The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - The Most Hands-Off $192K/M Business Anyone Can Copy - Ep. #315
Episode Date: July 7, 2026beehiiv is the newsletter platform I’ve used for over a year and a half because their data shows you exactly what’s working. Get 30% off three months at �...��beehiiv.com/chrisAlso, they're not telling anyone what it is yet, but beehiiv's Summer Release Event on July 16 is worth clearing your calendar for. RSVP: http://beehiiv.com/summer-release-2026━Check out my newsletter at https://TKOPOD.com and join my community at https://TKOwners.com━I sat down with Luke Van Der Veer and we talked about how he built a business renting lead generation websites to local businesses. Luke shared how he went from running an SEO agency to firing almost all of his clients and building his own digital assets instead. We got into how he picks the right local niches, why boring services like towing, tree service, carpet cleaning, and concrete can work so well, and what makes a website easier to rank. Luke also broke down how he finds buyers for the leads, why he prefers flat monthly fees but has recently grown a lot through revenue share, and how he now uses his SEO skills to buy and grow real businesses. You can find Luke at https://websiterentalcoaching.com/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---
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Why don't you start by telling us who you are and what you do?
My name's Luke Vanderbier and I rent websites, lead generation websites to businesses.
What got you into that?
What led you there?
I had a job, an HR job, and I did not like it.
And I was searching for ways to quit.
And I tried all these different side hustles selling an eBay, selling an Amazon, drop shipping, affiliate marketing.
I paid for a course and learned Facebook ads.
I tried to create a Facebook agency.
I actually made some money with that.
Then my last attempt here before I kind of pivoted was an SEO agency.
Started running an agency, picked up a bunch of clients, but it just turned into another job.
It made more money, but I didn't want to be working all the time.
I wanted to build something up front and then try to make it somewhat passive so that I wouldn't have to be there grinding it out in an office for 45 years or whatever.
I just don't agree with that thing that society pushes.
So I was running an SEO agency, not for very long, under a year.
and I just had a client call me in the middle of the night complaining about his results,
which were stellar, and it really made me mad.
And I woke up the next day and I just shut it down.
And I was thinking about it.
And I'm like, I don't know.
How do I remove his control or take back the control?
And the only way I could think of was if I own the asset, because then he can't tell me what to do.
And so I was like, okay, I'll just build stuff and all the niches I'm already in with clients,
fire all of them and I'll just rent the site out.
And then if somebody doesn't want to deal with it, I got 50 other people I could rent the site to.
Yeah, so I guess in other other industries you might call this vertical integration.
Correct me if and or where I go wrong.
Like you develop all these SEO skills.
They're very valuable.
You're implementing them for other people.
It's working well for them.
But you feel like, okay, I own a job.
I don't own a business.
I'm still kind of working hourly.
I only get out what I put in.
This doesn't feel much better.
It doesn't feel like as free as I thought it would feel.
So like why drive all these results for other people when I can just vertically integrate
have my own websites, drive results for myself, and make this more passive, more scale.
Right. Yeah, I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner. It just had that like trigger and it
just made me so mad. I was like, I don't, I'm like, how do I get rid of this? Yeah. I just need to
remove all of these people. Like, how do I make them like change the dynamic? And that was the only thing
I could think of. But it worked. So I was like, okay, let's just keep doing this. Yeah, it's kind of like
a friend of mine. He had a Facebook ad agency for Shopify brands, for ecommerce brands.
Yeah. And he got really, really good at turning $1 into five.
specifically driving people to Shopify sites to buy physical goods.
And then he's like, why don't I launch Shopify brand?
Like that's the hardest part is finding customers.
I can find customers.
And he did.
And now he's vertically integrated.
He makes more money.
Yeah.
So he's looking for like higher level uses of the skill set, which is kind of, you know,
taking me into other things.
So I love this.
So you fired all your clients.
Like you woke up, had this realization and said, I can't help you anymore or what?
All of them.
I kept, I kept one of them.
One's a friend.
I kept him.
everybody else went. I was just like, I'm not doing this anymore. Here's some other people you could use.
I'm done. How much of like an immediate revenue or income hit was that to you? It was a hundred and eight thousand.
Just go. Okay. A year? Yeah. Wow. And did you have like had you started already building websites before you,
you did this or no, you started with a clean slate? Nope. I just stopped. I'm not going to say it was the smartest move. It probably was not. But I was just confident in what I was doing. It's like I can get results for them. I can get results for myself. Screw. So I just. Yeah. Well, you, you, you, you, you,
burn the boats. And it, like, we're able to look back and say it was a good decision because
we haven't gotten the numbers yet, but I assume just by nature of you being on this podcast,
it's worked out well for you. So it was a good decision. And had you like kept, you know,
in my church, we say one foot in Zion, one foot in Babylon. You straddled the fence for a while.
You may have never, like, felt enough pressure to go all in and to actually make this work.
You may be worse off today. Had you hedged your bets a little bit. This is true. This is true.
It would have been slower. Okay. Yeah. So.
you fire everyone except your friend which makes sense what do you what do you do what are your first
steps i just started building sites and all the niches i already in so i built uh a towing site and i
well i can share one of them because i shut down oh towing site in woodside queens um another
towing site in a different area uh an hvac a limo uh an electrical how many was that one more i'm missing
one and a tree service okay um and just started ranking all of them all six the same time it took
two, three months to get them relatively close to like bottom page one, got the Google my
businesses and all that stuff set up. Leads are coming in and then it was like, okay, now I've got
to furiously rent all these out, rent out, run out, run out, sort of calling people and renting
these and then I'm right back to where it was with the same income. And I'm like, ah, okay,
problem solved, but it just created a other problem. Much more passive though, right?
Yes, yeah. Okay. That was so cool. I'm like, I don't know what to do with myself now.
So I want to, I love the story of the first thing because there's a lot to learn there.
I just Googled it.
Woodside is a neighborhood in Queens.
60,000 people, give or take.
What told you to go to Woodside?
What signal did you see?
There wasn't any kind of special reason for that one.
That was just somebody, I had my car parked outside my apartment and somebody smashed it so hard with like a garbage truck or something.
It knocked it onto the curb and just destroyed it.
And I had to call the towing company up the street.
and I was just talking to that guy and he's like, I don't know where these leads come from.
He's like, we occasionally get one like this.
This is good, but I don't know how to do this.
And I was like, I put towing in Woodside.
Sounds like it's going to be some demand here.
I can rent to this guy.
And that's exactly what it did once I got the site up.
It's just easy.
I just, I love that that story is so representative of what normally happens in the business
building experience.
Like you solve a problem for yourself.
You see something nearby that tells, that gives you a data point that says there's demand here.
And the status.
decision in me would say, that's a sample size of one. You can't trust that. But for whatever it is,
something out there in the universe is just like screaming that to you. And usually that one data
point carries the weight of so much more than one. Do that make sense? Yeah. And you said you shut it
down and I want to get into that. But it doesn't matter because it gave you, and I'm assuming,
it gave you enough traction to keep going. What was the life cycle of that website like? How did it go?
and then why did it get shut down?
That particular one was it took two and a half months or so to rank.
The organic piece was a little bit slower.
The map was like number one instantly.
I didn't even have to do anything to it.
I just put it up number one.
It was called Woodside towing.
That's the city.
So I kind of hijacked the keyword.
And it was instantly number one.
Nobody else in the general area,
the towing companies there had any kind of SEO skills or anything
just from kind of Googling around.
So that was a major advantage.
and it just started getting calls, 30, 40 calls a month, which was enough to get six, 700 bucks.
And I was like, all right, cool.
So I rented it out to that guy.
And it was good for a while.
But as I was doing the other sites and things, the GMB gets suspended for some reason.
Google business and my business.
Right, right.
And once that one went, you know, the lead volume, there was still some coming in organically.
But for that particular niche, a lot of people are calling the map.
They're not going to, like, do a quote form.
They're calling directly off mobile.
So it pretty much tanked it.
And I was like, all right, forget it.
So I just shut out.
Now, when you say renting it out, how exactly did that look?
Did you find that one guy that you called?
And he's like, I don't know where these come from.
And you started like, how did it work?
How did you charge him?
When he picked up my trashed car, I was just asking him like, you know, how often does this happen?
Then he was like, where do you get the leads from and just asking questions.
And it just brought out like, dude, I don't know, stuff just randomly comes in.
I don't have any control over it.
I've gotten screwed 17 times by other agencies, whatever.
So I just let it go.
Whatever refers to me is cool.
And I was like, okay, cool.
I'll come back to this guy.
So I just ranked it.
And then I called him back and I'm like, hey, I'm the guy that had the thrashed car.
I'm like, I got those leads for you.
And he's like, okay.
So how much is it going to be?
And I'm like, how about $700?
He's like, for how many?
And I'm like, I don't know, 30, 40 calls.
I'm like, how many of those are going to close?
He's like, I have 40, 50%.
He's like, all right, cool.
Yeah, let's do it.
That's it.
That's it.
So I just routed it to him.
I'm trying to do the numbers here.
So let's say 20 closes a month.
What does a toe cost?
A few hundred bucks.
A couple hundred bucks.
Yeah.
So we're talking like he's paying 700 to get back like three to five thousand dollars.
Yeah.
So it's a solid ROI for him.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you just charged a flat monthly fee and you, it was looking like 30 to 40 calls a month.
And sometimes he gets a little less.
Sometimes he gets a little more.
Yeah.
You charge him that until it starts.
Yeah.
Okay.
And I think it's, it's one thing that I love.
love about this business is how much surface area there is. So there are tens of thousands just in the
United States. Okay. We'll only focus on that of not just cities, but neighborhoods. Tens of thousands.
Insane. Let's just say, let's be conservative and let's say there's 10,000 worth like ranking for.
Okay. And then let's be conservative and say there's only a thousand services out there, which I know
there's more. Let's say home services towing, local businesses. Let's say that's 10 million
like service plus geography variations. 10 million. Woodsidetoeing.com.
Greenville, guttercleaning.com, like whatever it is, Greenville, Texas, Greenville, South Carolina,
Greenville, whatever. And so with 10 million opportunities out there, there's a lot of room for everyone.
And there's a lot of opportunity for there to be more demand than supply in any given geography and or service, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay.
You just have to find something. The goal is to try to find something that's not a red ocean, right?
Like everybody from the outside, people talk about all the same things. They'll go, they'll try to talk concrete, roofing, plumbing.
You could do those. It's not that you can't get results.
there, but why would I compete against 50 companies when I can find the random one in the middle of
nowhere that has no competition? That's going to be more passive. So let's go for that. As long as it's
worth similar. Okay. So your first was Woodside towing. What were your other five or six?
It was towing, towing, HVAC, limo, tree service, and pest control. Okay. Now, you probably
quickly learned that you liked some of these either services or geographies more than others.
What did you learn and why? I learned that
smaller cities were generally easier
simply because there wasn't as much competition.
Like I was in New York,
60,000 to like 300, 400,000.
Under 500,000, safe bet. I didn't want to do like Manhattan.
Like, I'm not going to do 2 million people. Like, I looked at towing.
That was one of the things that Googleed and I was like,
there's 87 companies. There's no way I'm going to compete well with that.
I've got just too much work for the payoff.
Yeah.
I think it's also important to note like demographics and like social, you know, cultural things
because Greenville, Texas has 60,000 people.
But the market for towing is probably a small fraction of the market for towing in Woodside Queens.
It's just a different, it's completely different, right?
So you can't automatically take that logic and say, dude, I'm going to put any city of 60,000.
I'm going to put that plus towing.com.
It won't always work like that, not just because of, you know, cultural.
trends and societal things, but supply and demand.
Greenville, Texas might already have five sites doing the exact same thing, right?
Right.
So you're typically looking at the search results trying to figure out, like, is this a good
spot to go into a combination of things on the maps and organic to see like, okay,
what are my chances on this one?
Okay.
So that's what you learned about like the size of the city.
Did you learn anything about the industry that you, that you choose?
Or did that not matter as much?
The industry didn't matter as much.
I think it was more about the industry affected the kind of,
conversation with the people when you're trying to rent the site out. That was the thing that was a little bit different because the towing person, I typically got the owner. The limo service, you get the secretary. And then you can't, you got to get through the secretary or the gatekeeper to get to the owner. So that was more of a pain. The HVAC was similar. Pass control. I got the owner. Tree service, I got the owner. So it's like, okay, now I have to try to pick things where there's enough companies that are small enough for the company's in the right range where I'm going to get the decision maker on the phone easier.
Otherwise, I've got to like walk in, which I've had to do before some of the sites that I couldn't find somebody.
You probably have a higher close rate when you're there in person.
Oh, yeah.
100%.
So what are some services where you're most likely to get the owner on the phone like towing?
Tree service is a good one.
Pest control is okay.
HFX not.
Plumbing's not.
What about landscaping?
Just like guys mowing lawns.
Landscaping's okay.
Landscaping, you can get some owners.
I've got a couple landscaping.
as long as they're doing landscape design and not just like mowing because it's not it's not worth
enough it's like doing a site for like cuts i'd have to generate 8,000 needs to be paid anything
yeah you know if i want to do it so it sounds like the sweet spot is the fine balance between
high ticket and owner cell phone number publicly available right because lawn mowing is low ticket
owner's cell phone number available but it's too low ticket towing is right there in that sweet
something like dentistry, very high ticket, but you're not going to get your own
yourself.
So then the only way you do that one is if you know somebody.
Yeah.
But if you get the dentist, you could probably sell those leads for a lot more.
Like the gold standard.
It's like if that's your buddy or you got colleagues or somebody can introduce you to somebody
and you have that intro, then cool.
Or like pre-sell the idea up front.
Then I'm cool with those.
Okay.
So what month was this when you first started this?
What month and year?
February, February 19th, 2016.
My mom's birthday.
Okay, 10 plus years ago.
All right.
Now, what did that first year look like?
How many sites did you add?
What was your revenue like, et cetera?
I don't know how many sites I added.
I was doing a lot, multiple a week.
The first six sites just replaced.
It got me right back to basically where I was around that a little over 100,000 mark,
$9,000 or something a month, $9,500.
From your first six sites.
Yeah, because they're all a lot.
Yeah, because you said you replaced your income with that.
Yeah.
Just let's X, which was cool.
So that was nice.
What tools were using to build these sites at the time?
Originally Weebly, just because it was an easy drag-and-drop builder.
I think Wix was a thing, but I didn't, the interface wasn't intuitive.
Weebly felt more intuitive.
And what do you use today?
WordPress.
Okay.
Is the exact match domain name important for this?
I would heavily recommend it.
It's going to make it a lot easier, especially for a beginner.
So geography plus service.com. That's the formula. If you can, yeah. But it doesn't have to like, you know, if I did the woodside towing thing, maybe woodside towing is not available. I can do woodside towing pros. I still got the keyword in the city in it. So I'm still going to get the same kind of effect. What are some examples of domain names where you've gone kind of outside of that pattern and it still worked well?
I don't generally. I'll do like a dot net before I'll throw in other words. But, you know, let's say like Irving carpets instead of Irving.
are an urban carpet cleaning like i've done some dishes like that like city and then a plural like carpets
yeah like that's not really a keyword but it was close enough where i got the hit from the city relevance
and the hit from the topical relevance of the item okay how much weight would you say like the name
slash domain name carries with regards to your success versus like everything else that you have to do
five 10 percent okay i think it just makes it easier up front you get results a little bit faster because
you have that branded yeah it takes a little bit longer but you know long term
If you're trying to sell it, then you'll get a higher multiple with a brand.
If you're trying to just keep it, it doesn't matter.
Okay.
And a brand would be like you're generating leads in multiple geographies for one service
under like a key brand name, not just like the name of the city.
Okay.
Are you doing that at all?
Yeah.
What niche is that in?
Concrete.
Okay.
There are several, but concrete's one I don't care about sharing.
Everybody tries concrete.
Yeah.
What made you pick that?
Just the combo of high-ticket.
it. I just think it was another thing where it's just I knew it was worth a lot. So I was like,
all right, well, let's just give it a shot and see. And after good results with the first few
sites, it's like it's an easy thing to write about. I know a ton about it now from all the
Googling and trying to do the research on whatever, like how hard could it be to spin up a few more
of these? So are those under different names or is it all under one company name? There's
one LLC and then there's DBAs across a million places to have all.
you know, map listings and organic under it. Okay. So it's not like it's not like looksconcrete.com
with like locations in a bunch of cities. It's like city name concrete, other city name
concrete and that's all under one umbrella. Yes. Yes. Okay. So if the name slash domain name is five to 10
what is the other 90% of finding success here? The content's a huge piece. I think people underestimate
how important it is. The content of the site is like the foundation of a house. And if it's not strong,
it's like building a house on sand.
You're not going to make any money,
and it's going to make it so much harder to work,
to like rank it.
If the content's really,
really strong,
sometimes the site will just rank
without a single link.
So that is my goal every time I launch one.
Like, how good can I make this?
So I have the process for that.
I'll go look out at all the competitors in that niche.
I'll see what they're talking about.
And I'm just going to double,
triple,
quadruple,
whatever they're doing.
And I'll make sure I'm including,
you know, commercial and transactional keywords.
So it's not just like a Wikipedia,
but whatever,
I'm blowing them away.
They have their, you know, three bullet points on the item.
I have a thousand words in the item every time for all services.
And they have no chance.
So then if all else is equal, I win.
So when it comes to content, if you had to choose between quantity and quality, you would choose quantity.
I would choose quality, but I'm doing both.
I'm doing quantity with quality.
Like I guess I'm saying like more content, more articles, more blogs on one website.
I don't have to choose.
blogs or blogs i'm talking like website structure home about content contact page and then service pages
for every service like right now if you just went and googled a lot of places it doesn't
matter what the niche or city is you'll see a lot of companies that don't have service pages they'll
have a page with like a bullet point list of what they do like a roofer they'll say like repair
roof installation you know roof inspection but they don't have a page for it and if you don't
have a separate page for it you're basically telling google i do all this but google's like well all right
I don't believe you.
Which one's more important?
What?
Like what?
You're just confusing it.
But if you had a more authority from you.
You're like, oh, okay.
So you do roof repair in this spot.
Cool.
Okay.
What else do you do?
Yeah.
You need all the specific things and people don't do it.
Are you able to show your concrete site to share your screen?
I'll show a carpet cleaning one.
I use this one as my example because it's the lowest paying one.
So if somebody kills it, spams it, whatever, I don't care.
Okay.
And are you using AI to generate any content?
My VA is doing.
it. So they'll use it and then kind of human edit it and then send it over for a quick scan to make
sure it's okay. Okay. What model or tool do they use to do that? I don't micromanage. I'm not exactly
sure. I'm pretty sure it's clawed. Okay. Because it's like two schools of thought. Some people are like,
you can't just make art content with AI. And then the other school of thought is like people need
their questions answered. So all else equal like a good, well written human content is better. But for a lot of
categories, there's nothing. There's not enough. So even AI written is better than nothing.
This is true. So you want me to show the screen? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, let me. I'm sure I got the window here.
So like this is one of the first sites. I haven't touched this thing in years. So there's probably,
there's actually a lot of stuff out change, but basic idea still stands. Right. It's got the city and the niche right in the name.
Dot com phone number in a big easy spot. Click the call button. If you look at it on mobile,
You know, what you do and a way to contact you is immediately apparent.
And then there's two options.
I see people do something with, you know, they'll have like a phone number or a quote form, but never, they don't always have both, which doesn't make sense.
The thing I've learned with this is some people don't want to call you.
Some people don't want to talk right now.
They're just like, no, I'd rather just be a little bit more passive and get a quote this way.
So this grabs those people.
But then other people are like, I need something now.
Cat just peed on the floor.
That's the person that calls that.
So you got to have both.
And then it'll just be a lot of stuff like, you know, reasons to trust us.
And look, I'm looking different keywords.
So carpet cleaning is the one I want, which was up here.
We got a variation down here.
And then going into some of the other services that are part of the carpet cleaning umbrella.
And like the, you know, the GMB thing went down for this too, like years ago.
But it just doesn't matter at this point.
It won't die.
No.
It's still sitting there.
Number one, you could probably search it.
I'll probably come up.
And then just pages for each of the items.
So a lot of companies won't do this.
They'll just have like a bullet point list of these, you know, five, six things.
And then, you know, that's it.
Yeah.
And it's not helpful to Google.
Yeah, I just Googled carpet cleaning Irving, Texas, and you're, your number one right there.
Yeah, cool.
So it's like that just stays there, super glued.
And I'm like 45 minutes from Irving.
So this is very relevant to me.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I try to pick spots like that.
You can, you take the skill.
you can apply it to anything.
So it's kind of like shiny object syndrome.
You got to watch that because it's really, it's really tough.
If you could do it for anything, you're like, oh, my God, I could do it on this.
I can do it on that.
It's really hard to block all that out and try to pick stuff.
But you've got to be really rigorous, like, okay, this one looks good and follow the process
and try to get something that's going to be easy.
So it stays like that because like I don't want to sit here and like do content
or have to keep managing links and all these things.
So how long has this site been up?
That's, oh, God.
You'd have to look at the domain.
main thing made 2017-18 somewhere on there and how much has it made lifetime would you guess uh it's been
rented at 500 bucks a month so whatever that is times however many months it's been 50 grand i mean geez
something like that yeah and your cost on that has been 10 bucks a month probably less because it's
shared hosting across the like the cloud billion other sites has it been the same person that you're
selling these leads to the whole time yeah they probably love you they're probably making way more than that
Or they were to churn by now.
They're just, I find this with a lot of these, there's really not much churn.
I think part of it is, it's sticky because organic is just better.
The leads are just better.
I've run ads before.
Higher intent.
It's higher intent.
And the person from, you know, on the customer's perspective, right, think about them,
they search like, you know, carpet cleaning, whatever.
They see a billion results they can pick from.
You're like, who do you pick?
They're assuming that the person that's number one,
Google must have put them there for a reason. Now, we know that I just manipulated it to get there,
but they don't know that. They assume like, oh, well, Google must know. So they just trust in Google
and choose the first one. And studies support that, which is cool. So those leads are just better.
Yeah. Are there certain niches that you would recommend people never touch? Oh, yeah. Okay. Elevator repair.
There's one. Don't touch that. That was cool. I had a client do it in New York City.
They're ranking number one for that.
We're getting all kinds of leads.
Went to rent out the site.
And I'm like, wow, this was an easy one.
Never thought of this.
We found out that the elevator companies do really long-term contracts.
And then they charge you hefty fees to break the contract.
So even though people wanted to switch to save money, they wouldn't actually do it because
they'd have to pay so much to get out of it.
So we couldn't rent out the site.
So they weren't high intent.
Yeah.
They would not break the contracts because it costs a lot.
And like you wouldn't know that unless you called people.
ahead of time, which you're probably not going to do.
Yeah.
Anything, any other niches that are stay away from?
Jet rental.
I did that one.
That was pretty cool.
Like private jet rental?
Private jets, yeah.
I had a site that was crushing it for that.
It was bringing a lot of stuff.
But I had a person who was taking the leads and he was essentially a jet broker.
Because I couldn't get the jet owner.
So he was trying to like, you know, uh, middleman it?
Sell those leads.
And it's like a middleman on top of the middleman.
So it was kind of pain.
And then once he kind of fizzled out because he started trying to just jack up the prices of some insane thing and try to get like a money one on just one shot.
And I was like, dude, you're just wasting my leads now.
But then I couldn't really find anybody else to do that way.
That's like another one.
There's some that just, you know, not every one of these is going to work out.
So, you know, it's okay.
But I took a shot on some big ones like that just to see because it was, it would have been worth a lot.
Is the, if we were to call this like a supply and demand marketplace, the demand side being the number of business owners,
willing to buy these leads and the supply side being the number of leads that you're actually
generating. Which is harder for you. Finding someone to buy the leads or actually generating the
leads. I think it's finding a buyer. Finding the right buyer because there's tons of people who will
give it a shot. But people that are serious and that have the right mindset, much harder to find.
Yeah. There's a lot of people who are just like, oh yeah, I work entirely off referrals.
And then I'm like, okay, well, you know, $1,000. And they're like, $1,000. And I'm like,
dude, you're going to make $20,000 just off the revenue on these few that just came in.
Like they don't even if the math makes sense, they still don't always go with it.
So it's like not logical.
It's like emotional thing for them.
They're prideful about it.
Yeah.
Have you give them lead?
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm just, it's just something you got to deal with.
Do you give them leads for free to capture them or does that not work?
I generally do it for a few days.
I don't want to go more than that because to the core, I believe free has no value.
So I have a hard time doing this to begin with because I'm like, I did work to get this.
and now you're just taking it and blowing it.
So I'll give them it for a few days and then we'll see how they respond.
And I'm just kind of watching like, first off, the people that I'm going for,
people who are already paying for ads.
I'm not just going to Google a random person.
I'm looking for people who are actively spending money.
Google ads, Facebook ads.
I don't care what it is, but I want to see that they're investing in themselves because
at least they already have the mindset.
And then once I know that, okay, I know something about them.
I'll give them a shot at this.
How one of the questions I'll ask is, are you, like, how soon are you going to follow
up with the customer?
Like, here's this person.
and they want this now, like, how soon can you get to them?
And if they tell me today and they don't call today, they're done.
I'll just find another one.
I'm like, I need to trust them and they need to communicate with me and it needs to be professional.
Sometimes I'll just call them, shadow call, see what happens.
And when they pick up the phone, hello.
Yeah, it's like you're not a business owner.
Answer the phone like a business professionally or you're out too.
So I just have a list of things.
Like if they do this, you're done immediately to the next one to try to find the right person.
Because once you do, then you don't have to touch it.
Yeah.
So do you use like the meta ads library to see who's,
advertising on meta? And then
as soon as advertising on Google, you just
Google, you just like literally Google it
as if you're looking for it. Yeah.
Yep. Yep. And I'll just look for people that are local.
Because like sometimes it's Google, you'll
Google somebody, it'll be like a national company. I don't want that
either because I don't want some call center. I want a local
person who's trying to run ads.
Okay. If you build a site, let's say it's
you know, Greenvilletoeing.com. You build that on July
1st. How long do you wait before
trying to find a buyer for the leads? Do you want to
see leads come in first or what?
I don't know, a couple months.
Okay, you let it simmer.
Yeah, like, I've gone back and forth in this.
I don't have really a set rule for this one.
I have a VA that does the kind of outreach now,
so I don't really have to do anything.
Two months or so, something will start coming in,
and then I'll have them looking for somebody
to at least start testing the waters anyways.
Like, hey, you know, we got something cooking here.
Would you be open to this if we sent you some stuff?
Like, just get a cut.
And I'll try to do like a referral or a commission thing up front.
And then immediately flip it to flat fee.
see them close some things. But then I'll like, I'll test them because I don't trust them.
So I'll call the customers and pretend I'm doing a satisfaction survey and see if they actually
went with that person, how much they charged and if the stuff lines up with what the business
owners tell them. How many of your deals are RevShare versus Flatfee?
Vast majority are flat fee. RevShare is just something I'd done recently. I was out in Vegas on
dropping bombs with Brad Lee and he was talking about RevShare. And like after we got off the pot and I was
like my God, why didn't I think of this? So I came home and I immediately started doing RevShare.
I reached out to my highest paying clients, like the bigger flat fees, four or five grand a month
clients. And I was like, I got a way I can get you more leads, but I want to change the structure
of how we're doing this and just pitched a bunch of them on RevShare and immediately started doing
that and my income went way up because it's just at a certain point. I'm like passive is cool.
You know, four or five grand coming in from that site. I love that. But like if I can make 30 or 40
off that site. I'll throw in a few more GMBs and do some other things to get this going,
but you got to make it worth my while, which was the revenue, which made a huge, huge difference.
What percentage do you take? 20%. Okay. Just off the top of the gross revenue. It'll depend on the niche,
though, because like I got a landscaping one. That one I can't. That one's net because the gross,
it's weird to like try to calculate that because they had so much materials and all these things.
So I like, it depends on the niche, whether I'm going gross or net. And then if it's gross,
it's lower. If it's not, it's going to be higher. And you really have to have a high level of
trust with that. That business owner has to have a high level of trust in you to want to do this,
because you're taking a significant portion of what they're doing. Oh, yeah. And how do you,
trust them or know that they're closing what they say they're closing and that their margins are
what they say they are? I'm asking for read access to their CRM and their payment system.
Like quick book. Which is, again, this is why they have to, yeah, HubSpot or Striper,
whatever they're using.
probably this the structure probably doesn't work for a brand new customer you got to get to know
each other for a while no yeah you need it you need an existing relationship or you've got to be
really good on the phone yeah i had it i had that recently with a paving company that one actually i have
it's like fake equity in the company which i could talk about but like that was a completely random one
that wasn't a new one but that's i don't know we just had really good rapport that doesn't happen
much yeah now you say do other things for you are you willing to just put
paid ads like Google ads or LSA into it to drive more leads for them? Because the numbers on
that could make sense if they're sharing revenue, right? Yeah. Yeah, it absolutely could. I mean,
for me, so I do a bunch of different things like the rental things is one. I've been buying
businesses. I've been doing these revenue shares and equity deals. Those are like the three core ones.
My goal is always to try to make, try to pull myself out and make it as passive as possible for me.
So running ads and all these other things, I don't want to deal with it. But I have pulled in
friends of mine who do that with their agencies and just give them a cut of my cut and then try to
negotiate a little bit more for me. Talk to the business owner and be like, all right, I know we're at 20.
I got another guy who could do this. I'll work with him and manage that relationship. If you bump us to
25, I'll give a piece to him. I'm like, you don't have to deal with it. Nothing changes on your end.
I'll just drive you way more leads. We're going to have it from Facebook now and Google.
And then just try to keep stacking this with people I know. Yeah. Okay. It's just a little bit more
to manage. What can you like, what are you looking for in the first three minutes when it comes to a niche or
that tell you this is a winner.
Do you want me to just walk through one?
Yeah, please.
So people are like, you know, where do I find a niche?
It always makes me laugh.
Look around all the trucks that drive by you with car wraps on the side of them.
But I like going to Thumbtack.com slash near dash me.
And then they have all these different categories of things.
And under each category is just a million businesses that you could just look through
and start Googling these.
But I personally really like home improvement.
So I'll just start going through these and just take an itch and start Googling it.
So like, you know, we could do as best as testing.
Let me just asbestos testing.
I'll just pick a city.
We'll try Dallas.
All right, cool.
So I just popped in asbestos testing for Dallas.
I skipped over all the sponsored.
Don't care about that.
Looking at the maps.
I want to see really low.
So like less than 10 reviews.
If possible, I'd like to see where they don't have a website.
Or maybe instead of a website, they have like a website.
they have like a social media profile.
Like I've seen people's Twitters,
they've seen Facebooks, all kinds of stuff.
Those type of things in here tells me these people don't know what they're doing.
So that's,
yeah,
and they're ranking highly regardless.
Right, right.
They're begging for a competitor.
And then looking in here,
I also want to see like looking at the names of the businesses,
nobody has an exact match.
So if I went Dallas,
that's testing right now,
I'm in this map somewhere automatically,
just by virtue of my name being the exact keyword when nobody else has that.
So I like,
I like the map,
how the map looks. So let's go organic now.
Now organic, I want to see local companies.
Now, the first thing I see, this dude's got an inner page.
From a content perspective, one page on somebody's website that may have a couple hundred words on it or something is not going to be an entire website built on that topic around that location.
Right?
Like if I build a Dallas, Texas environmental consulting thing or an asbestos testing, there's no way this guy's one page beats my entire site.
So I'm not worried about interpages.
So he's,
him I don't care.
So this guy's number one.
Right.
Yeah,
which is interesting because so that means like,
okay,
that's a great sign.
And then he Yelp.
I'm like,
I don't care about Yelp either.
Google would rather have a little company.
Yeah,
like Google would rather have me,
but,
you know,
all these local companies aren't doing a good job.
So whatever.
I'm just going to steamroll them.
Right.
So I'm going in here and I'll just kind of look through.
Don't care about sponsored.
And then here we go again,
Interpage.
inner page, inner page, you know, that might be a local one.
You say inner page, you're just looking at the domain.
It's, you're not just seeing the domain.
You're seeing a sub page on their domain.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, like the little carrot, right, as best as testing, whatever.
So we can click on one.
Yeah.
So it's like, all right, he actually did okay.
Like this looks like the H1 for his page.
Cool.
And he's got some content and stuff.
But like, there's really not that much.
It's not the only thing he does either.
Yeah.
And like, you know, what is what is he got?
400 work?
maybe on the whole page.
So it's like if I create a website and I got, you know,
1,500 on that topic and then I go into detail on all the service pages on the same thing,
I'm telling Google, I'm a beast.
I know everything about this.
This guy doesn't know anything.
Come on.
And then Google's looking at me like, okay, this might be a better option for the customer.
This person seems to know more.
Yeah.
Right?
But like the map, I don't love, I like a lot of the stuff I see,
but I don't love how it's like 32, 30, 402.
And because I want to do both, I want the map and organic,
I'm skipping this, even though, you know, the bottom looks nice.
So then I'm straight back to Thumbtack.
Uh-huh.
Cool.
So I'll just go down the list.
Let's try mold remediation.
We'll stick with Dallas.
Let's just do mold remediation if I could spell.
Okay, so we're skipping the ads down to here.
All those remediation.
15, 46, 138.
So like, I don't like that either.
Nope, too much.
Instantly done.
And I'll just do this.
I'll keep going through the list and figure out like, okay, which one of these might work?
What about radon mitigation?
That's interesting.
And these are all very high ticket too.
Right.
Yeah.
Like we had radon at my parents' house like years ago.
That thing was like $6,000 for them to install some kind of crazy system to like put it out.
Look, this first one has one review.
Yeah.
So like there, this is interesting. Nobody even came up for the map. That's so. Yep, right there.
Let me try something else here and see if there's any other.
Another thing you could do is go to trends.google.com and compare two search terms against each other.
Put radon removal in one, radon mitigation in the other.
And you can see, all right, well, you know, nothing showed up for mitigation because no one really searches that.
They all search for removal.
So you don't want to get a false positive either, right?
Yeah, I'm trying to pick whatever the main keyword is.
I don't know the niche.
So I don't know what that is.
I'm assuming it's mitigation, but I try both.
We see the same guy.
He's one person who's got one review, and the only category is environmental consultant.
So it's like, we could check Google's categories right now and see if there's something related
to Radon.
I don't know if there is.
But this might be the category we pick, but I'm loving the fact that there's only one review.
He's got a branded thing.
He put his LLC in the title of his GMB, so he doesn't know what he's doing.
He's 68 years old.
He's 97.
These other people, we got another thing.
here we go again, interpage, inner page, a directory, there's that dude. So he's clueless.
Then we got national radon defense. It's probably a national site. I see Texas.
I see a Reddit, maybe somebody that's local, better business zero, and an Angie's list.
So it's like here's a winner right here. And how much is radon worth? So I know that if I put up a
site for this, I could probably be number one in a month just with content without doing any link
building at all. And if I get a GMB for this, Google will probably either boot this,
guy or create the three map instead of one map.
How are you able to get Google Business profile listings for all these things in all these
cities? Because it's getting more strict, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I generally work with the
contractor. So I'll generate leads organically first, which is obviously a little bit harder.
But then once you have those leads, I reach out at the person, I'll make a deal. And then once
I see that they're paying me and we have our established relationship, it's going a little bit.
then kind of like my rev share idea, I'm just going back to them and saying, hey, you know,
I've got a way that we can get a lot more leads coming in, but I would need your help.
Like you down to help me get this.
Okay.
It's like he's creating a false competitor, basically.
Yeah.
I call it illusion of saturation.
Yep.
I'll have him help me do it.
I mean, there's guaranteed ways to do it.
You can just spin up LLCs, but I won't do that unless it's worth a lot of money because
they need taxes and all the other stuff that comes with it.
So outside of picking the name, picking the niche, giving the Google business,
profile. What are some other best practices for ranking quickly, like SEO best practices? Go into all the
competitors sites. Google whatever the niche is. So we just did radon mitigation. Look up all the competitors
and see what they're talking about. I take notes and just get a big list. And then I'll go into other cities too.
So like, you know, Dallas might have no competition, but San Diego might have killer competition.
And I want to know where the competition is crazy because they'll have better stuff. So I'm going to go
into all the top cities and see who's got it. And once I have an idea of all the things we can potentially
talk about. Then I'll go look at the keywords and see like, okay, what should be a page and what
shouldn't based on volumes? 500 plus keyword searches or so. Let's do something. 50s don't really
care. I'll weave it in where I can. And that's kind of how I'm building out the overall structure.
And then once that structure is created, that content's got to be really, really good. So I'm trying to
weave the keywords in there. I'm trying to make sure it answers questions, structuring it for
AI's doing a lot of like making sure the HTML's lined up correctly. Like what is the umbrella keyword versus
the things that should fall under that logically,
because that's how Google's looking at it,
and then creating some structure with frequently asked questions.
And for that, you just go to chat GPT and type it in.
Like, you know, I'm trying to rank a site for radon mitigation in Dallas.
What are the common questions that consumers have about this?
And it'll spit out, like, ask Yelp and ask Reddit.
Or like, ask all the social media sites.
You can put that right in the prompt.
And it'll pull exact quotes from Yelp, Reddit, Facebook,
all the social profiles, and now you have stuff you could write about.
And then you just throw that right into the content.
content on whatever the related page is. Yeah. So if this business, this industry has seen any
disruption from AI, it's been positive disruption. It's made it more scalable. Yeah.
More doable. Yeah. People get worried about the AI taking away searches and whatever,
but it doesn't, this is the last thing to be affected because people still want to talk to a person.
They don't want an AI answer. They want someone to answer the phone and like install this thing for
their house so they don't die. Yeah. Do you use any other third party tools for finding the supply and the
demand imbalances in these markets? Or are you literally doing what you just shared your screen
and showed me? I mean, too. So SCM Rush, if you want one that's already out there. And then I have a,
I have an AI engineer friend who built a private one for me that just kind of does the research for me.
So I don't really have to do the manual Googling anymore. Yeah. What are your numbers like today?
How many sites do you have? What's your monthly revenue, profit, et cetera. It's 232 sites.
You're going to have to do the math on the profit. I'm not going to know what that is. But,
We finished the month, 192-5 last month.
Holy crap.
In one month.
Yeah.
And growing, I imagine?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, just from last year, it's drastically different.
I have to thank Brad, because the introduction of the revenue share, just that idea, jack this up
tremendously just because you can make so much more up one person.
And I don't have to keep taking on more clients.
I can just grow one person, which was sick.
What do your cost look like?
I mean, you've got a virtual assistant.
That's not much.
It's usually around 50 grand for the.
year. So like one VA is $1,200. The other one's a thousand cloud hosting is like 300 a month,
call rails, like five, six hundred a month. I'm on a legacy plan at this point. So that's cool.
They didn't boot me. Rank track and it would be like 150. And then Volter for cloud servers all
over the place for map listings and things. And then my VA just kind of manage it all for me.
So I don't really have to do much other than just kind of oversee check in. I was going to ask you
tech stack, but I think you just listed it up.
Yeah, that's all of it.
Yeah.
When you're tracking, like, people are getting this many calls.
They're actually answering.
They're calling back.
That's all done through call rail.
Yeah, VAs are doing all that.
I'm not doing any of that.
I look at a rank report on Mondays that the VA send me and a call tracking report to see
that numbers are stable.
And like, we have so much data over the time.
I can see general trends.
So like if there's seasonality or weird things that happen.
And as long as it, they both look okay.
Like if rankings tanked, but the call volume is still the same.
I'm like, whatever.
But if rankings,
went down and call volume went down. And I'm like, okay, let's see what's up and we'll look into it.
But generally, most of the sites are things like the urban one where they're just sitting.
So it's not, I don't do anything. I'm literally passive. I don't do anything with it.
The bigger ones are the ones I'm kind of on top of more because those are worth hundreds of
thousands per site. So that I'm like watching a little bit heavier. Yeah. So over 90% net profit
margins. How many hours per week are you spending on this? On this, two or three.
Wow. For the rental sites. The other, the other things.
I'm doing like the equity share stuff and whatever that's newer.
So I'm sending a lot of quite a bit of time on that.
But I guess it's like I'm looking at it as like, do you have to?
No.
I can just go chill and do nothing.
But I would lose my mind.
So I have to do something.
And that's what I choose to spend it on.
So what should someone's first step be for getting involved with this business?
Just going and finding their niche and learning WordPress.
Is WordPress very difficult to learn for something like this?
I mean, there's lots of tutorials and things for WordPress.
And you could use Dragon Drop like Elementor, Divi, Bakery, Builder, all easy things.
They give you a menu of item.
title onto the page, drag paragraph, you can just play with it and learn it.
Yeah.
Content and stuff, easy to just Google things.
Domains and stuff, we just went over, niches we just went over.
I think the only thing that people are going to have a problem with is probably link
building.
So like if people are trying to do the whole YouTube University learn for free thing,
follow one person instead of multiple.
So at least the puzzle pieces will line up instead of taking one thing from that guy and
one thing from this guy and trying to jam the pieces together.
Yeah.
And then in terms of like renting sites out, it's really not that hard.
The conversation is you have leads in hand.
You already have something valuable.
I'm literally just calling the person and saying, hey, I know you don't know me from Adam,
but I've got customers that want this.
I'm like, if I send you some people, can we work out a cut?
And the majority of people will say, yeah, cool.
That sounds great.
And then I'll just test the relationship.
What do you use to invoice them every month?
It's always straight.
I'll get their credit card, have it on file, auto pay.
I'm not doing invoicing because I don't want them to have any control.
I want all the control.
Do you think that SEO skills tactics are more important?
or is the right niche selection more?
Niche is definitely important.
But the SEO piece, that SEO piece is the last little bump that can make something go
from worth 400 bucks a month to worth like four grand a month.
What did, so your first six sites replace your income?
What did your first year, second year?
Like how did your growth look like from that first year until today?
Kind of like one of these because it was pretty incremental literally until last year.
So it's been kind of like a little wave going up.
And then this past year was just a straight ramp just because of the revenue share thing.
I just picked the biggest clients and went all in on trying to grow those.
Is this a good thing to do on the side?
Like a side of full-time job as a side hustle?
I love it as a side hustle idea because there's lots of people that have walked away from jobs and all kinds of stuff doing exactly this.
I know three people that have made more than a million bucks just since 2022 with.
doing this on the side of what they're doing, like eventually quit, but like that's insane.
So yeah, now I love it as a side hustle. And it's way better than any of the ones I tried.
Yeah. And we've all tried a lot. So much better. Yeah. I think it's a great thing. I think and then
pivoting like I would highly recommend trying the revenue share because that makes even more. And then I've also
knew something called profit interest. It's kind of like a it's like fake equity.
It's like allows me to participate in revenue share now, but I also can take a piece of the
company when it sells. And like I just got a paving deal for that. Their companies were three and a half
million and I just got 20% of it. So I'm going to try to push them as high as I can with SEO and see what I can do.
And then eventually when they sell, I don't know when that's going to be 10 years from now, 15 years,
that's going to be worth a lot of money. So it's like I'll get the big thing now, but I'll get a big chunk at the end too.
Man, I'm fired up to do this myself. I'm the guy that's just supposed to ask questions about now.
I'm like, oh, geez, I mean, the shiny object, man. It's rough. It's real. It's very real.
It's rough. Well, Luke, where?
Where can we find you? Where can we learn more about you and everything you do?
Yeah. I mean, you want to learn about my stuff? It's website rentalcoaching.com.
Okay. Is there anything we should have covered that I neglected to ask you about?
I don't, I guess there's a couple things. There's a lot of, I think one of the things I've learned that I kind of wish I knew sooner was the other uses of this.
It just never really occurred to me until recently. I was doing this, renting websites for a long time.
And it created a tax problem, a good one. And I was.
talking to my CPA the one day and she's like, you're going to have to pay a lot this year.
And I was like, okay. And she told me, I almost had a heart attack. And I was like, okay, how do we not pay that?
And she's like, legally? And I was like, you can buy real estate or buy a business. And I was like, okay,
I have real estate. That's not done much for me. What do you mean by a business? And she's like,
just buy an existing business. Lots of baby boomers. Go buy one that's already working. And you can take all the
FF&E, the furniture, fixture, equipment, or trucks, all that stuff, and offset some of your
income so you don't have to pay taxes on. And I was like, cool, what's the downside? And she's like,
well, next year, you're going to have that company making you money too. So you're going to have
even more tax problems. Then you get to do it again. Well, and then you got to run a business.
Or you got to hire someone to run this business. I'm like, all right, well, whatever. So I'm like,
fine. So I did that. I went, I went and I learned about acquisition and I ended up buying a
catering company. And I have no experience in catering. I was only comfortable with this because of
this background. Like knowing SEO, knowing lead gen, I knew like even if everything fell apart,
their website's doing nothing, ads are doing anything, I can get the leads. So I'm like,
whatever. How hard could it be? So I bought it. I took an SBA loan. It was like 230,000 down or something.
I bought the company, $1.7 million. I took my brother out of his job. He was an operations manager at a carwash.
And I was like, hey, if I gave you half the company, would you run this?
And he's like, absolutely.
So I put him in to keep me passive.
And he ran it.
So I've just been a passive partner on this, just pumping it with leads.
And it just pays me while I chill.
And then I've just been, I just didn't think of this sooner.
So I'm like, this is awesome.
So now I just keep trying to buy more businesses to offset more taxes and use SEO to grow it.
And it's been going well, the catering business.
It's great.
It's awesome.
Man, that's interesting.
I got to look into that.
I've just been teaching people how to do that too.
Like a lot of people are with me.
I've been trying to show them that too because everybody wants to just go as big as possible.
And I'm just looking, what is the highest use of this skill set?
I think that might be it.
Yeah.
Okay.
More vertically integrated.
Luke, you're the man.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
Thanks, Chris.
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 mowing 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.
