The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - The Simplest $10K/Month Business Most People Miss ($0 to Start) - Ep. #327

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

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We're on track to do 200,000. So we are at about 10,000. 10,000 revenue. We've seen up to 15,000. And how much of that is profit? 85%. Wow. That's incredible.

And how much money does it take to start this business? $0 and very minimal time. Because once you set it up, it's just doing its thing. The boards are fantastic for a side hustle. How many people out here could have a different life if they made $3,000 every single month? Are you paid per month or per year? All up front. Okay.

Yeah. How do you design the ads? Well, either do Canva or ChatGBT.BT. Yeah. Chatt-JPT, Image 2 is amazing. Oh my gosh. It's so good. I work way less than I would at a job. And I have so much more fun. Yeah. So I wouldn't trade it.

Yeah. All of our services are lined up to move them to the next step so that they go, well, now I've got this problem. It's like, well, we can solve that too. Yeah. We're still early for just about everything. And if you try to convince yourself that we're not, then you're probably just thinking of excuses to not do the thing. not start a business. What do you have to lose? Worst case you don't sell any, you just put it in a

different restaurant. Do you ever walk into a restaurant and see that sandwich board next to the host stand that says like when their happy hour is, what the discounts on appetizers are? My guest today, Rachel, found a way to monetize that. She gives restaurants that board for free and then she sells ads on that board for $3,600 a year. Finding the restaurants to place it is not hard. funding the small businesses to advertise on it is not hard. But the genius of what she's doing is the upsell. She upsells them to something much more profitable that has nothing to do with restaurants or local businesses whatsoever. This is a banger. Please enjoy. So by the end of this episode, will people have enough information to start this kind of business that they run in their

part-time that makes them thousands per month? Yes, absolutely. One board placed and you can make $3,000 a month. Okay. So we're not hiding anything. No gatekeeping. No gatekeeping. I love to lay it all out online. Okay. So you're both full-time employees a year and a half ago, right? Yep. Where was the first restaurant where you saw a chalkboard that gave you this idea? It was in Montana.

Now, was this sign outside or inside? It was inside. Okay. So you walk in and like right near the host table, they have a sign, a chalkboard that's like, you know, two for one fajitas or whatever. Yes. And you saw that. And you were in the mindset at this moment of like, what business should we start?

Is that right? You already had an agency. Correct. And then we were looking for ways to generate leads. For the agency. Correct. And so, you know, of course, like after watching your show, we're always looking at opportunity. And we were looking at it because they had one right by the host stand.

And people are looking at it trying to decide if they're going to pick something off of the specials. And we're like, how do you put something on there where you can sell advertising space? Yeah. So we didn't replicate the chalkboard thing. We did dry erase. So that is like the liquid chalk markers. Okay. And the ads are just printed directly on there.

So after having that idea, we started exploring that. And then it sort of led into, hey, we can use this as that lead generation piece that we're looking for that is also going to make us money. Yeah. You foot in the door. Okay. Now that's so interesting. Like, because there are places where ads are already. Then there are places where ads could be and then places where ads aren't.

Yeah. So I've been to restaurants every now and then where there are ads like in the tape. Have you ever seen that? Oh, yeah. Like underneath plexiglass or something? Yep. I don't think I've ever seen ads on like a specials chalkboard. What gave you that idea?

Just between like table advertising or sometimes they have banners up with just business logos on it and they'll hang it like above the bar. And so we were like, well, how do we take all of that and put it where people are already looking? They already expect to look at those specials to see if there's something they want to order. So that's kind of how it came about. And also like the TV billboard or, or, you know, they're like, and also like the TV billboard or the TV advertising. Like, how do we do something like that, but not so complicated where you have to go install TVs and use the software?

So it was like a mixture of banners, TV advertising, and, you know, just putting that all together. Okay. So to be clear, the specials board that you saw didn't already have ads on it. You saw everyone was looking at it. You could put ads there. Spoken like a true capital. Yes. Right.

Where else can I put ads? Exactly. Okay. So what did you do? What did you do first? What were your next steps after having? that idea. So it was basically just finding where we could make this happen. Like where can we get this printed that makes sense. And we just went to a bunch of different printers around Missoula.

We were in Missoula. And we were just kind of like painting this picture and getting quotes. And that's how we came across that, the dry erase. And we're like, well, that works because you can just spray it off, wipe it off, use it again. So we just made like a Canva mockup of what we thought it could look like. Put the ads at the bottom and, you know, just assigned at the top. So we put the typically we put them inside of restaurants and what is it made out of it's like an aluminum so the front it has a dry erase coating so it's like aluminum uh sandwich board and it's like it's outdoor resistant as well okay so if they want to put it outside we've had breweries put it outside like on their patio and stuff okay so we wanted to make sure it was indoor and outdoor and then the coating like the

dry erase coating make sure that the ads stay nicely on there okay why didn't you go chalkboard did you start with dry erase? Yes, we did. We just couldn't find anything like that. And all of the chalkboards alone were way more expensive than this. Okay. So like by a couple hundred dollars. So this is a lot more lightweight and you just put it on a stand and it makes a lot more sense. So a company in Missoula made those? So you didn't have to get them shipped? No. And what do they cost? It cost about $350. Okay. And you have other sizes? Yeah. Yeah, you can do any size you want. And how much money does it take to start this business? $0. Really, all you need is Canva to make the ads. And you don't even have to sign up for that subscription until you've sold an advertiser spot. So you don't pay for the board,

the stand, the markers until everything is sold. So realistically, zero dollars. And then once you sell an ad, you can go sign up for Canva or chat chbt to make their ad and get it approved. Okay. So that was your first and last design. Like you, you landed on what you stuck with. Pretty much. Yeah. How many did you get printed first? So you only are. print it when you sell all the ad spaces. So we started with one just to test it. And it went really well. We got the first one done in about two weeks. So we decided to keep doing what we've done one to two every single month. Okay. So the printer doesn't need like a big order. Nope. He'll do one. One. All right. So tell me how tell me the process you went through to find your first customer.

Yeah. So you want to start by finding the host location. So you can tell the advertisers where it's going to go. So host location. So host location. Because we're talking, this is like a marketplace. Yeah. You find two sets of customers, the local business and then all the other local businesses to put their ads on there. Yep. So a host location is the local business where this will stay.

Correct. You start with that. Yep. So restaurants, coffee shops, gyms, anywhere where there's a lot of foot traffic and people stay for a while. So restaurants are like number one. So are there any like bad locations like where there aren't enough people or? Yeah.

So think low foot traffic places like a dentist office, maybe physical therapy where there might only be two people in the waiting room and they're really not going to be they're not going to have enough exposure for these advertisers I would say that's kind of something you want to steer away from keep it on the high traffic side of things okay so we've typically done restaurants for all of these and so you can send an email send a DM you can stop by in person we have done DMs and stopping by in person to find the host locations our very first one we sent them a message on instagram it was like this brunch place in Missoula. We're like, yeah, it's good.

What was it called? FSK. FSK. Forkspoon knife. Like I'm picturing like a hipster place. Kind of, yeah. Exposed ceilings. Yeah, exposed ceilings.

You got like the Edison. Myel. Yes, exactly. If you pull it up on Google, that's exactly. Really? That's funny. Okay. So we actually shot them a message on Instagram to their business page.

And she was like, I'd love to see it. Can you stop by? So we did. We walk in with that. We show her. And she's like, so this is completely free. There's no catch. We're like, yeah, it's completely free.

You can use it. We're just going to put ads on the bottom. You just keep it up for a year. And she's like, I love it. Let's do it. So we're like, okay. Was that your first DM or? No, it was probably like our 10th or 15th.

That's a lot more realistic. Yeah, no. But still, oh, geez, you had to send 15 DM. Right. Wow. Yeah, just copy paste. And what was your DM? It was just like, hey, we're putting up, we're looking for a local restaurant in

Missoula to host one of these boards for free. You came highly recommended. would you be interested in taking a look at this? And we always make sure to say that it's free to them. So we're not trying to ask them for any money. So really simple. And then we send a quick picture of it so that they can be like, they can understand what the heck we're talking about.

In that first DM before they reply, you send a picture? Yep. Okay. And did FSC already have a specialist board? They did not. Okay. Well, they had like a mini chalkboard one about this high. And they would put it up like by their-muffins 250.

Yeah. Like they put it on the counter or something? Yep. How long had they been open, give or take? I think like three years. Okay, so pretty well established. Okay, so why do you think she said yes? It's free, but was she already kind of wanting a special board or?

So I think she said yes because she really likes to present their daily specials. So they do like different pastries and things like that. So she likes to get creative and tell people what she's going to have. And that's when she brought up her little mini chalkboards. And she was like, yeah, these are terrible. Like they're so tiny. I want something bigger. Yeah.

So she was really excited about it. And this was the business owner you were talking about. Yes. Presumably the one who saw your DM. Yep. Yep. So you DM 10 to 15 restaurants, coffee shops, etc. She was the first to reply.

Yep. And so how much did you go back and forth via DMs versus how quickly did you just go meet her in person? It was, hey, I love this idea. Can you come in and show us? And we said, yeah, can we come on Wednesday? Oh, okay. So you bring the board and she's just like, yep, that's cool. What do I sign up?

Yeah. I mean, because what else is there to say? Right. She's like, it's really free. You're like, it's free from six pounds? Yes. 2.7 millimeter of thickness? Yeah, exactly.

Okay. She wasn't turned off by the ads at all. No. Because me, like if I have like a nice place or something, it's like, man, it looks tacky. I'd rather pay $350 and get a blank one. Right. You know? Do people ever say that?

No. No, we had one like golf course restaurant that was kind of upscale. And he said we stray away from having other advertisers in our location. But no one has ever disliked the look of it. I'm surprised you don't get more of that. Yeah. Maybe it's Mozilla, or maybe it's just like restaurants are so strapped. Yeah.

We've done it in other locations too. Okay. So we haven't run into that. Okay. So she said yes. And you had already sold those spots? No. So we waited until we had the host location.

Okay. So then we can tell them where it's going. So then when we contact the advertisers, we can say, we've got a board going up inside of FSK. Okay. Are you interested in being on it? That way they know, they're like, oh, that's a popular brunch place. Yeah, I'd love to be in front of those customers.

Okay. Have you learned that that's like a big deal, like where their ads are going to be shown? No. It's not that important. It's not. It's honestly surprising because one time we got a referral for this hole in the wall place, I think it was called like Peggies or Polly's or something for some diner. And I was like, I've never heard of it.

It's off the beaten path. And I was like, I don't know. But what we did was in that particular situation, we asked the owner for referrals. because we thought, you know, nobody's going to know this place. The owner of Peggy's. Correct. So we asked him, we walked through it with him. Like, who do you know, or like, who does your insurance?

Who handles your insurance? Who's your attorney? Last time your HVAC went out, who did you call? And just sort of walked them through the process. Because when you've initially asked them, they're like, no, I don't really know anybody. Yeah. And they're like, well, what about this? What about this?

What about this? And then you leave with a list of names. And then that kind of dawned on us because that made it so much easier to fill the board. So we're like, okay, great, we're going to do that from no on. Yeah. So we leverage the referrals from the owner so that we can fill the board a lot quicker. That's smart. There's a lot of questions like that in business where if you ask someone something too broad, they don't know what to say. Exactly. Like in the AI, you know, implementation agency, if you're like, what problems are you struggling with in your business right now? I don't know. Right. Yeah, there are problems. But if you're like,

do employees ever show up late, you know, or do you ever have sleepless night? Or do you ever have sleepless night? about your business? Yes. When was the last time you had to sleep this night? Like you got to like really remove like the thought process from them because they're not going to be creative enough to answer it. Exactly. And we usually kind of start off by saying, is there anyone you don't want on the board? And they're like, no. And then we just kind of make a joke, oh, I don't know if you have an ex-spouse or a cousin that you hate that has a business and then they kind of just laugh. And you go, well, is there anyone you do want on this board? Is there a realtor that comes and eats lunch here every single week that you want to make sure they get a fair shot at

being on here and then just start to walk them through that process. It's funny with local business owners, oftentimes their billboard or their ad, they don't even really expect or hope it brings in business. It's just kind of a flex. Exactly. Like a realtor's face on a bench. It's like, yeah. Right.

My bench. And that's what's great about these boards because, you know, anytime you're talking marketing or advertising, the first question is, what's my ROI? And you don't really get that with this because it is like a billboard, you know, like you can go and pay $5,000 a month for a billboard and they can say, I don't know what you're going to get. I can guarantee, though, that this many eyeballs are going to see it. So then you just tell them, you know, if Peggy's gets 7,000 customers a month, you say, well, you're going to be in front of about 7,000 customers every single month.

Yeah. And that's enough for them. Hmm. Okay. And then they do like to share pictures of it. Yeah. And like posted on their social. Like, hey, go check me out at FSK. Okay. So how many ad slots are on there again? There's six. And that's standard across the board. You don't have any like full, like someone, if someone wants the whole board or half the board or third. If somebody wanted to buy two spots, we would absolutely let them. So it's not set in stone. You could do more if you wanted to.

I probably wouldn't go more than like 10 so that, because you'd have to shrink the ads down a little bit. But you can do two. You could do five. You could do six. Six just looks clean to us. So that's what we've been proceeding with. Does the 350 include like printing the ads?

Yes. Okay. Printing and everything. Yeah. And what are the ads made out of? Like what material is that? It's honestly, I don't even know. It's just printed on there.

And I'm pretty sure it's just like pressed onto the board. And then it has a coating on top of it. Okay. So you sent to the printer the like the designs. And he prints it as is. Okay. Yep. And now what is your pricing?

So for one, if we do one board and we're doing six spots, it's 600 per spot. And that stays up for one year. If we're launching two boards in two different locations. So they get double exposure, then we charge 900. Okay. So kind of a 50% discount then. Yeah. Okay.

So 3,600 per board per year? Yes. So 300 per month per board, total. Wow. That's pretty good. Yeah. So your profits, it's around 3,200. If you do one board, 4600 if you do two.

Hold on, 3,200 of one board, because your cost is only the, so it's about 400. It's about 400 because there's, we give them the stand to put it on and markers to write on it. Okay. So all in about 400, but the costs. Okay. So, you know, we're talking like 85% profit margins, less your time to like DM these people. Right. Okay.

So the, do you have like a contract? Does the restaurant sign a lease? Do the business owner sign a lease or, you know, an agreement? Yeah. So we have the restaurant sign an agreement just saying that they will keep the board up for one year in a visible location. And that if they sell the business, that transfers to the new owner. Okay. And have you ever had any pushback from that?

No. Okay. Do you check in? I make sure it's still visible or? Yeah. Yeah. If you think, if you remember, but. Yeah.

We typically do. And we've never had this happen, but we've told, like, we've had the conversation. If the advertisers ask, like, hey, I was in the restaurant and I didn't see it up, then, like, we have that contract in place so that we can contact them and say, hey, you've got to get that board back up. Yeah. But we have not run into that. And the first place that we did, the brunch place, she actually posted on her Instagram story almost every day. because she's... Because the specials are on.

Exactly. So, like, they're getting all that exposure as well. Man, because if you could, like, measure that, you could use, like, an AI agent or something to, you know, put all of your customers' Instagram pages. And anytime they post a picture of that board, you know, it could log that to a spreadsheet. Because then you could honestly say, yeah, Peggy's Diner gets 7,000 customers a month.

But Peggy posts this every day. And those posts get 1,300 views on average. But you're really getting 87,000 views a month. Right. Right. Exactly. Not that you'd be able to 10x. your prices. It doesn't scale like that. It's just information to help make the sale. It's either going to

increase your clothes rate or you could increase your prices. Right. Yeah. So it's just a whiteboard. Whiteboards have been around forever. Why are people paying you $3,000 for them? Because it's put up for a year in front of thousands of customers inside of a local restaurant or just any busy local business. So if it's going inside of Bob's Pizza and Bob's Pizza gets 10,000 customers a month, that means that their business is displayed in front of those customers. And all the specials of that restaurant are written on it. So people are already looking at it. They're already sitting there.

They're looking at the board trying to decide. And then they might glance down and go, my roof is leaking. I'm going to call Rick's roofing. Do you ask these restaurant owners what their monthly volume is? I would think a lot of restaurants, like, they don't know how many people come through every month. Yeah. So we will ask them. And they're like, yeah, it's anywhere between 7 and 10,000 or it's 32,000.

if they know their numbers. But a rough number is all we're really looking for. And what's an average? Between seven and 10. Okay. That's typically what we see. What about for coffee shops? That's about the same. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And the busier locations. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's open less hours a day, but it's like a higher volume of people. Yeah. All right. So seven 10,000. So I'm trying to get a feel for like what the CPM cost per mill would be. Yeah. So if it's 7,000, that's seven and you've got to buy, you know, 300 a month. Is that right? So like $30 CPM. So like that's pretty good.

Like for a business owner, just if they were comparing it against the billboard or Facebook ads, that's a pretty good price. Right. Yeah. Just harder to attribute new sales to it. Right. Exactly. What kind of stories have you heard from your advertisers that where they've gotten business from it? Yeah.

So one of the painters, he actually, he was on the first board that we did. And then he was on a couple other ones too. But he hopped on it because he, that was his favorite brunch place. his office is kind of close to there. And he was telling us that it was the owner's son. He needed his house painted. And he's always in the restaurant and he saw it. So he gave him a call.

And he was like, oh, that's Murray's painting. He's right down the road. And he saw it. And he was like, I see him every day. I'm going to give him a call. So that was one of the stories. But I think what's great about these is that you can kind of explain this confidently to a business owner.

Like this is truly about branding. This is about just being everywhere at a low cost. so that somebody might call you and they might not say, hey, I saw you on this board, but they're going to say, I just see you everywhere in town. So I figured you were the guy to call. Yeah.

And when you explain it like that to them, that kind of disarms the ROI question, and they just understand it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Well, I say that only 50% of marketing works. You just don't know what 50%. Exactly.

Yeah, you hear that all the time where they're like, I have all this marketing going on. I don't know what's working, so I'm not going to turn anything off. Yeah, yeah. Have you ever thought of, you know, giving a board to a restaurant

without any advertisers in place and just putting like six QR codes that say your ad here. Oh, yeah. That's a good idea. Because 10% of adults are business owners. So therefore any given restaurant has 700 business owners coming through. Yeah. You know, and it's like, oh, hmm. I like that.

What do you have to lose? $400, but if worst case you don't sell any, you just put it in a different restaurant. Like you can do month a month on that. Right. Once we fill it up, we'll sign a 12-year lease with you. So especially if it were like a higher. volume place. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so there's six hundred bucks per year per board. Most of that is profit. What are your numbers today after a year and a half? So we've been doing this for six months.

We installed this about six months ago. Our agency is year and a half. Okay, okay. Yeah, six months. This came later. A lot of people start with the lead gen. We put in and after. But so we've done about 50,000 in revenue on just the boards. In six months. Correct. So on track for over 100,000 your first year because I assume you're growing. Yes. And 45,000 of that is profit. Holy cow. So it is about 90% more. And you don't yet know what your churn will be. Like I have to think after a year, it's like, why would we get rid of this? Right. We didn't even pay for it in the first place. Worse case, they want to put it in a closet. At that point, just take it back. Right. Then your next customer is pure margin, pure profit. Yeah. And a lot of the advertisers that like we

had on the first few boards. We're on the next set of boards. So that turn rate, like, has been really low. Our advertisers from the first one want to move to the second one. So each time we launched a new board, we just reach out to who was on the last one. And then a lot of them will double up. Okay. Are you paid per month or per year? So all up front. Okay. Yeah. So we just collect all up front because $600 for the year is, I think that's like a buck 50 a day. And that's a really easy ask. So we've talked about like if we ever receive any pushback or raise the prices dividing up into two payments or monthly payments but at that point it's 50 bucks a month and yeah rather just have the money up front so okay we're profiting all that right up front okay so i'm getting confused so how much was it

per month per advertiser again it's 600 for the year 600 for the whole year correct 3600 for the year for the board yes okay yep so 50 bucks a month per business owner so what is your i guess you don't count monthly recurring revenue, right? Because you're charging just up front. Right. Okay. Six hundred for the year. Okay. So, sorry, how many unique businesses are on your boards? So I think we are at like 63. Okay. If I want to, if I want to, if I'm sorry of them have multiple boards. Yes. Uh-huh. Okay. So 63 unique businesses. And then of those, how many have you upsold to? About half. Half. Okay. So the whole world is screaming about AI right now. And you're arguing we need to be placing whiteboards in restaurants. What's the argument for that? I think it's just kind of going back

to the roots of simplicity instead of screaming AI, which we do on the back end, but offering them something so simple that they already understand and that has been around for years is such an easier sell. And I think a lot of businesses appreciate it. So it makes it easier for them to swallow things like AI automation upgrading their website when you offer them something that they understand and that they've probably already done something like it. When does that conversation happen? Pretty much immediately. So we, what we'll do is, because we do websites, reputation management,

different, you know, AI services like AI receptionist, AI chat widget. And what we'll do, what we'll start with is as soon as we get them paid for the board because we don't want to like overwhelm them and just say, oh, and by the way, we also do AI and automation, all the things that they're afraid of. So we will, we'll get that all settled. We'll get the board placed. Get paid. Get paid.

Yes. And then we run a report in GHL that prospecting report. And it shows like where the gaps are. Their citations, if they're responding to reviews. And that's a few clicks. A few clicks. You just put their website in there and enter? Yep. Yep. Yeah, you just find like their business on the map. Shows where all the gaps are, like what they're doing wrong. Yes. It gives them like a percentage reading on all of the different categories and an overall rating. And then it will even tell you like how likely GHL thinks they are to convert. So the ones that. that are like 20 or 30 percent we typically don't send unless we see a bigger opportunity with AI. So if they're not answering their phones, if we're trying to call them to get their ad approved and they don't answer their phones, that's when we see an opportunity for an AI receptionist or an AI chat widget. But typically we start with that GHL report. And nine times out of 10, they have some major issues that we can help them with that leads into reputation management. Okay. So if you plug in Sally's coffee shop and Sally is just a killer at internet market, And she has an AR reception.

She has all this stuff. You're going to plug in report and it's going to say, yeah, she could be doing these three things better. But your chance of closing her is like 12% because she's pretty solid. Yep. But most of the time, 90% of the time, you plug in Sally's coffee shop and it's like, Sally didn't know what she's doing. Exactly. She needs all of these things.

And so we think that if you present this in the right way, your chance of closing her would be 60%. Is that accurate? Correct. And then we actually just go through that report with them. Okay. So that they can see the data. And a lot of times when we get to the citations and like the review responses, they immediately like, how do we fix that?

Yeah. Because they're like, oh my gosh, I didn't know anything about that. Okay. All right. So let's say, for instance, July 1st, you close a customer, you accept their money. They signed. They're going to have their ad on a board for a year, July 1st. At what point do you say, hey, by the way, like the second?

Typically when we're wrapping up the board and we've got it placed. So when we, because we'll send them a picture of it in the location. So if we have like those few that we know we're going to target, we'll email them separately. Say, hey, your board is up. It's live. You can stop by and see it. Here's a picture of it. Also, I noticed a few things on your website or your Google Business profile that we can actually help you with if you are interested.

Or we'll just kind of say we noticed a few gaps of where you might be missing the boat. We can help you rank higher. Yeah. So they already worked with us on something. that they understand and they got to know us, they like us. They see that we operate really well and really quickly. We respond. We're trustworthy. And then then we can have that conversation where we're pitching what everybody else is pitching websites, AI, automation. There's no shortage of people doing that. Exactly. You're just saying the difference between us is we just take a different,

we take a back door. Everyone else is knocking on the front door and they're like, look at the noceal listening sign. You're like, what about your side door? Also, I'm coming through the side door and I'm bring in six cookies. Yes. Right. And I'm helping you find more money, aka more customers. Would you like even more of those customers? Right. More cookies? Yes. Yes, exactly. You've seen what we can do. You've seen that you like us. Do you want to know what else we can do to help? Yeah, because that's, it's all about trust. And so I get a dozen cold emails a day for this. And I don't know this person. I already don't like this person. They're no different than any other cold email. But if it was like my friend at church

or my mom, it's like, I like you, I trust you. Right. But they don't have to be. your mom. It just needs to be someone that you already gave money to that didn't run away with it. Exactly. That gets you 80% of the way to being like an immediate family member when it comes to trust. Not like knowing them necessarily, but just like trust worthy enough to give them money every month. Yeah. And especially in marketing. Like there's everybody's a marketer. Yeah. And everybody wants to take your money. So it's like how do we just be a little bit different. Yeah. Okay. So what I want to ask about your pricing for that. But before I do, do you have a list of your of these 63 customers. I'm curious what industry is there in. Yeah. So it's mostly painting HVAC law.

Okay. Tax, insurance, realtors. Okay. So these are very local business. Yes. Mm-hmm. Painting HVAC law, tax insurance realtors. Okay. Of those categories, what's the most common? Like, what's the easiest to close? Honestly, the like tax and insurance side. Okay. Which I thought it would be more home services. Uh-huh. They still love it too. But there is something. that tax people, insurance people, they just, I think they understand this type of advertising. They're the ones likely to do the bus advertising, like realtors. Yeah. They're all over town like that.

You know, yard signs, things like that. So I think that's why they're used to this. Yeah, yeah. HVAC, painting, they are more focused on that ROI. And like, what do I get back immediately? Well, there's a few things happening like a realtor. A new home sale to them is worth $15,000. Right.

$500,000 home, $15,000. A painter might be 3,000 one time. Right. So it's like theoretically, the realtor could be five times easier to close for that fact alone. Right. In addition, painters, HVAC, a lot of those guys are just busy. They don't need to advertise because there's a three million shortage of blue collar workers. We all know that, right?

Exactly. Whereas realtors, there's two million realtors that's insanely competitive. So you have those things working for you. High ticket level of competition, how busy they already are. Most realtors are not busy. Right. Because there's so many realtors. Exactly.

Okay. So what do you charge on average for your digital services? Yeah. So for the websites, that's anywhere between 1,000 and 6,000. Up front. Yeah, that's just the setup. Okay. So depending on what they need.

And then it's anywhere from like 50 bucks a month if they just need basic hosting to maybe a thousand or more if they want automations and AI plugged in. Okay. For hosting, you said? Mm-hmm. Okay. What, for the customers that you're building websites for, how many of them already have a website. I would say 50%. Okay. I'm surprised there's not more. Because my experience, it's like,

it's easier to sell a website to someone that has a website. Right. Because they know that it's important. theirs is outdated. It's old. A website's one thing as a business owner, you build, you forget about it. It might be broken. You don't know. Yeah. And you move on and you check a box and you feel good because you have a website. But then it's like years later, it's like, oh, this website sucks. Yeah. It looks bad and it's not converting and that form has been broken for nine months. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe nine years. Yeah, That's our second best customer. Yeah, right. Okay, so one to six thousand to give them a new website or their first website.

Yeah. Now, I've used GHL a lot. How much time do you spend building that website? We actually don't build them in GHL. So we'll do like the backend hosting in GHL if we need to. But we, and by we, I mean, my husband, I don't do this, but he codes them in CloudCode. Okay. Yeah.

And they load super quick. They're really nice and really easy to maintain. Still very approachable for, I mean, you can use. natural language. Yeah. To build those. So 63 customers on the sandwich board side. How many of those have you closed for digital stuff? So 20 to 30. We've got about 20 active right now. And then the other 10 we've done like just a one-time website, one-off, like a citation blast, certain things like that. So of those 30, how much like lifetime revenue do you expect you'll get from them? Typically about 7,500 per year. Per year for each of them? Okay. So 200,000? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, we're on track to do

200,000. 7500 times 30, 225 per year. But it's not all recurring. Some of it's recurring. Right. Yeah. Some of that is like the upfront setup fees. Some of that is the ongoing. The AI services and automation, those are our higher ticket items, brand reputation and just website hosting that falls on the lower end. Okay. So, The, theoretically, if you said, we're done with the sandwich boards, we're done with our legion, we're going to turn it all off, we're busy, we're full. You would be making top line revenue like 325, 350 a year in here and out. And of course, over time, you would lose them.

You would turn on both sides of the business. But after six months of work, you've built a business profiting six figures a year, right? Yeah. Doing something that I've honestly never heard of. And I hear of all the businesses. Like I've heard of, you know, digital marketing. I've heard of putting ads in restaurants, not in this way, but putting those two together, I have not.

And that's what's so beautiful about ideas and about business is because if you take like five different ways of finding customers, a thousand different industries, 10 different pricing models, 10 different distribution methods, and you multiply all those numbers, you end up with tens or hundreds of millions of variations of ideas. And you can't tell me that all of those are taken. Right. They're just not. We're talking, call it 50 million ways of pricing, modeling, pitching, getting your foot

in the door, selling certain things to different industries, 50 million ways, and 98% of them are still wide open. Yeah. And if one of them is taken, there's probably 100 other people that could do the same thing and still be successful. Right. Exactly. As much as people say that the market is saturated, I think HVAC is saturated, plumbing

is saturated, cutting grass is saturated, marketing is saturated, everything is saturated. just figure out how to get yourself in front of your customers. And if you have to be a little bit different or think outside the box to do it, like absolutely, go for it. And that's what's going to set you apart. So is your role in your marriage to like run the sandwich sign business and then like kind of upsell them and then you hand them off to your husband who's doing the digital stuff? Yeah, pretty much.

So I'm customer facing anything to do with sales and talking to people. That's me. And then I call them and I say, we've got this project to do. Yeah, yeah. So do you take them all the way up until. they're closed, and then you hand them off. Yeah. Then you go to the next one.

Yep. Okay. How much time are you spending upselling and closing people on the digital side versus trying to grow the physical side of the business? So I would say the upsell, like, so selling the boards and upselling them, I probably spent about 10 hours a week. Okay. And then another 10 to 20 on like the other side of our business.

Okay. Like making sure everything is in place and where it needs to be and targeting my next, my next group. Yeah. Now, you told me what types of businesses are easiest to close on the sandwich board. What types of businesses are the easiest to upsell into? Home services all day. So it's the opposite.

It's realtors, tax, insurance, lawyers. They're willing to pay $100 a month, but less willing to pay $5,000 for website or whatever, $1,500 monthly for services. Yeah. And a lot of what we have to do, or what we do has to do with those Google reviews. And I think contractors and home services just really understand those Google reviews. they just don't have a system in place to get them. So when we bring them that system, they see the value in it all day. Okay.

Let's say there's four buckets of revenue on the digital side. Let's say, I just made that number up. Websites, three others. Where do your customers fall? Typically in brand reputation management and then like the websites. If you were to assign a percentage to that bucket, how much of your revenue comes from brand reputation management? 60.

60. Okay. Cool. And then what else? Websites. So some of them are just website builds and then hosting. I would say that makes up another 30%. And then we've got 10% on the higher ticket services,

like the AI receptionists, automations plugged in. So appointment bookings, things like that. Those are the higher ticket services. You know, it's interesting how early we still are on the AI side. Like I know that people are using voice agents and stuff. But like if the whole AI story is 100 years long, when it's all said and done, we're 3% of the way there.

know really like crazy because no one knew what chat at gbt was the first year right so 2% of the way into it that is interesting because i think something like uh do you do any voice agents yes something like that in five years or 10 years is going to be where websites are today right but 20 years ago selling websites was still really good right like i've said this a million times on the podcast you probably heard it but like we're always early for everything right like it's unless we're talking like, you know, cassette tapes or like certain industries where it's already done and dead. It's like we're still early for just about everything. And if you try to convince yourself that we're not, then you're probably just thinking of excuses to not do the thing, to not start a business.

Exactly. You hear that all the time. Like AI saturated. And it's like, are you serious? You do think that that's accurate. And I think that's why, I mean, I'm sure business owners feel like it's saturated too because they're always getting contacted about, hey, can I sell this AI service? And I think a lot of them get scared when you say, like, I do AI and they're like, they think it's going to mess up their business. So having that forefront item where you build that relationship and it makes sense to them. And then you kind of lead in, you don't just drop AI on them. Yeah. You just sort of work it in there.

It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And they're more open to it instead of just being like, AI, AI. Right. I just, I, maybe I'm just like, I don't know, grumpy, but sometimes when people tell me something saturated, I'm trying to think of an example. Like I was in Utah last month. And Utah is the dessert capital of the world.

Yeah. It just is. And we were in Lehigh, Utah, which is probably the dessert capital of the dessert capital. And we wanted to get ice cream. So I go open Google, I pull up ice cream. And there are eight scoop shops within like a three mile radius. Yeah. Now in Dallas, Texas, there's probably two or three.

Yeah. So on the surface, you'd look at that and say, it's so saturated. We're so oversaturated. Then it's like compared to what? Right. How do you know that? Because you might go to all. eight of those and there's a line out the door, you know, and you add a ninth and there'd be a line

out that door because it grows the market. Now there's even more options. Now there's more people wanting ice cream because it has this perception of saturation. Right. So I just, I push back that we're late on anything and that anything is oversaturated. Certainly things are. Like there are markets where there's too many of an industry and none of them are doing very well except for a few. But I think it's saturated on the on the outside. But it's not saturated of the people who are actually doing things. So especially, and I speak to that from like a marketing standpoint. So all of the people doing any selling marketing services, AI, I think there are so many of

them. But what percentage is how well they're all doing? Exactly. What percentage is going to stay consistent and actually do what they need to do every single day to get in front of their customers? That's the difference. And that's where people don't realize that there's a huge gap. And there's a huge opportunity to step in and be one of those people that does something

every single day. Yeah. That's where you're going to win. That's so good. Okay, so reputation of brand management. Is that like responding to reviews? Yeah. So it's like soliciting reviews. Correct. So it's an automated request system. So you hook it up to, typically we'll hook it up to their invoice system. So when they receive payment from a customer, the request goes out. And then it's set on an automation to go out three times via email and three times via text because they're more likely to respond to a text. So it's that part and then also replying to

those reviews so that that Google will start to ring you higher. There's a few other things like posting those five-star reviews to your social media, putting a chat widget on the website, things like that. So that's kind of all built into that package. And the big secret here is nobody needs to know how to do or build any of these things. We're just paying one piece of software. Right. One flat monthly fee.

If you have four customers, it costs 100, 300, 500 a month. You have 4,000 customers. It still costs 500 a month. Right. How much, how many, I'm not even going to measure this in, hours, but how many minutes does your husband spend setting up a new customer for something that you're already doing for another customer? I mean, it's just kind of set up as a snapshot in high level.

So if you have an HVAC business paying you how much per month for reputation management? $3.99. $400 a month for reputation management. And then another HVAC business says, I want that too. How many minutes do you spend setting him up? It's about 10 minutes. And then we do an onboarding call, 20 to 30 minutes. So 30 minutes, one time.

things will break over time, of course. 30 minutes, one time for 4,800 a year. Yeah. And we don't really know what the churn is yet because it's early, but presumably very low turn because they're getting more reviews, they're responding to the reviews, therefore their Google Business Profile ranking goes up, therefore they're getting more customers, therefore they're correlating that to you and your genius. And they're like, what else can I pay you for?

Can you help me with this? Can you do an AI voice agent? Yeah. Yeah. And that's even like, so all of our services are lined up to move them to the next step. So the boards, get them in so we can have the. conversation about their website or reputation management. Then they start getting more customers. Then we say, how do we help you manage those customers? Let's put in an AI chatbot. Let's put in

an AI receptionist. And so it all just kind of like leads them at the line to keep them so that they go, well, now I've got this problem. It's like, well, we can solve that too. Yeah. Oh, man. I just, my last interview in this seat was with a guy that does estate sales. Oh, yeah. I listened to that one. Yeah. And so he has this ugly, unsexy, somewhat profitable, very, very, very, very, tedious business, like a literal sweaty business that feeds him these $100,000 leads. Right? An estate sale to house flipping pipeline. Yep.

He's probably one of the first people that's ever thought of that. I've never heard of anyone else doing it. I've never heard of anyone else doing this. There's so many ways to get your foot in the door. Okay, so I'm going to guess, guesstimate some numbers here. Call it 12 customers paying for reputation management, $400 a month each. So $4,800 a month, almost all profit. for one of your services.

Yeah, yeah, and very minimal time. Because once you set it up, it's just doing its thing. You just have to make sure, check in, you know, once a month, make sure it's actually doing what's supposed to be doing. And something might unlink, something might break. But other than that, it's fantastic. What are the downsides of this business? The downsides of the boards is that they're not recurring.

Okay, so for the boards, they are not recurring. So you have to do a new board every single month. But when you really think about it, you need 12 restaurants or 12 coffee shops to put it in. Sorry, what do you mean every single month? Because it is recurring up to a year, isn't it? So we collect up front, right. So we just collect all the money up front.

So we make the 3,200 profit. And then we go do another board and sell another set of that. To grow the business. Right. But that old board you just place, that's good for a year, right? Yeah. And at the end of the year, most will probably, most of your six advertisers will probably stay. One or two may swap out.

And the printer would just print over those? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You can do like final stickers and put it on or just create a whole new board. because the cost is so low. So this type of business I need to make an acronym for it would be way too long. But it's like, Y-O-A-G-A-Y-L-D.

You're only as good as your last deal. Yeah. Right? It is recurring. You haven't seen the recurring yet because we haven't had a year elapse yet. But you got to keep placing more boards. Right. And in Missoula, Montana, there's only so many restaurants.

But you're in Colorado now. There's a lot more there. Okay. So that's the downside of that. It's a little unscalable. Is DM to in person? Is that the whole play? You found that cold email, cold call works, or it just works so well that that's all you do now.

Yeah. So typically we'll DM to try and get like an in person appointment to show them the board. And then we'll go in and we've never had somebody just say yes over a DM. They want to see it. They want to know like what this weird free thing is. We're trying to give them. So we'll DM, try to get an appointment. Then we stop in and then do the whole contract, walk them through the referrals.

And then the referrals, we typically leave with 12 to 20 names. And then we just go call them. We can usually close six out of those. Really? Yeah. So that whole side of the business is kind of leaning on referrals at this point? Yeah. Not like, because it would be a lot harder otherwise.

Yeah. Go to the phone book and start calling HVAC companies. No, no, no, no, no. Right. Exactly. Okay. I would try the QR code idea. I do like that.

You're right here. I was going to say something earlier. I'm all over the place. But when you said you always try to get them to the next. next thing, right? Like a website, then reputation management, then an AI voice agent or whatever. I, they call that micro commitments, right? Yeah. And it's like, you could also call it the buy a guy a drink first principle. Right. Where it's like, you don't offer someone the $5,000 thing right after you meet them. Even if they trust you like you would know you, you offer them the free thing.

Yep. And then the $50 thing. And then the $500 thing and then the $500 thing. And your net of net, your close rate will be a factor of 10 higher. Right. And if you, oh, nice to meet you. Okay. Do you want a $5,000 website? No. So that's an important principle. All right. So the downsides, unscalable. What about the downsides of the digital business? I would just say the hustle. We do a lot of cold email and testing and measuring what messaging is working. So it's just a hustle like everything else. But you just have to create your system and stay consistent with it. Because if you don't, that's when it's going to fall off. And that's when it's going to come really bad because you don't have a business. If you can't stick to the hustle, then you're not going to have a business.

So just like everything else, it's just a hustle to get appointments booked and get leads in the door. Okay. So if you've closed 20 to 30 on the digital side from the physical side, how many other digital customers do you have that you've closed from other avenues? Yeah. So actually my husband's Facebook is like it's monetized and I don't know the right terms, but he is like blasted out to a lot of different people. So he'll post content about Google business profiles, citations, websites. And he actually has a lot of people coming to him now. because he's just shown to so many people that he'll have people reaching out like, hey, I always see your posts on Facebook.

You seem like the guy to go to. So that's another really good avenue for us. Okay, so your husband is off camera. Yeah. We just talked to him. He's super interesting, even though he doesn't go his face a lot. I'm sure. I'm sure.

So that's very encouraging. He has 800 YouTube subscribers, 1,300 Facebook followers. And he's just posting videos about here's how to make your presence more visible in your HVAC business on Google or whatever, right? And even though those videos get hundreds to low thousands of views, they're very targeted views. And he's able to do the same thing that the sandwich boards do, which is build trust immediately. Yeah. And you just wait for the DMs to roll in.

I'm assuming he's not like really going out there and chasing down all these commenters and likers. You just wait for DMs. Yeah, pretty much. And then you follow that lead. So how many customers have you gotten from that and all other external sources? I think we've gotten six here recently, correct? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Six in the last three weeks. And that's, I mean, that will will be. tens of thousands of revenue. Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so great when someone just sends him a Facebook message. Yeah. And then like he doesn't like to respond. He because he doesn't know what to say. And I'm like, so he hands his phone to me and I'm like, yeah. That's great. Great team. Okay.

So across all of your customers, across both business lines, what is your like monthly revenue and profit today? So we are at about 10,000. Okay. 10,000. A month. Mm-hmm. Sometimes that's up to, we've seen up to 15,000.

Okay. It's between 10 and 15,000. And how much of that is profit? 85%. Wow. That's incredible. And it's enjoyable? Yeah, it's so great.

Yeah. It really is. I especially getting to do this with my husband. Like, you can see we're already a really good team because I'm the talker. He's the doer. So we work really well together. And I work way less than I would at a job. And I have so much more fun.

Yeah. So I wouldn't trade it. Yeah. What does your response rate on your DMs, your cold DMs, to local businesses. For which, for the boards? With the sandwich boards, yeah. I would say probably around 10 to 20%.

That's good. I want people to understand, like an Instagram DM from a local carries a hundred times the weight. Yes. If I get it, like I have my DMs or I have too many DMs, I rarely look at them. But if I look in there and someone's like, hey, I live in insert city name that I live in or insert city next door, I'll probably respond. Yeah. Just because it's like, oh, it's my guy. Right.

You know? Right. If it's like, hey, do you want to buy my agency services? It's like. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So like I think with the advent of AI, local will be more critical, more important than it. Yeah.

Because we feel connected with those people. Yep. So if we send out 10 local DMs, we typically get one to three responses. Wow. Okay. And then of those, how many would you say you close? I would say we close. Well, so when we reach out for the boards, we're only looking for one.

Okay. Sometimes two. So out of those three, we can close the one or two that we need. Okay. Especially because it's your. giving them something free. Yeah. Sometimes they'll say no because they already have 10 of these up in the restaurant.

Okay. Or sometimes they're just like, no, I don't know what this is. I'm confused. So the secret sauce to that business all comes down to asking them for referrals. Oh, absolutely. If that weren't a thing, I imagine this would be 10 times harder. Yeah. So our first board, we actually didn't ask for those referrals.

Yeah. And so we just hit the cold emails, hit the cold DMs. And we did fill it in about two weeks. Okay. So it went by pretty quickly. There's a hustle for $3,200 bucks. Yeah. Uh-huh.

So, but then once we started leveraging those referrals and kind of cracked that code, we're like, wow, that's like a whole other world. And then you can have the board done in a couple of days. Yeah. Okay. What, uh, how do you design the ads? Do you ask for them to submit something or? Yeah.

So they can, but we include it. So we'll either do Canva or chat TBT. Yeah. Chadjibati Image 2 is amazing. Oh my gosh. It's so good compared to what it used to be. Like the letters aren't weird. Yeah.

Yes. Claude is really bad right now. It is great for everything else. It's amazing for everything else. Anything I should have asked? Anything interesting about the business that we might have missed? Yeah. So I do just want to say like lean on those referrals. So the boards are fantastic for a side hustle. So I mean like how many people out here could have a different life if they made $3,000 every single month. So as a side hustle, it serves perfectly good and it's fantastic. It can also be like I encourage you to think beyond like what's next like look at what we've done with our business using the board of what's next because that question is going to come when you're working with these businesses and you're providing them an advertising service like these boards they're going to say eventually what else do you do

what else can you help me with hey i'm not getting that many calls can you help me with this yeah that question is going to come so i encourage you like these side hustles can always turn into something bigger it can turn into a really big business if you have that answer ready of what else you want to offer. And your side hustle could become bigger than you ever thought it could be. So, like, if you're going to pursue these boards, lean on those referrals and your life is going to be so much easier. And also think about what else you can offer. What else can come next? Yeah. I just have this envision this future where after this goes live, there's like sandwich boards with ads in every restaurant. Yes, probably. It's like the new thing. Yeah, we're going to be seeing ads for it.

It's very low tech. Mm-hmm. Like you can do tech. Yeah. Yeah. No cost to start either. Right. $0 to start. Yeah. Yep. You use Stripe for payment process? Right. Yeah. What other tools do you use?

So, Stripe for payment process. Yeah. GHL for CRM and all that. Yep. A Canva, which is kind of like phasing out a little bit. We just do that if something needs edited that we just made an AI. We use chat chit and Claude. Instagram.

Yeah. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Do you DM on any other platforms like TikTok or Facebook or just? Facebook. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Facebook, you have to be careful because like it'll show.

shut you down pretty quickly. Typically five or ten messages if you send them pretty close. You'll get the little red couldn't send. They block you. Yeah. Instagram is like the Wild West. They don't care. So you can just send as many as you want. So I'm curious about something. Hey Siri, ask chat GPT how many restaurants and cafes, coffee shops, there are per capita, per person in the United States. Okay. So there is one restaurant or or a cafe for about every 200 people. Okay. So if you have a town of 2000, then there's 10, town of 20,000, then there's 100. So no matter where you live, there's like hundreds, especially if you go out, branch out a little right. Hundreds are probably thousands of potential customers. And it could also be an auto shop,

you know, oil change or it doesn't have to be a restaurant. Right. Any type of a business could have specials. But it's just the more eyeballs the better. Yep. But I mean, an oil chain shop could get even more eyeballs. Yeah. And then, so like what we've talked about if we were going to get kind of niche like that. So let's say we put it in an auto shop, then whoever you put on the board, like you want to target it towards that customer. What else do they need? They're already there for their auto repair or whatever it is. And then you can easily convince other businesses. So we're actually working on one in Knoxville right now. And it's tied in with the Humane Society. So we're launching two boards. And from that money, we're actually donating to the Humane Society.

So the target that we're doing is vets, pet groomers, you know, things like that, pet supply stores, because one is going up inside of the Humane Society. So it's going to be in front of customers that they have a dog or they're adopting a dog. And then that way, like, know your customer, basically. So you've successfully found customers for this in both Missoula, Montana and Knoxville, Tennessee? Yep. That's great. Yeah.

That was like, people came back, oh, well, this is a Montana thing. Yeah. No, it's definitely not a Montana thing. Montana is tough when it comes to business. Do you know what your clothes rate is once you're there on site with the board, like to the restaurant? It's probably close to 100%. Yeah.

If we have a set appointment, it's 100%. Yeah. If they asked us to come in and see it 100%. We've done like cold walk-ins. And that has been pretty rocky for us because they're like one time we walked in. And the owner was cooking breakfast. And the hostess was like, yeah, I forget his name. Ricky or something.

Yeah, go talk to Ricky. He's in the back. And we're like, he's in the back. And he's literally flipping like sausage patties. And we're like, well, this is going to be a no. So, yeah, walking in cold is a little bit tough. But if we have an appointment, they asked us there. Yeah.

Yeah. I would think you could close this remotely. Like, especially if you're in person was instead of FaceTime. Can I FaceTime you this afternoon? Yeah. And it's like, here's the board. Here's the thickness. It's like, don't, don't.

You like hit it against the ground. Like it would not be 100% closery. But if it were 50, now you've got 900,000 to sell to instead of. instead of a thousand. Exactly. Yeah. But you haven't even needed to try that because you haven't exhausted your local market. Right. Well, this has been amazing. Rachel, where can we find you? Both the sandwich business, sandwich board business and the digital business. Yeah. So if you go to a community cash playbook on YouTube, community board playbook.com. And then our agency is big sky automation services.com. Big sky like Montana. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Chris, I wanted to thank you for having me on

and for all of the ideas and the content that you put out, my husband and I just love watching you. And we've learned so much from you. So what you're doing here is incredible for like everybody who's got this entrepreneur mind. And your videos are so so fascinating. So we appreciate it. I appreciate that. Seriously, thank you.

You're welcome. 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,

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