The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - You Can Replace This $10,000/Day Job With AI - Chat with Michael Girdley | Ep. #178

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Check out my newsletter at TKOPOD.com and join my new community at TKOwners.com.This is part 1 of a two-part episode, come back next week for part 2.I sat down with Michael Girdley (https://x.com/girdley) and we went back and forth pitching business ideas like it was a game show. Michael came loaded with a list of 15 ideas, and we talked through each one, from a browser plugin that detects AI-generated content to an AI that replaces $10K/day EOS consultants. We also got into fun and low-cost offline businesses like old-timey photo booths and gold-panning kiosks for malls, plus more strategic plays like a marketplace for forgotten businesses and a fund that offers minority buyouts to small business owners. We even explored how to reimagine EOS from the ground up to be fully AI-first. Lots of laughs, lots of frameworks, and tons of real opportunity in this one.You can find Michael on X at https://x.com/girdley or at https://girdley.comTimestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 AI's Impact on Business and EOS Implementation02:56 Exploring Innovative Business Ideas05:50 The Role of AI in Content Authenticity09:10 Nostalgia and Experiential Businesses12:05 Minority Investments in Small Businesses14:54 Creating a Marketplace for Distressed Businesses18:12 Reimagining EOS with AI21:06 The Future of Business Automation

These implementers will charge up to $10,000 per day to come work with your company. AI replaces the EOS implementer. You go take chat GPT and you say, your job is to act like the world's best implementer of EOS. AI is going to change everything in terms of doing business. And I like it. Every time we go to one of these hokey places, our kids always want to do gold panning or gem mining. And that is just a great business. People are super hungry for enrol life experiences.

So I like this one. Hungry people who are driven like yourself are the ones that build great businesses. Grit matters. I firmly believe that any business idea could work. Welcome to the Kerner office. Right now, I am literally sitting in a tent after midnight in the rain in the middle of the forest in Oklahoma. And I realized, crap, my podcast goes live in less than four hours. And I don't have an intro for it yet.

So here's the intro. You may have heard of Michael Girdley. He's all over Twitter. He owns a bunch of cool businesses, Alamo fireworks, sophomore businesses, recruiting businesses, and everything in between. So we had a business idea showdown. He'd give me an idea, and then I had to build on that idea with my own idea, using his as the foundation.

We did that over and over until we found a winner. I'm not going to lie, there are some really, really good business ideas in this episode. So please enjoy. All right. So there is a huge problem where you do not know if what you're looking at online is AI generated photos, AI generated text, like you have no idea. So basically what I want to pay for is a service that sits in my browser. and basically it's a plugin and it watches everything I'm looking at, and it flags for me

stuff that is highly likely to be AI generated. This may already exist, but I would pay like $20 to $30 a month for this service. So it's a browser plugin that auto detects everything I'm looking at and tells me if it's AI. Whether it's on a website or in your inbox, anything on your screen, anything, even video. Even videos. That's going to be a thing. Like, I don't know if it is or not yet, but that's for sure going to be a thing.

I think if that should be. be a big thing because what's real and what's fake. How will we ever know? You don't. Like, until you buy my browser plugin. Coincidentally, I might as well announce my next product. It's a browser plugin. Oh, and I think it could have a cool name. You call it something like distrust. Mm. Like I distrust everything. I like that. I could see that being like a whole category. Like I could see there being hundreds of browser plugins and they're being like a governing body with like a benchmark. And it's like, what is your benchmark? 97% accurate.

You know what I'm saying? They kind of have those for the LLMs, but it would be something similar for detecting LLMs. Either you're being really nice or starting out straight. No, no, I'm being, no. I will preface. I love every idea because I firmly believe that any business idea could work. Like with the right marketing, the right ideas, it could work.

So I am a yes man when it comes to ideas. But this one I really like because everyone's talking about browser plugins that watch what you do. so you could create SOPs, you could train other people. It could tell you how to be more productive. That's where I thought you were going with this. I was like, okay, I've heard this one. And then, of course, they have apps.

They're a wrappers where you can paste something into it and say, yeah, this was generated by chat. But this is like passive and it just exists. And maybe there's like a meter on the corner of your screen or something that flashes when it sees it or highlights it, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like it could kind of like highlight, put stuff like with a red glow over the top of it thinks it's fake.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. I like it. And you know what? I'm going to take that idea and I'm going to build on that for my idea. Okay. Okay.

So I think there should be like some sort of a governing body like just like I said, like an authority for detecting AI generated content. And the idea here is for all of these apps, wrappers, whatever, to pay you a licensing fee or a yearly fee or a monthly fee to get graded and score. and scored. And it could kind of be like, like what are those seals that you have on the bottom of a website that it's like SSL certified or whatever?

Yeah. Something like that. Some sort of a governing body, someone to raise their hand and say, I'm the authority. You know, Greg Eisenberg was talking about how he moved to Miami. He needed a dentist.

He was walking around. He passed a dentist. And they had a sign in the window that said, voted Florida's best dentist. And he walked in and he's like, good enough for me. He became their customer. He sent dozens of friends there.

And he said that one sign, just from him alone, caused like tens of thousands of dollars worth of business. And so we had talked about that. Like what sort of a governing body could you be? And it's all a racket, right? But I think this would be a good thing to attach that model to. What do you think? I think your path is to go get somebody in the, in Brussels,

in the EU government to mandate this as a requirement. Kind of like all that horrible cookie things. Some are very liberal. Yeah. Yes. someone willing, well, it turns out it's all a big barbell because you and I both live in Texas and our state government is now also banning pot, which is like, it's like, oh, yeah, which is like a barbell at the far left and the far right of the middle, they just meet. So it's funny. I dig that. So you

have like a governing body. So it'd be like CE Labs or one of those like ISO 9,001, but it's for. Exactly. Because on one hand, it's like, if you don't think about it deeply enough, you're like, yeah, but who am I? Like, why am I? Like, why am I? anything special. Like, well, but all of these governing bodies just kind of raised their hand one day. One guy was dumb enough or cocky enough to say, I can be that. Pay me money. You know, like, that's all it takes. So I like that one. That's good. Okay. So that's two. Are you keeping track of these or should I open a Google Doc? I've got my list that I'm writing down yours as they come up. Okay, perfect. Okay. So I had one that I think is totally up your speed, which is I saw this tweet the

other day where people took a picture of this place like outside, I think, Times Square in New York. And it was a place that had a bunch of old-timey photo booths. And people were lined up around the corner to go do these things. And I went to a bar here in San Antonio the other day. Well, you know, because I'm old, so I only go to bars on Saturday nights and from the hour of six to eight. And they had the old-timey kind of photo booth. And like, it was just a fascinating kind of thing that these things are like,

doper-dooper coming back. I think there's total market for people to start to build like on these old-timey photo booths and start to put them everywhere. Because I think people are hungry for this stuff because it's just the opposite of what you get from the photo and a mobile device that shows up on Instagram. It's like the pendulum going the opposite direction. Totally. Right. Have you been to like Pigeon Forge, Branson, one of those. Those places. Too classy for me. Yeah. Yeah. Have you been in one of those? I have not been to Pigeon Forge now. Oh, if you, we were at Pigeon Forge a few months ago and there's probably a dozen of these

photo booth businesses for old-timey Western photos on like all on Main Street and there are retail spaces and like who knows what they pay for rent, right? Like probably 10,000 plus a month. It's crazy rent. And I'm assuming they do well because there's a lot of competition and they don't go anywhere. Like they've been there for years. So I'm just assuming they do well. And so that is my data point of why I love this business because I think that speaks to a bigger

framework, which is like take a business that thrives in like a tourist trap area and test it in with like a fraction of the cost in other areas like a bar in San Antonio or a kiosk in a mall. It might flop. It might only be a tourist type attraction, but it might not. So I love that. How was it doing this one in the bar? Were people attending it? Well, number one, here are two signs.

The one, I try to talk my wife into doing it. She's like, my hair isn't, it isn't our night. So I was like, cool. But then the wall was just covered with hundreds, if not thousands of people that had done these and given them to the bar to put on the wall. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So people are doing it? Yeah, it seemed pretty popular.

And was it just like your standard photo booth that just had that filter on it, basically? Like it was the old school kiosk one that used to have like the Kodak, like film. printer or Polaroid in there. Yeah, precisely that. That is cool. Okay. Yep. I like that one a lot.

Should we come up with like a grading scale for these? Should we write down our own grades like privately so we don't bias each other? We could grade them if you want. But I figured we just the end would just pick the finalists. Okay. That's good. That's good. All right.

Well, I'll continue in this tradition and I'm going to take your theme and I'm going to add an idea to that. Same theme, Torres Traps. I've got four kids. every time we go to one of these hokey places, our kids always want to do gold panning or gem mining. Okay. And that is just a great business because you get a pile of dirt.

You kind of mix in some cheap gems that kids think will make them millionaires that are really worthless. And you pay like $45 for a bag this big. And the kids just have a blast. And no one feels ripped off. The kids are entertained. They're paning for gold and, you know, waters filtering through these things.

I think someone needs to take those, take that concept and shrink it down and put it in like a high-trafficked shopping mall, like the Gallery of Houston or the Gallery of Dallas, because it's very visual. Every kid walking by is going to want to know what's going on. You can do like a prize thing where like one in ten baths have a gold nugget or an Amazon gift card or whatever.

And then when someone wins, you could like advertise that. You could have a TV showing. it's just the type of business that would get people to stop in their tracks and shell out 35, 45, 45 bucks. And if it doesn't go well, you just close up shop because those kiosks are month to month. And you just say, I tried. What do you think?

I dig that one. Well, and I think it's really in. No pun intended, right? Yeah. So an interesting trend, right? We talk about the pendulum of like consumer demand. My son is having his birthday today. And he is going with his buddies.

He turned 16. so nobody can drive. So everybody's mom is dropping them off at the mall. It's just like, well, here we are again. We're back to the other end of the other end of the cycle again of repeating itself, which is a decade ago.

Nobody wanted to go to the mall. Now my kids are like, yeah, we're going to go to the mall. They have like a little arcade there. We're going to hang out with our friends. It's going to be great. So I think I'm very pro this as an experiential thing. I think people are super hungry for en real life experiences.

So I like this one. I think it's a cool one. So would you have like running water? So you like do the, Yeah. So I actually did some research on this like six months ago. And there's like one or two companies that sell these setups. They're like five to $15,000. And they're big enough to fit in like a key, like a mall. But they sell them to like these touristy places. They're not meant to be in a mall, but they could be like if you could have orange Julius like all you need is a drain and a plug, then you can have something like this. Right. Right. It does remind me of the last time I saw one of these little mining operation things was we went to the dinosaur museum. It's a, I think it's southwest of where you guys are towards like Browwood and Texas. Dinosaur Valley National Park. I mean, it's, Len Rose, Texas.

But on the way there, you drive past the creationism museum, which is super fun. More barbell, right? Yeah, it's like, if you want to get to this dinosaur museum, you've got to go past the Museum of Noah's Ark, which I try to get my wife and kids to go to it. They're like, we don't want to go there. We want to see the dinosaur. That's what it is. I like the wall mining operation.

I think that's a cool one. All right. Okay. So I'm going to get a little more niched on here. Okay. Okay. So one of the things that I think is a struggle is you have so many of these businesses now that are small businesses that like the only two options for them are like sell the business to and sell the whole business or like find a family member to take it over. Right. Those are kind of the two options you can have and eventually like the family member buys it out. So I think there's an interesting thing to kind of replicate what happens at the bigger end of the spectrum on business buying and generational transition, which is like, come up with a model where you become a fund that goes in and does minority investments in these

businesses. So like minority buyouts. So say, for example, somebody has a good business, right? Let's say they own a chain of small mining kiosks at the mall, right? That's doing a certain amount like this company could go in this fund would go in and do a minority purchase of say 40% of the business and the way they would get paid back as like a preferred return and then there would be guardrails on the kind of broader thing right to keep the people from paying themselves everything in terms of salary and all that kind of stuff so it's a half baked or maybe like a third baked idea but like I just see so many businesses where they're not ready to sell the whole thing but they want to get like partial liquidity and take some chips off the table and this is done for

bigger businesses but nobody's really tried to do it for small businesses So tell me why this sucks. Is there a revenue range that you're thinking? Yeah, I think it's stuff that is like slightly bigger than SBA size. So like enterprise value rise, you're like in that five to 15 million EV type thing, you know, where maybe the thing's throwing off two or three million a year in EBAA. Like, then you just say, okay, well, we're going to buy one of those EBAA from you for cash. And here's $6 million for it.

And we're going to get this preff. And then if there's an exit, then we're going to get, you know, this percentage of the business at exit, right? Yeah. So that's the total extent of the thing. It was like, okay, so many people are trying to chase all these total buyouts. Like, why don't we go to people and just say, hey, we're going to buy a minority thing. You can keep owning this.

And then over time, like, you just take some chips off the table. Because when people start, when I'm seeing this for me, too, like you start getting 50, 55, like, you don't want to have 98% of your, like, net worth tied up in a plumbing business that you own. Like, you would love to have 60% of your net worth there. You're not ready to retire. But like you don't want to have everything dependent upon this one thing that could go wrong, you know, in a downturn, that sort of thing.

I like that idea. I'm wondering if you should pick like a niche, like home services or like only HVAC or anything. And maybe your niche quote is like having a 20, like a Lindy niche, right? Like you want it to have been around for 20 or 30 years. You want to see a consistency of management. You want to see double digit net margins. And if it fits, if it checks those boxes, you don't care. care if it's a restaurant or a home service, right?

Yep. I like that idea. I wonder what it does to, like, from a mental perspective to the owner, does he pseudo-checkout? Does it change the dynamic of his motivation or his drive or not? Yeah. Maybe it makes him fight harder, you know? It totally good. Yeah.

And I do think it comes down to a lot of potentially an adverse selection problem with this idea, which is, you know, 100. hungry people who are driven like yourself are the ones that build great businesses like grit matters right and if you want to be spending more time on your boat it's not good for building a bigger business so that could be kind of the adverse selection problem with the whole thing in the end i think you go look at like warren buffett's writings when he was you know really excited about the business he bought like nebraska furniture mart like he talks about that lady that ran it like just a total machine and when she didn't get what she wanted she opened up a competing business across the street like that is just like that

crazy grit that you want. So I think for some of this to work you, there has to be the right people involve because the smaller the businesses, the more wholly dependent upon the caliber, the management and the ownership. Yeah. Isn't there like a test that you can take that measures your grit? Have you heard of that? Uh-uh. What is it? I don't remember what it's called, but it's like pretty popular. Grit. I thought it was called owning a restaurant. I think it's Angela Duckworth, the grit scale. I think she wrote that. a grit book. Yeah, I think she has like a test on her website. And so maybe if we learned that is like a key component of whether you're successful or not post purchasing this minority stake, they have to

score a certain way on that grit test. And if they don't, then you don't even move forward with due diligence. If they do, then you keep going. I like that idea. Is that kind of the percentage ranges that Warren Buffett buys in for? I think it's all over the place. He's done 100% buyouts. There's been some stuff where they've done 60% buyout. There's stuff where they've done, you know, owning single digits. It just depends on the situation. Interesting. I like that idea.

That's a good one. Should I build on that one again? If you want to riff on that one, go ahead. I'll try. So most people don't realize that of all those sweaty startups, like boomer-owned businesses, like we're all enamored by the silver tsunami, 10,000 every day, yada, yada. Most people don't realize that the vast majority of these businesses will just be closed. Some of them will try to sell.

Maybe they half-heartedly post something to biz by sell or they reach out to their cousin, who they heard was a business broker, but he's really a residential real estate broker and he's probably garbage. There might be a half-hearted attempt. And frankly, shockingly, many business owners don't even know that selling your business is a thing. That's possible, right? Like, who would want this? Like, I'm just a stylist.

Who would want my, you know, 75 hairdressing customers? they don't realize there's a value there. It might be low, but there is a value there. And so here's my idea. Call it like an online marketplace, like a biz by sell, but specifically for business owners that have already resigned in their head to just lock the doors and walk away. And then opportunistic people, you or I could come in and say, all right, I don't really want to start a business. I want to start from something. I want a foundation. I want to book a business. I want a warehouse with a bunch of woodworking equipment in it, something, I want to step into something. And maybe you pay $5,000 for an email list or $50,000 for an email list or maybe you take over a

lease or maybe it's just a real estate transaction. But it's specifically biz by sell for people, it would be hard to grow this. I think you'd have to educate them. But for people that have just said, I don't think there's anything here. If there is, please tell me, maybe it's an auction system, like an eBay style. What do you think? I dig it. So it's almost like biz by self for special situations. Are you familiar with that phrase?

Like special situations? Yeah. No. From like a business span? I don't think I've heard that. Yeah. So the deal guys refer to special situations as like distressed assets, turnaround assets,

stuff with one customer. Like just like oddball stuff that's just like a special situation, something bankruptcy. see. Like that's special, special situations. I may get fertilized by defining this incorrectly, but it's kind of that thing where it's just like, hey, we've got this random thing. It's just like, you know, it is a two-thirds interest in Michael Jackson's like music catalog, like special situations kind of stuff where it's just the context is really bizarre. So I like it because that's where there's just, that's one of the challenges of biz by sell

is so much of it is just stuff that's like down, trying to be down the middle of the fairway because that's what everybody thinks is going to sell. And you see a lot of deals. And we see them on our podcast acquisition anonymous that talks about like these deals that we dig into them. And they're a special situation. There's something screwy going on. But they try to post it like it's a down the middle of the fairway deal.

Yeah. So like I like this. Like just like random, hey, here's this random weird thing that you should think about, you know. Yeah. And honestly, I've scraped Bizby Sell before. And you can see how long it's been listed. Right.

You could get your first listings by just finding all the, ones that have been listed for 365 plus days and say, hey, we both know the score here. Come on over here. People are actually looking for pieces of garbage like this business. Yeah, I like it. I mean, that's a good one. Okay, I got that one down in my list. Yeah. Okay, you want to hear my next one? Yeah. Okay. So you're familiar with EOS. Yep. Okay. So EOS, for those of you not familiar, is an entrepreneurial operating system. It's a system of templates and rules and processes that you use to run your business better, and it's got all these different things. It's just business paint by numbers.

Even so, they give away the book basically for free. It's like 15 bucks that shows you the whole system. You can download all the templates. You can do it yourself. What's that? Traction. It's called great book. Traction.

So basically, even despite all of that, some companies still go out and hire consultants to help them implement the system in their business. And they're called implementers. They are franchisees of the EOS system. The reality is, these. These people act very much like an AI does. They know their rules. They know what you're supposed to do.

They listen to what's going on. And then they say, oh, here's how to think about this rule. So the idea, oh, here's where it gets worse. These implementers will charge up to $10,000 per day to come work with your company. $10,000 per day. So some of them are cheaper, but like they charge big money. Have you ever used one? Indirectly, yes.

I've been paid a couple times to help people do it. I've done it a couple. If you were like, hey, you want to pay you, if you want to pay me $5,000 to hang out with you for a day, I'd say yes. Yeah, that's the way it works sometimes. Same. So I've done that. But basically all you're doing is like you memorize the book, understand how it works, pay attention to what's going on, and then just be like, okay, guys, like, do this other thing.

Here's the idea. You go take chat GPT. You give it the book and you say, your job is to act like the world's best employees. of EOS. Here's all the documentation on it, read it, and you're going to log in to the Google meet, and you're going to participate in this meeting, and you're going to act like the implementer and facilitate us for the day doing this particular thing. And instead of it being $5,000 a day, it ends up being $250 a month to be in a U.S. implementer. AI replaces the U.S. implementer.

So, all right, logistically, what does that look like on a Google Meet? Like, are you just getting the transcript and then uploading it to, or using the AP? to listen in real time. So I think the software to be built here is bridging into Google Meet, like acting like a participant in the Google Meet and pretending to be a human, even though everybody knows that you're the AI and you're not going to have,

you're just speaking via audio and listening to the audio of everybody else going through the day of the planning sessions and stuff like that. So yes, bridging an AI bot that does an audio interface into Google Meet, like you just bridge those two things together. Yeah. Okay, I'm just trying to think, how would you interact with it? Would it just be like a chatbot? And you'd say, like, based on everything we said, what are your suggestions? And it's just scanning the book and saying, do, do, do. Yeah, it's got, it knows all the rules. It knows there's a strict set of templates they follow. You know, typically the way an implementer like this works is they're running you through a structured day where your team meets to talk about what your goals are and all that kind of thing. And then the implementer is kind of being a participant in that and then guiding people through the process of following those steps. So, like, Like, everybody would show up and then you basically treat the AI implementer like it's a human

being and be like, okay, like start us on our day. Okay, well, the first step is we're going to do this. I'm like the AI would tell you. I think the technology is all there to do this. Yeah, it is. Man, that's going to happen. Like, that's another idea that it will be done. Who's going to do it when?

How will it be rolled out? I like that a lot. I think the one downside that comes to mind is accountability. Like, does the business owner really feel beholden to a chat bot? Whereas if it were a real implementer, it's a real person. And just like, hey, man, what are you doing? You know, like, you're paying me all this money. You're not doing the thing.

Surely there's a way to bridge that gap, like to pair it with a real human, maybe like 10 to 1 instead of 1 to 1, you know? Well, and ultimately, I've seen people hire implementers like this because they feel like they can't manage the process and they're not, their leadership is like struggling. like they can't get their people to speak up or they feel like they need a third party to do this stuff for them. And it's like, oh, that's more of a sign of bad leadership than it is like a sign of needing an implementer, if that makes sense. So I think part of it also is if a CEO isn't ready to listen to an AI and get feedback from an AI, that's a sign that you're not very coachable and you probably have some bigger problems than what the EOS is going to solve for you. Yeah. Okay. I like that idea a lot.

and I'm going to give you one along the same vein. Okay. Wait, are you thinking these up as you go along or you pull them off a list? No, I am. Oh, you don't have a list.

No. You're just riffing on these? I'm really great. This is my superpower. I spent 30 minutes coming over these ideas. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not saying it's going to be good,

but I have it. All right. So there needs to be an AI-focused EOS. Like, EOS needs to be reborn. A new company entirely, but AI first, right? Just like Instagram was successful because it was mobile first, Facebook was not, right? So here's what you do.

You take the same thing. You take a PDF of the book traction, upload it to Cloud or whatever. You need a big enough context window. And you say, here's chapter one of traction. I want you to take the first principles from this, rewrite it with AI top of mind. Right. So I don't know traction well enough to riff on that. But kind of like there needs to be a visionary and an integrator, right?

Isn't that what traction says? There are two types of business owners in the world, visionary and integrator. Maybe the visionary would be the guy setting up automations in N8N or Lindy or any of those software. And you could use like specific tools, kind of like Tim Ferriss's book, Tools of Titans, right? Where he takes all these tools and he integrates them into like optimizing your life. So it would basically, it would not be associated with EOS in any way, but you'd be completely ripping off what has made EOS successful, which is helping people turn around businesses with success, but putting AI at the forefront of it. Like how to implement AI into your business with kind of an EOS first principles framework.

And you could do the same thing. You could start with a book. You can sell it for $15 because they have, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. They're doing great. They're selling franchises. They're doing great. And then you do in person stuff and you literally fly people there, charge $10,000. $1,000 a day.

But instead of, like, focusing on how to better manage your people, it's like how to replace your people with apps and LOMs, right? Like unabashedly. What do we think? I dig it. I think there, yeah, AI is going to change everything in terms of doing business. And, yeah, I think I dig it. I like it.

I got nothing else to say. To me, like, I think EOS's value proposition is, oh, $10,000 for a day, but you're going to fix my $7 million. business, that's a great value. This value proposition is, oh, $10,000 for a day, but I'm going to save $30,000 a month on payroll from now on because you're going to just show me these tools and automations and frameworks and LLMs that can replace. You know, Linda at the front desk, it sounds morbid, but it's going to happen. Like Linda's getting fired whether we get paid for it or not. So we might as well get paid for it. All right. We ran out of time. So come back a week from today for the

second half of these ideas and see which one we choose as the winner.