I Discovered The Easiest Million Dollar Business to Start in 2024

the easiest business to start to make a million dollar a year is also the hardest business to get to $100 million a year and I say this to someone who is both a product of the education space which is by the way wink wink the business model I'm going to talk about but I've also done 100 million plus in sales in that business and sold my last one for 46. 2 million and so I have a very good understanding of being both a customer in that industry and a supplier of that industry and so I want to make this video for two types of people first is somebody who's like hey I want to start a business and the second is for people who have a business and they're considering switching into an education or coaching business and this business and this video is going to talk about the pros and cons on both sides and the two biggest considerations that you have to make one is what's the goal that you're actually solving for believe it or not the reason that this thing is really fast is also the same reason why it's not going to make you a billionaire on the second problem or the second thing that you have to consider is what problems are going to come up for each of these businesses and which ones you're better at solving the problems that are in this business or the opportunity in this business and the problems in this business are the opportunity in this one and that's why this thing can be mega mega big takes a little longer this one can get moderately big really fast but really hard to scale from there so let's dive in coaching information education digital Course membership businesses are among the easiest businesses to get to $100,000 a year $100,000 a month $200,000 a month but this is what the business looks like in terms of the difference between that and a traditional business a digital course business looks like this in terms of the speed a traditional business looks like this and so the key thing to make this decision really only comes down to two factors and they're both incredibly important but they're very simple to understand so the first one is what is your goal if you want to sell a business and build an asset that you can exit for 25 50 100 $250 million a billion dollar someday then this business the coaching digital Etc businesses are not a good business for that and all we have to do is look around and see okay of the people who don't have a brand who started from scratch and had information businesses how many of them were able to get to $10 million per year how many to $30 million per year how many to $100 million per year the amount of guys at 100 million I can count on one hand and I know them all and all of them have deep Brands and have been doing it for 30 plus years almost all of them the people at $30 million year there's probably I can count on two hands and I almost know all of them and think about how many people are in this space there's Millions if you count creators of people in the information digital product space and so that's a very very small success rate even at 30 million a year and so what's interesting is that there's this massive band of people at the 500 million2 million $3 million a year because it is a business that requires almost no operational infrastructure to get to that level you can get get to $2 to $3 million a year with a team of 10 that for most entrepreneurs is where they cap out in terms of their operational skill set they don't know how to lead they don't know how to manage so the first thing you have to figure out is what your goal is and the second is what problems you are more comfortable solving all right let's walk through this so if your goal is to make let's say $1 to $3 million per year in a business this is probably the fastest and easiest way to get there you have no inventory you can immediately package the knowledge and experience that you have you can deliver very outsized value to a very Niche audience so for example gym launch I knew how to run a gym there is no school for running a gym and so if you're a gym owner learning from thousands of other gyms and getting the best practices off the bat because there is no book for running a gym no textbooks right I tried to write one but there's no there's no real book on it and so no one tells you how to set up a membership sale no one tells you what the script is no one tells you how to set up your lobby no one tells you what hours are the ones that are empty and which ones are full no one tells you how long to make your sessions no one tells you how to pay how to pay your trainers all of these things you have to figure out on your own and it's and it's so valuable if you can immediately learn the stuff and then triple your income that's incredibly valuable but it's not sticky once you teach someone they know it that's why fouryear degrees are four years not forever you learn it you graduate and so for that reason they become very difficult to create Revenue retention with as in people buy it and then they leave so that is why this business is very hard to to turn into an asset because the recurring nature of it is very low and on top of that you have three types of key man risk so if you're a personal you're an influence you got a personal brand you're the one who's bringing the customers you're the one who's leading the team and you're the one who's delivering the product if you're the one who's required to make the ads then no one's going to buy the business and say okay well we're just going to get rid of the guy who makes all who gets all the customers in well that's not going to happen let's say you magically replace yourself on the front end well you're still the one who's in charge of making the thing that delivers all the value which is the product and the one who's staying on top of it seeing what's working right now and all that stuff and if you're not doing that then they're like okay well maybe we can replace this but eventually the product is going to deteriorate and we're going to be out competed by people who are newer and better and so okay fine then you have to replace that these are both very hard problems to solve and then finally the entire team's loyal to you and they started working because they probably watched your content or consumed your ads or in some way they aspire to be like you in some way or they admire certain traits about you and so if they're like well if you leave I'm leaving and so you have this infrastructure of people who also don't want to work for anybody else and so there's huge risk from an asset perspective to sell or exit this company and so if you want to make this as income and just think about this as getting a really high paying job then this is a great opportunity but now I want to talk to these people so I had three different business owners and this is why I'm making this video recently one was a guy who had a paint paint business who's doing 4 million bucks a year uh another was a salon owner doing about 3 or four million bucks a year uh she had uh six locations doing lash extend exensions and other stuff like that and then the third business was a business was a a business opportunity like a micro business where he would set up home gardens in people's backyards like that was his that was his thing and people would pay him to do that and so he could teach other people how to set up Gardens in other people's backyards Etc okay so almost all of these guys were right here they had enough skill that they could teach a beginner but not enough skill to be a master so they could jump from here and based on the time in the business they'd be like here like if you look at this amount of time to here they would jump all the way to here on their income they'd jump higher up on that graph But as time continues to go on this way this graph as time goes on goes off the chart and this one is very difficult to get there especially if you have a exit meaning somebody buys your business because you built an asset that does not rely on you when you have 60 locations and you're not the one in the ads and you're not the one delivering the Lash extensions that's a very sellable business and what I can also promise you is that to get from 1 to five going from 55 to 60 locations you're going to make more money at 55 to 60 and it's going to cost you almost no time but most people quit right when they reach a boss that they don't know how to beat and what's interesting about this is that the cap on this business and the cap for most people in local in Lo in Chains or traditional service businesses is about the same it's because they don't know how to get the next level of leadership in and so they're able to get the first team in maybe one manager but they can't get the next level of leadership in that's what takes you from five locations to 25 to 30 locations that's going from one city where you've got three to five to five cities we have three to five if you're thinking locations but you can think about this as an accounting firm it doesn't really matter but fundamentally you have another layer of leadership which is why people get stuck and so if you are in this business then you just need to realize that you're about to get the best returns that come at the end and not get the shiny object now if you are in this boat and you deceive yourself and you say you know what I love making an impact I love helping people with their businesses more than I like I like paint pain help I like helping paint owners make more money with their paint business than I do like helping homeowners paint their houses fine but guess what that will one wear off when I was in the gym business in the beginning I was like I love Fitness but guess what it very quickly became not about Fitness it became about business and so once I got my H 100th and 500th and thousandth weight loss testimonial and before and after I stopped caring it's just like I I got numb to it because I had so many testimonials just like yeah you know you you you ate less and you did resistance training and you got stronger and you built muscle and like yeah like your body changes that's kind of the point and the thing is is that right now this is novel it's new now you're like oh wow I you know this guy was able to move houses and go into a new zip code and his kid went to a new school and he's got time for his family and as crazy as what I'm about to say will sound you will get used to it too it'll be the same as the other thing because you're going to say well I mean dude it's not you'll start downplaying you're like listen man I mean you ran some ads that you that we already knew worked and you ran an offer that was better and you set up a sales process which you didn't have and you had a script which you also didn't have when you run that thing you're going to make more money and so it it's it starts the The razzled Dazzle around it starts to go away it's just exciting because it's new and so my first big piece for either of these people is do not straddle their line you've got one ass that's an ass okay you can't ride two horses pick and it's the fundamental skill of entrepreneurs being able to make a decision and if you can't make a decision and you can't commit and acquisitions. com we Define commitment by eliminating Alternatives when you get married you eliminate all other women or all other men that you're going to be dating that's how you commit you say I will eliminate all Alternatives and so if you want to commit to either of these things it means you need to eliminate the Alternatives focus is the measure of the amount of things that you say no to so somebody who says no to more things is more focused than somebody who says yes to more stuff period so if we're looking at these two opportunities this if you want to be in this range then great then this is a good opportunity but understand that this will cap and it will get very difficult to scale which goes to problem number two so I'll write the goal here real quick if you want to have a $10 million plus exit then sticking with the traditional business is the better model now real talk over 5 years you might make that an income over here and not be able to exit the business but you'll have made that an income and so there are lifestyle benefits so here you'll make more income faster and you'll sustain a higher you'll be able to sustain a higher Lifestyle the whole ride and so that's also a little bit of a trade-off so here you usually have to reinvest more of that cash into opening new locations into hiring better people whatever less so than you do in a digital products or education business so that's a pro or con depending how you want see it now the second element of this is what problem are you more comfortable solving so if you're in this business you're going to have huge key man risk which is you have to figure out how to transfer everything that makes you special to other people without making them so special that they leave your business and take your customers very very hard on top of that you're going to be in the talent and training business and if you really really want to scale then you have to build a brand because acquisition will only become more and more expensive as you get to colder and colder audiences which means you need to build positive brand associations with you over time which means the product needs to consistently be very very good so you get good reviews good word of mouth and that continues to compound in time rather than compound against you which is what happens for most people because they make medial products because they only are a little bit better than most people not way better than most people so the problem that you have in this business on the other side of sticking with the thing that you're in if you're in a let's say you're the painting business you're the accounting business you're the whatever business the problem that you have to deal with is that it's slower in the beginning this is faster in the beginning slower near the end this is slower in the beginning faster near the end so number one it's slower number two it typically has more Capital involved you have to reinvest more of the money to continue to grow it especially if you have brick and mortar locations you literally have to spend money to open a new location to expand capacity here there is no Capital expense to to sell more people into your membership sell more people into your course not really you just have more people you have to hire but that's it so in this business it takes longer and it costs more money but because it takes longer and it costs more money there are fewer people who do it successfully and as a result they create something that we can put here in big letters which is you create an asset you create something that someone some else could own and so what I will say here is that if you stick with it from here to here and you get good enough that you really understand all the Special Sauce about the business you might not ever want to tell anybody about it because you want to own the whole thing and I'll say like ad acquisition.

comom the last chain we recently purchased it was a franchise and it had more franchise locations open than it had corporate and I bought all of the franchises out and so we took all 30 plus locations in house and made them all corporate and we did that because I looked at the economics and I was like wait a second why would we want to make 8% when the amount of work that it takes to open a franchise location is 50% of the work that it takes to open a location we own the whole thing on anyways and with franchisees and customers by the way you can't fire them with because they paid you if you have employees and you have a bad manager you swap them out and so we have more control and we can know that they're going to execute correctly the amount of franchise or buddies I have I can't even count and they all say the same thing man these franchisees are idiots they all think they're smarter than me they all want to do it their own way right and their own way is the wrong way and so they end up making less money and they don't do it right and so then all of a sudden your reputation tanks because they're not following your process and it's a whole cycle and so there's a reason Panda Express is a significantly more valuable company is that MrPanda owns them all he owns all the net income from every single location and he owns the dirt and he owns the property itself all 2600 did almost 4 billion in sales with 27% net margins absurd 27 net margins it's almost a billion a year in income income cash flow woo but he didn't start coaching other Chinese restaurant owners when he had five locations he just stuck with it and so it goes back to what goal do you have if you want to build an asset that eventually will require less of you less work and give you ultimate Freedom this business model will do it if you're looking to make a 100 500 a million bucks two million bucks a year and are willing to continue to work and basically always have to keep working in order to do that then this is a good business model reiterating this if you're here right which is at this early part here then this model is the faster and easier way to make a million $2 million dolls a year it is if you want this and you're further along in this curve then for most of you it would make sense to just stick with what you're doing because you're about to unlock this huge amount of value that's going to get created and so I want to give you an even-handed approach to thinking about this and understanding that you also may be let's say you're at this point and your goals might actually change and so when I was starting out if someone's like hey you can make a million bucks a year I'd be like screw asset value I don't care about exits I was like I just want to make money in which case great vehicle but what happens and the reason that you can look at Alex Becker who I think got up to $25 or $30 million a year in his information business switched to hyos and then built a multi million doll Enterprise with software Sam ovens had consulting. com they were doing 30 plus million doll a year and then from all the skills he learned transferred to school. com and then made it significantly more valueable Enterprise right now mind you School makes less cash flow than consulting.

com because this business requires more capital and is slower at the onset school's in year five or six right now right but it's scaling like this now because it's easier to add 5,000 customers in a month in this business and almost impossible to do it here especially if you have Service attached to it and so there are pros and cons on both sides and you have to realize that your goal will change and if you do get to this point where you're right at this point where you're like well shoot because sometimes people go the other way they say hey I've been doing this for 5 years I want to start a software company look at all the people who are successful with software companies who made the switch let me tell you the one Comon trait because I know all of them they stopped this and they started doing that and so in either direction if you're going to do it do it and don't do the other one so I want to talk to Avatar number three hidden bonus is somebody who's been successful here for 5 years or someone who's been moderately successful here for 5 years the other side looks really tempting because if you're over here you've got enough cash saved up you've been making a million bucks 2 million bucks a year for a while and you're like man now I want to have that 10 20 50 $100 million plus exit right I get it I was there on the other hand if you're here you're like man I've been I've been putting five plus years in this thing I want to start making some money I want to start making some cash flow and so this starts looking attractive and I'll give you the quote from my CFO there's in every business and so the key here is let me walk you through the transition on either side if you're going from traditional business over to digital education business what you don't want to do is keep the traditional business and so there's the fallacy of like well one some of you want to keep it because you're afraid of actually making the jump and this is actually what makes you money in which case just keep doing what you're doing but if you really are going to make the jump then there's this idea that you want to have keep a test kitchen and I actually think it's not true so let me explain so the concept of a test kitchen is works when you're making food because you want to standardizing process and you roll out the food making process across all locations it's much easier to roll it out you have franchise control or you have corporate control whatever now if you're in an education business you teaching your employees on site how to do do a new process or do a new play is not how you're going to teach all the people in your community all the people who are your customers that buy your stuff from you from an education perspective what are you actually going to do you're going to probably record some videos and add some sort of Zoom call you know add-on to help give support maybe some Community Support as well but that's about it and so if you want to test whether or not a new play is going to work in this education model then test it like you would actually roll it out which is if you have 100 customers take 10 customers that represent different segments of the market both geographically like what Market are they in and what skill level they're at and so when we ran things at gym launch I wouldn't say let me take the top 10 gyms and test something out because that's going to give me bad data I'm going to have the top 10 winners they're going to make everything work but if I take the bottom 10 on everything nothing's going to work but if something does work for them it's going to definitely work for everyone and so what I did was I took two people from each of the 20% bands so two people from the top top 20% % two from the next 20 next 20 in the middle next 20 the bottom middle and then next 20 at the very bottom so I had 10 people in different markets at different skill levels and so when I rolled it out I got to have a representative sample of both markets and performance to see whether this play actually worked and I see that as a far superior model to actually creating better products and better education that also doesn't require you to keep an appendage of a business that you have to stay attached to because whether you like it or not if there's a problem in this business and you know a a client sleeps with a uh an employee right or an employee stealing guess what's taking your shower time I don't care if this is 10% of your income it's going to take 50% or 100% of your mental bandwidth until the problem goes away your brain is going to deal with what's urgent not necessarily what's important and so this is why Focus is so important so if you're going to switch from here to here cut it sell it don't have any appendages and go all in on this if you are going to go from the education business over to a more traditional business like software or service business that you want to attach to it then guess what you cut this business you say I'm done with that and I'm going to build this for real just don't straddle the line I've yet to see anyone succeed big doing this and the vast majority of people do exactly that which is why I'm making the video so you have your three scenarios you're starting out you just want to make income then yes digital products education businesses is probably the fastest and easiest way to make a lot of money pretty quickly if you want to build an asset that's going to be valuable and sellable without you and you're comfortable with a slower pace of growth and putting more capital in this is something that's going to give you a 1050 $100 million plus exit if you're going to make the transition then pick if you are in this bucket and you're like that is cool I don't necessarily want that right now that's not the stage of the journey I'm at we have a free thing that you can do at school. com games where I will lead you through starting your business right now 50 54. 1% of of people who start the school games with the paid Community make their first dollar online very very proud of that if you are this business and you're trying to get to here you want to have a massive exit then acquisition.