7 Businesses That ALMOST Never Fail (Backed By Data)

Entrepreneurial Edge
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1 Video View·Dec 18, 2024
Data says over 50% of you want to start your own business, but less than 10% of you ever will.
Why? Because you don't know what business to start. In this video, we're changing that by
breaking down the least risky businesses that anyone could start. Or in other words,
the businesses that are easiest to start because they have low startup costs,
little regulatory technical barriers, low concentration, otherwise known as fragmented
markets. So by the end of this video, you'll have enough data and stories to go out and
start one of these businesses yourself. But how do we know? We analyzed institutional data of
30,000 businesses to find specifically the businesses with the lowest barrier to entry.
By the way, we used this database, which cost me 30K a year. But before we get into it,
make sure and hit that subscribe button so that you can learn all the rest. All right,
we're going to start with one of the worst, but one of the best that might surprise you,
which is a chiropractic practice. Now, I wasn't even going to include this one because it does
mean that you're going to have to get licensed. You're going to have to go through some certifications.
But the reason I did is because if you think about medical profession, taking the better
part of a decade and be really expensive to go to, chiropractic is way down here,
maybe three to four years on average. So you could start at a lower level and scale your way up as
opposed to having to be the doctor that your parents always wanted you to be. Let's start
with the barriers to entry. Startup costs. How much is this bad boy going to cost you? The startup
costs for a chiropractic practice are one of the lowest in the healthcare businesses, which is
actually fascinating. So let's say from a just a supply perspective, you could be in for less than
10K. We'd have an adjusting table, which would be 1,500 to 5,000. Diagnostic tools, maybe 500,
like reflex hammers. You guys ever seen those? Therapeutic equipment, maybe another $1,000 for
items like electrotherapy devices, maybe for items where you can get them to massage different parts
of your body. Support tools, 300 to 1,000 for things like pillows, cushions, and other accessories.
Now, education requirements are more. Chiropractors need to complete a doctor of chiropractic program.
The educational barriers are way lower compared to becoming a medical doctor, obviously. These
could take three to four years to complete after undergraduate studies. One of the bigger things
that you have to think about with chiropractors is insurance. It shouldn't be that expensive,
but we got to make sure we protect you from if you're new to the game and anybody gets hurt.
The chiropractic industry is highly fragmented, with independent chiropractors operating solo
practices all over the country, and those people represent half of the industry. Things to consider,
flexible practice models. So chiropractors have the flexibility to start small practices,
mobile services, which basically requires little to no cash up front. In fact, the way that I got
to my most recent physical therapist and chiropractor is from a gym located here in
Austin, Texas. This case study in particular is interesting. My friend Andrew, who set up in his
gym, the gym that I happen to be a part of, and created an atmosphere for him to be a physical
therapist. First, he started doing massage because that was easier to get into. Then he continued
with physical therapy, and he is also actually licensed as a chiropractor. What's interesting
is he has a few best practices that I thought would be useful for those of you who want to
work with your hands but don't want to go through the whole doctoral practice. First, he said,
he transitioned from insurance-based clinics to a cash-based practice at a gym here in Austin,
my gym. The reason why that's interesting is with insurance, one, you have to chase the payments,
you can't set your own prices because insurance sets those prices for you, and it often means
that you have a different type of clientele, a type of clientele that might not have enough money
for them to pay direct. Now, the tough part is with the cash-based practice, if he doesn't get
customers, he doesn't get paid. But he built up a strong rapport with the gym trainers and basically
had lead flow, right? So he told him, you send your clients to me, I'll send them back to you.
So he developed a full caseload of recurring patients based on people who were coming in
to train. Go work out, come to me afterwards. Go work out, come to me afterwards, and vice versa.
In this cash-based setting, it's crucial to target sort of health-conscious active clients
who actually value preventative care, encouraging them to do things before they need it. And then
he could even give them a little tip, a little extra cash for referrals. Bookstores. This one
surprised me too. Originally, I thought, why would bookstores be so low risk and not have much that
you need to start? But then we started digging into it a little bit more, and this is what we
found. Really low barrier to entry. So no regulation or prior education needed. Unlike
most industries, nothing is stopping you starting a bookstore tomorrow, certainly.
Low concentration. Yes, while no doubt online bookstores are everywhere, physical bookstores
still offer a unique shopping experience. And a lot of times they're partnered with things like
a pop-up cafe, a little store with additional goods in them. And they encourage you to browse
and discover an inviting atmosphere that an online retailer couldn't actually have.
And the proof is in the data. Despite a slight decline in 2023, print book sales were still up
10% higher than in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year. And I don't think this is a huge business
you could grow to massive levels. Two, I think this is an interesting business you could do as
a pop-up. So you could have pop-up bookstores. You could also have book resellers where people can
come in. You can get books for basically free from people because people feel like bad throwing
away a book. And then you can resell those books. It's not something that you're going to have a
huge amount of volume in. So you'd probably have to mark up the price on those retailers. And
having researched exactly how much it takes, it looks like an initial investment you'll need
somewhere in the realm of, let's say if you're going to do a pop-up store, maybe you'd need
donated books plus a thousand bucks for rent plus another thousand books plus another thousand bucks
for additional books and some other accoutrements to make the site look nice. But if you're going
to do a real store, you're going to need more like $10,000 or maybe $25,000 as a bare minimum.
What's interesting though about book sales is if you are an in-person store, oftentimes you
can get books without paying for them up front. And so a lot of the bookstores that you have
have an on-sale basis. So you get paid for the book author when we sell the book, which is
interesting. That means they float your money for you. Now rent could be all over the place, but
could range anywhere from $1,000 to if you're Barnes and Noble, this is going to be
a hundred thousand plus. Obviously, if you're going to do it our way, you're going to want to
make your rent really, really cheap. I'd probably stick with pop-ups too. I wouldn't keep this
business model as a for sure until you trialed it on a very small basis and probably piggybacked
on somebody else's traffic. So something like a coffee shop. Of course, as a bookstore, you're
going to need bookshelves to display store and market your available book titles. The number of
bookshelves you'll need is going to depend on your opening inventory for the bookstore. But I would
let's call it anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 on bookshelves. We also know this because you
could do bookshelves on the cheap and we've seen this lots of different ways. In the Halloween
Superstore models we looked at, they pop up a 30,000 square foot store and they use less than
$25,000 to build the shelves. So for your little bookstore, we can do it cheap. Signage, obviously
you need this inside and outside of your bookstore to market your store. This is where prices could
really vary, but you can show your promotions, show your book prices, and designate the different
sections throughout the store. This is going to add a couple thousand dollars. Utilities, estimated
utility costs for the first month to keep the building functional, $475,000 to let's call it $2,000.
Things to consider here. Great operational flexibility. Small independent bookstores can
operate with minimal staff. Huge benefit. But bookstores, they operate on pretty slim profit
margins. So making profitability a challenge, which means that you have to be super strategic on which
books you choose. But I think there's plenty of ways to do this in an interesting market. Let's
use one case study from Ryan Holiday. So Ryan Holiday's bookshop is called The Painted Porch and
he's got this huge following online and Ryan's recognized as sort of having this unique appeal
of physical bookstores that you can never get online. The store focuses on a curated selection
of books that he personally recommends and he aims to provide sort of a lovely, funky shopping
experience that prioritizes amazing titles rather than a bunch of trends. And then he adopted a
community-centered approach. So people come and engage with the literature and each other. The
other part that I really like about this model is if you live in a small town like Ryan Holiday does,
the lease is really low. The main street that he's on has great foot traffic. Lots of times people go
to these tiny towns and in these tiny towns there's not a lot to do. So they might want to go
to a little local bookstore, have a cup of coffee, and peruse a book. This is why you'll often find a
bookstore located on main streets in like second, third, fourth, fifth tier cities. I think it's a
really interesting way for you to become a community hub. They're not going to your bookstore because
they have a book need. Like, I need this book. That's Amazon, baby. They're coming to your bookstore because
they want to have an environment and a feel. They want to support local authors. They want to be
able to actually be there for an author signing. You could have local up-and-coming activities for
potential authors. This is really a community play and that's why I think it's really an interesting,
fun business model. I kind of want to open a bookstore. But why is looking to own a business
important anyway? Well, I think one of the biggest differences between everyday humans and the average
millionaire is that they have multiple income streams. And I'm willing to guess that most of
you don't. I certainly didn't. In fact, the average American has just one income stream. Usually they're
But how do you go from one to seven income streams? Am I suggesting you go and start
seven new businesses? No. If you can't buy a business outright, then maybe you do real estate.
But maybe you can't buy real estate outright. So you use something like the Fundrise Flagship Fund,
which allows you to invest in real estate for 10 or 100 bucks. I actually started investing in
Fundrise when they started years ago. Typically, I don't allow investment platforms onto the things
that we do. But I think in this environment today, with real estate down, with small amounts of risk,
allowing more people to get income streams is part of the mission. Financial freedom doesn't come
from some get-rich-quick passive income. It comes from thoughtfully investing over time and allowing
it to compound. If you guys are interested in investing, Fundrise is a great platform to do it.
Thank you for sponsoring this video, Fundrise. Click the link in the description below and you
can get more information on Fundrise. So next one, mobile food services. You guys know what I'm
talking about. This is the food truck. This is the Popsicle cart. This is an ice cream truck.
These are all around us. They've become part of everyday life. I even saw one the other day that
was a mobile coffee shop that was set up outside of another coffee shop because that line was too
long. You also see these outside of really big restaurants. During rush hour, they just pull in
and because it's lunchtime, there's going to be tons of people in there wanting quick and easy
food. You have a food truck as an alternative. So the barriers to entry here are, well, way lower
startup costs compared to traditional restaurants for sure. While opening a brick-and-mortar
restaurant can cost upwards of $200,000 to a million or more, food trucks are a tiny fraction
of that. You might not even have to pay at all and we can talk about that here in a second. So
some support initiatives. Initiatives like On the Go LA provide affordable food truck rentals
and operational support to allow people to enter the market with minimal upfront investment. That
means a lot of times for these type of endeavors, there's some sort of government grant. There are
food truck vending locations where they might even help you get your own food truck in order to fill
their lease. So there's lots of ways to get access to food trucks without spending a ton. The food
truck industry is highly fragmented. There is literally no single operator controlling more
than 5% of the market, which is wild. But this means a lot of people are opening food trucks.
The number of food trucks in the US has increased from about 4,000 in 2010 to over 36,000 by 2023.
So some things to consider. You got to get in the right places. This is the location, location,
location of real estate. You have to make sure that you have traffic already and probably quite
a bit of traffic because you're going to have no SEO, not great signage, and the thing's mobile.
So you got to figure out how are you going to get to where the people are. Two ways to build a
business. You can either pull people to you or you can push them to you. You're in a food truck that's
located outside of a big huge football game in which there's a bunch of hungry people that don't
want to pay 3x inside the stadium. So profit margins for this industry are actually slightly higher
than restaurants. So let's say that restaurants typically operate somewhere between
a 3% to a 10% margins. Food trucks can operate somewhere from 6% to 20% margin. Let's do a case
study here. Catherine O'Brien, also known as the ice cream lady, is somebody that we've talked to
at Contrarian Thinking. What's interesting is watching the launch that Catherine did. She sells
ice cream out of a bike. Look at this thing in front. I don't know what this is. This is like a
basket. It's like a cooler. It's like a bike cooler business. It's called Cream Cruiser in 2015 after
she was kind of inspired by the crazy crowds at Baltimore's Inner Harbor during her commute.
And she realized that she could start a business with really low startup costs, sell to a bunch of
people that are already located there, and then build on top of it. So she launched the business
with an investment of around $8,500, which covered the bike, trailer, event supplies, permits, and
obviously her ice cream. What's interesting is over the years, Catherine has catered more than
700 events and sold over 160,000 ice cream sandwiches, meaning that she's done sales of
more than $1.6 million. What I thought was interesting about this too is that she was
really clever and that she didn't just have a static location. She said, well, people will pay
a premium to have one of these bad boys at a wedding. And so because of that, she could have
her Saturdays and Sundays, which maybe would be great for ice creams during the day, but in the
evening, who's buying ice cream in the middle of the night on Friday? Well, if you're at a wedding,
you've already gotten a down payment from it. Plus, you get paid up front when you do something like
a wedding or an event, and then you get to fulfill later on. Whereas otherwise, if she's going to go
sell just on the street, she's going to have to buy all the stuff, hope people sell it. So this
allows her to be a little bit more flexible. Now, it's not all sunshine. Let's talk about
some challenges faced. So despite the initial success, she had a lot of challenges with a
failed wholesale venture that led to a lot of money lost, which meant that she refocused on
catering, which improved profit margins. Catherine now earns a minimum of $25K per month and has
expanded her business model to include bike business university, which is interesting,
an online course teaching others how to start similar ventures. It's kind of like how people
decide once they have a really great painting franchise located in Austin, Texas, like we do
with that one painter. Wait a second. I could grow all of Texas myself and have lots of painting
ventures, or I could franchise it and I could allow other people to copy my model. And she's
allowed other people to copy her model. So now she has multiple revenue streams. Oh, by the way,
if you liked hearing about Catherine's story, link in the description for our newsletter. We write
about stories like this all the time. We have a deep dive on Catherine too, if you want to see
more of her numbers and check our facts. All right, let's talk about the next one, florist.
I'm obsessed with this idea. I think when I retire, I want to be a florist and apparently have a
bookstore and that's it. Then no more internet. We'll shut this all down. You'll never hear from
me again. But the florist businesses are interesting for lots of different reasons.
One, you can scale this quite easily. You can scale this from a tiny little wagon that you sell
some bouquets out of to a big enterprise where you do weddings and events and thus have a big
front end filled with flowers, but also a big back end where you fulfill $100,000 plus orders.
Let's get into barriers to entry. So no formal education is typically required to become a
florist. I don't think there's a PhD that anybody's requiring, at least not yet, at least
not until the government gets its hands on it. Licensing requirements also are really not a
requirement. So most states in the U.S. don't require specific licensing or certification to
work as florists, which is great. And you can start as many ways as you can think of and you
can fit it around your current life. The other thing is you can do freelance work. So some
florists begin their careers by offering freelance services for small scale events, right? I love the
idea of home based businesses. This is how business started. Now, whenever I tell somebody you could
start a business in your home, they go, oh, no. What about the risk? What about the insurance?
What about the requirements? You guys, have you been to Etsy lately? Do you think that they
have a headquarters for the dollies that they put on a table that the grandma knits? Of course not.
Home based businesses is where we started. It is our right as humans to be able to start
a business in our home as long as you don't transact the stale at your house. That is
usually the difference between the two. So if I was at my house right now, not at my office,
but if I was at my house and we had customers coming in and out, that is a store front,
in which case the government tries to get their piece. But otherwise, with the rise of e-commerce,
many florists start by operating from home, just like we all did. So you can really reduce some of
those overhead costs. But to scale up from there, I sort of see it as a stair stack. So you start
at home, then you might have a pop-up location where you go, oh, yeah, this kind of works. Then
the next level would be having a pop-up stand. Then you could have an actual brick and mortar
store, et cetera. A florist could be started with as little as a thousand bucks. You need
tools and supplies. It's called 200, 300 bucks. Initial flower inventory, 300 to 500.
Business registration and licenses, I don't know, 50 to 200 bucks. Marketing materials could be
expensive, but you probably don't need anything to start except the right location. Maybe 100 to
200 bucks will allocate to that. A website or online presence. You probably just need Instagram
these days and a cheap website so you can get Google reviews. The other thing that's interesting
is that it's pretty low competition. So 38,467 florist businesses are operating right now in the
United States as of 2024. So that means there's a lot of them. But if you think about the fact
that we have a population of 300 plus million, I don't think that's as many as we think.
Here are some things to consider. Maybe it's a great time to enter the industry. The florist
industry in the U.S. is growing like crazy. Revenue increasing at a compound annual growth
rate of 4.1% over the past five years. So that means the industry is like, I don't know, 8.6
billion in total market cap. The profit margins on the business are interesting too. They reach
about, let's call it five or 6% of industry revenue in 2024. So that's pretty healthy.
So let's talk about a case study. This company is founded by Christina Stembel in 2010. I actually
met her back in the day. She actually started it from her one bedroom apartment in San Francisco.
She launched the company when she had only 50K in savings, nothing else. She didn't have any
external investors. What's interesting is Farm Girl Flowers is now an e-commerce flower company
that ships bouquets, vases, arrangements across the U.S. The company started with just one daily
bouquet and has grown to offer up to 40 arrangements at a time. I mean, I'm not sponsored by her or
anything, but I use her bouquets every time I send. What I love about this business is, you know, a lot of
times you get a bouquet and they're in like a big, ugly commercial box and they got this like plastic
wrapping on top of them. They're kind of cheap looking flowers. They're just bright red roses.
You men are like, I don't know what you're talking about. But for women, there's a real difference
between a corporate looking bouquet of roses and between like a boutique hipster bouquet of roses.
And that's what Christina's is. But what's fascinating is this business remains completely
bootstrapped. No external funding, which is fascinating in many ways because her competitors
are multi, multi, multi, multi, multi million dollar businesses with lots of funding. Also,
she is the only national flower delivery company owned by a woman. This is wow. I think women are
the ones who like flowers, but I guess you dudes are the ones that buy them. All right. Next one,
pet care services. This could mean lots of different things. It could be grooming them.
So washing, trimming, cutting the nails, et cetera. It could mean walking them. It could
mean babysitting them like those little pet hotels, lots of different ways to service
man's furry friend. What's interesting is the market is quite fragmented. There are some big
companies in this industry, but that's not really the majority of them. Most pet service industries
that aren't the few VC backed ones you can think of are done locally. And I think a lot more money
can be made by specializing in what types of animals, what types of grooming or training.
I have a friend who has a training company that does seven figures a year, and it is all about
training your Belgian Malinois in how to be a protector. Her name's Ashley Horner, if you want
to check it out. It's an incredible business that basically it takes people who are obsessed with
this one type of dog breed and turns their dogs into absolute protection animals. There's also
services like this for people who come into your house like this guy. Low startup costs. You can
literally start for less than a hundred dollars. Dog walking, for example, a leash. You might not
even need one. They probably have one. Print a few flyers and you're good to go. In fact,
a woman did that in my neighborhood and now walks a bunch of my neighbor's dogs. And for some reason,
because her flyer's there, it's like her face, you tear it off at the bottom. Remember that?
She says she's located locally. I felt more comfortable with that than actually going to
an online site. And the best part, not only are these very loyal customers, they'll tell
their friends if you're any good, and their friends have geographic concentration there
next to each other. So my tip, get to know other pet care services like grooming and send each
other your customers. Regulation does vary, so you should make sure you check for the particular
service, but on the whole, Vertical IQ ranks it as much lower than most comparable industries.
I don't think you need a certification to know how to walk somebody's dog.
Similarly, the skill set requirements varies from service to service, so you might not be
able to start, for instance, a Belgian Malinois training company, or I have another friend who
has something called Bite Camp, which he teaches these badass service dogs how to bite and attack
somebody if you yell at them. So you probably can't do that if you haven't been properly trained,
but I'm pretty sure just about anybody could walk a dog, just about anybody could learn to
wash a dog. All right, things to consider here. Pros, big target market. So 82 million U.S.
households own a pet, and we spend a lot of money on them, and it's growing. The global
pet care market was valued at $226 billion in 2023 and projected to grow $340 billion by 2029.
So that is a fast-growing market. The other part that's nice is this can be mobile or location
based. So it's an old-school industry where there's a lot of opportunity in modernizing
these services by leveraging the internet to better serve pet owners in search of quality
providers. I also think you really can't speak too much about the effect of localization. People
are very attached to their pets. They want to know that it's not some big commercial service
taking care of them. They'd like to know the person. That's why, for instance, you know, you
used to go to Petco to wash and groom your dog. Now I would never drop my dog off there. I wanted
to go to, like, the local groomer instead. So we actually saw the market start to protect these
really big guys, and then consumers said, no, I kind of want the local guys instead. For instance,
when it comes to me, I don't have somebody random watch my dogs. I have Samuel do it.
Okay, some cons to this. Animals can be difficult. They're not human. In fact,
they're largely better than humans in many ways. But also, you could have people get bit by animals
if, dear Lord, help you if you hurt somebody's animal. So this could be more unpredictable and
vary in different ways. Also, we have an entire video on a weird way that you could make money
with dogs and or dog services if you want to go back and look at this video. Let's get into a
case study. So actually, members of our contrarian community, where we teach people to buy and sell
businesses, bought a pet grooming business. This is James and Katie Fleming. They actually
transitioned from law enforcement and business consulting to entrepreneurship in owning a dog
grooming business. They wanted more family time and freedom. They also loved dogs. So they bought
a business. Their business acquisition journey was really interesting. So they did the thing all
of us kind of do. After exploring real estate investing, they discovered the potential of
acquiring existing businesses, probably my fault, and then decided to enter the dog grooming and
boarding industry. What was interesting is they acquired the Fido Spa, if you guys are in Dallas,
go check it out, for $340k with an $80k down payment. They used seller financing for the rest
of the remaining amount. Post acquisition, they improved the business by implementing very simple
things, you guys, consistent pricing, having better customer service, which allowed James to leave his
law enforcement job and work fewer hours and get to hang out with dogs all day, which I love. Now
they run a successful, profitable business, and I think they're starting to open their second location.
And they haven't even done so many fun things I would do with an old business like this, like
I would redo the branding and logos, I would have a better and cooler looking storefront,
I would probably have activities and community hours, bring your dogs around, let's all hang out,
everybody gets their nails clipped while we all have coffee, something like that.
The next one is bed and breakfast, which we could also say was Airbnb and property management. So we
kind of lumped these all together, again thinking of the stair-step method. So what's fascinating is
you used to have, well, you could start a hotel, which would be millions and millions, or you could
start a bed and breakfast, which might be a couple hundred thousand dollars or a million. The
difference between the two is basically that a bed and breakfast is a smaller size, more personal
hotel with less amenities. Then we could take a step down from that, which would be an Airbnb.
And then even below that, you could have a property management of Airbnbs or bed and breakfast. So you
can see the stair-step model. Now this is a fragmented market, which is interesting. Let's
just focus on the bed and breakfast for a second. There is no single company holding a significant
market share, probably because inherently bed and breakfast aren't meant that way. So this means
lots of new entrants can kind of get in there, carve out their niche, without having to compete
with the large chains. Startup costs. Now of course, you could go big, but since this is for you
beginner businesses, if you already own a property, initial costs can be minimal. So that's for sure.
But if you're renting, maybe you do rental arbitrage, which can significantly reduce the
upfront costs. If you wanted to start small, let's think about it this way. The average annual
revenue for a bed and breakfast property is around $221,000. You guys can see where we get all these
numbers to figure out what you think about our averages down in the show notes. So that means
that even smaller establishments can achieve profitability really quickly. You don't actually
need one that does two or three million dollars in order for this to work. You can start small and
scale up. And if you don't want to start with your own bed and breakfast, why don't you just ask to
manage somebody else's? That would cost you nothing to start. So things to consider here. Where you're based.
Let's just get to some math here. Coastal areas have a higher occupancy rate, so six percent higher
than the rest. The truth of the matter is, this is all about location, location, location, and using
something like AirDNA to determine which areas have the best for bed and breakfasts for Airbnbs.
It could also mean that if you want to do the property management side, that doesn't matter
as much. You just find where you can get your supply. For instance, I own both an Airbnb and
part of a property management business. For the Airbnb business that I have, I have all different
sizes, but we have one tiny one located here in Austin that we bought for like $350,000,
something like that, me and my brother back in the day when he lived here. That Airbnb is profitable
every single month since we've had it on average. Now we don't make much. We might make 500 bucks
to a thousand bucks a month on that Airbnb. It's located downtown in Austin, but on a $350,000
investment, that's actually pretty good, especially since we did a mortgage. The only bummer is that
we have to pay 20% of that to our property management company. So because I saw that,
I was like, can we own part of one of those companies? Because I'd like to not have to pay
for the huge upfront cost for the Airbnb, but also get part of that property management fee.
So we did. This was ranked as the lowest barrier to entry business, landscaping, which kind of
surprised me, but I guess I understand it because I actually have three landscapers that work on my
house. We have Oscar who comes and has done our landscape architecture. Then we have Ramon,
the guy who comes on a weekly basis, clips everything, makes sure nothing's dying,
and does day-to-day landscaping and lawn cutting. Although at this house, we don't have much of a
And then we have the third one, whose name is Lisa, and she's the one who came in and redid
the entire backyard. She only does really big projects, and I think we paid, I don't know,
$100,000 to totally redo the landscaping of the backyard. So again, you can scale up between the
three. Now the barriers to entry. The landscaping industry, highly fragmented. You're going to see
a common theme here, right? 600,000 companies operating in North America, no single company
holding more than 5% market share. So what that might tell you is that it's actually kind of hard
to scale these bad boys. So if you want a $50 or $100 million business, maybe hard, but to start
one, maybe not. Because the startup costs are pretty low. New landscaping businesses can begin
with minimal equipment. Lawnmower, string trimmer, basic gardening tools collectively cost you,
I don't know, $2,000 to $8,000. Little regulatory requirements. Here in Texas, you don't have to
have licenses to operate a landscaping company unless you're going to actually do construction.
Now that could differ. If you're in California, a license is needed for breathing. But here,
you probably only need them for specialized licenses. So check whichever ones are required
for basic landscaping services versus more complex. This is highly in contrast to industries
like construction, which have tons of licensing and regulatory requirements. Things to consider
here. This is perfect for those of you guys who don't want a ton of employees. So most of US
landscape contractors have no more than five employees, highlighting that the majority of
small businesses are in fact small operations. Let's do a little case study though on if you
wanted to scale one up to make millions a year. This is my friend Nolan Gore, who owns Top Choice
Lawn Care here in Austin. You can check him out again if you need your lawn to be trimmed. Let's
look at his business. So he scaled from $1.6 million to $7.5 million in revenue, which is
interesting because Nolan's experience was the military and financial, and he kind of used that
to acquire and grow this landscaping business on the back of a family business. He purchased Top
Choice Lawn Care when it was not profitable. That I don't recommend for your first thing. That makes
it really hard. But he was kind of motivated by the fact that his confidence and background in
landscaping meant he could add on an unprofitable asset. Nolan's father was the founder of another
landscaping business, and then he added this business onto it and basically did it at a price
equivalent to its debt. Meaning that, yeah, he did have to take on some risk in order to do this
investment opportunity. That said, Nolan talks about a lot of the things he did wrong and lessons
learned, and how having practical management experience over theoretical knowledge is crucial
in business in general, but certainly in this one. So landscaping businesses all the way to
florists, all the way to bookstores. Now you can't say you don't know what business to start. But if
you want to kickstart that, you might want to think about msmbook.com, which is where I have
my book located about how to buy main street businesses so that you can start from third base
as opposed to square one. So choose one that gets you fired up and get to work. And let me know in
the comments which one you end up picking. And if it works out for you and what questions you have,
we'll try to answer every single one of them. Thanks for watching, guys. If you haven't,
make sure to subscribe to the channel. We just did this crazy analytics where we saw the
percentage that subscribed versus the people who keep coming back. Spoiler, a bunch of you guys are
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