#223 Can These WEIRD Ideas Turn Into Million-Dollar Businesses?

Summary

Owned and Operated - Episode #223: Can These WIERD Ideas Turn Into Million-Dollar Businesses?

Release Date: July 15, 2025

In Episode #223 of Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast, hosts John Wilson, Jack Carr, and Sam delve into unconventional and quirky business ideas, exploring whether these unique ventures have the potential to evolve into million-dollar enterprises. The conversation intertwines personal anecdotes, industry insights, and thoughtful reflections on entrepreneurship's diverse pathways.

1. Introduction to Weird Business Ideas

The episode kicks off with John introducing the theme of "the weirdest ways to make money," setting the stage for an engaging discussion on niche and unconventional business ventures.

John [00:00]: "I think what we're here to talk about is the weirdest ways to make money."

2. Collectibles and Magic the Gathering

John shares his fascination with collectibles, particularly Magic the Gathering (MTG), highlighting its complexity and market potential. He discusses his venture into exploring online businesses related to MTG, emphasizing the high margins and passionate consumer base associated with collectibles.

John [03:00]: "I really don't know what happened. Somewhere along the way, everybody got really into hunting and trucks, and I was like, what about magic? The gathering?"

Sam chimes in about his own niche interests, such as ant farms and mushroom cultivation, showcasing the diverse nature of personal passions that can translate into business ideas.

Sam [04:06]: "My son's 5, our thing right now is we go and find... we start up ant farms. I am an average, avid, also mushroom grower."

3. Exploring Niche Businesses: Ski Wax and Marinas

Sam introduces a unique business concept centered around ski wax, detailing how a small mom-and-pop shop successfully generated over $2 million in annual revenue through E-commerce and strategic demonstrations at ski resorts.

Sam [12:59]: "This was on the market... they sold ski wax. That's the bottom line. And the way they sold ski wax was as they went skiing in different communities."

The discussion then shifts to the idea of owning a marina, with John contemplating the challenges and opportunities of managing such a business. They explore the high-margin potential of boat repairs juxtaposed with the operational complexities of maintaining a marina.

John [28:00]: "But I think marinas are kind of like a funny business... you get to tag in like boat repair, which seems extremely high margin."

4. Challenges of Managing Multiple Businesses

The hosts reflect on the difficulties of running multiple ventures simultaneously. John expresses concern over scaling businesses without overextending resources, highlighting the balance between passion projects and sustainable growth.

John [23:38]: "We run two verticals now... the problem is, you know, and this is, this is meant to be like the fun ways to make a bunch of money. But it's, it's hard."

Sam echoes these sentiments, discussing the complexities of integrating different service lines like plumbing and HVAC under one umbrella, emphasizing the need for specialized marketing and management strategies.

Sam [23:42]: "Running H Vac and plumbing... it's totally different infrastructure, different businesses."

5. Passive Income Ideas: Content Businesses and Royalties

John introduces the concept of passive businesses, such as buying YouTube channels or royalty rights. He shares insights into how content-driven businesses can generate steady income with minimal ongoing effort, although he acknowledges the challenges in monetization and sustainability.

John [19:11]: "I bought YouTube channels but didn't create any more revenue... So it's about, like, you can make money cracking the pack because like people are watching."

Sam adds his experience with the fluctuating success of E-commerce ventures, underscoring the importance of aligning business choices with personal strengths and interests.

Sam [16:05]: "It's just not my style. I didn't know anything about E Commerce."

6. Reflections on Past Ventures and Lessons Learned

The conversation takes a reflective turn as the hosts recount their previous entrepreneurial endeavors, such as Sam's foray into Bitcoin mining and John's early interest in content businesses. These anecdotes serve as lessons on the risks and rewards of pursuing unconventional business paths.

Sam [34:05]: "We had a full... an old apple orchard storage facility up in Washington where it had like 3 cent power."

John [35:08]: "Diving into other businesses and Owned and Operated have helped us understand distribution better and we've been able to take a lot of the lessons we've learned from growing a media business to core business."

7. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In wrapping up, the hosts emphasize the importance of passion and sustainability in choosing business ventures. While unconventional ideas can be lucrative and fulfilling, they caution against spreading oneself too thin and stress the need for strategic planning.

Sam [35:44]: "Monetization can be hard. Hard sometimes. But there's definitely a path to it."

John [36:04]: "If you like what you cards and skin, including your hobbies. So I'm going to go back and look at mushrooms and ants and figure out how to do it. There's a way."

Key Takeaways:

• Passion-Driven Ventures: Aligning business ideas with personal interests can lead to sustainable and enjoyable entrepreneurship.

• Niche Markets: Targeting specific, passionate communities (e.g., MTG players, skiing enthusiasts) can yield high margins and loyal customer bases.

• Scalability Challenges: Managing multiple businesses requires careful planning and resource allocation to avoid overextension.

• Passive Income Streams: Content-based and royalty-driven businesses offer potential for steady income but come with their own set of challenges in monetization and maintenance.

• Learning from Experience: Reflecting on past successes and failures provides valuable insights for future business decisions.

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For more insights on growing your home service business and exploring unique entrepreneurial ideas, visit www.ownedandoperated.com. Share your strangest business concepts in the comments below—we'd love to discuss and potentially feature them in future episodes!

Transcript

[John]

I think what we're here to talk about is the weirdest ways to make money. I've been playing Magic the Gathering recently.

[Jack]

Nerd alert.

[John]

But I think collectibles is really interesting. You can create this high volume, high retail interest in a collectible item. But I found two online businesses, but it was like 750,000 in cash. I was like, maybe, maybe, maybe. Welcome back to owned and operated. It is 2:43 on a Wednesday, and papa just cracked a drink. No free promo, and I'm ready to rip.

[Sam]

I'm not allowed to have any more of those. Our producer, John M. Told me that I'm gonna hurt myself. Yeah. Too much. So today we're talking about raw dogging life right now.

[John]

Raw dogging life.

[Sam]

We say that legally.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

We're sorry. It's been a long day.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[John]

Well, I think. I think what we're here to talk about is the weirdest ways to make money or you said lifestyle businesses, either.

[Sam]

Because they kind of go hand in hand. There's some weird ones that are like, they're weird, but they also like. It's because it gives you the lifestyle. And we'll get there.

[Jack]

Okay.

[John]

Like, I want you to go first.

[Sam]

I think you should go first with the weird business that you told me about.

[John]

Okay. Okay. All right. So, like, one of the downsides. You know this. I'm just explaining this to the listener. One of the downsides of being inquisitive. I'm curious. Curious person, and I like to do stuff, and acquisitions are fun. So I've been playing Magic the Gathering recently. I've put this on Twitter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I put this on Twitter. I don't care.

[Jack]

Hey, if.

[John]

If you want to fly to Ohio and play Magic the Gathering, like, let's go. Let's go. Well, I just. I just found out Sam Preston from Service Scalers.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

Plays magic. Yeah. I didn't know. Like, he. He texted me about it last night because a friend of his saw me tweet about it, and he's like, hold on. Were you joking? I was like, hell, no, dog. Like, are you joking? See, no. We're gonna play some magic.

[Sam]

I love myself a good strategy board game. Settlers of Catan.

[John]

Oh, that, like, the entry level. I'm saying, like, 101. I know, but Magic was voted the most complicated tabletop game in the world.

[Sam]

I don't disagree. I don't know anything about magic. All I'm saying was I'll go down some of those rabbit holes with you to, like, hey, let's play this strategy train game where you have to build stations all over the map and get power to them, and I'm all in. That being said on magic, I'm out.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

That's too much.

[John]

I don't know what. You know, this is just like. Of all the plumbing company H vac. Of all the owners that I know, I am the nerdiest. And that has always been the case.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

Like, I don't. I don't. I don't quite know what a Duramax is. Someone said that in Tweet. I think it's a type of truck. I played World of Warcraft for way too long. I'm into Mad. Like, I'm in the mat Gathering.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[John]

So. But, like, I don't understand. I was a plumber.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

You know, so I really don't know what happened. Somewhere along the way, everybody got really into hunting and trucks, and I was like, what about magic? The gathering?

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

Or like dungeon. You know, I did Dungeons and Dragons, A little D and D group for a couple years. That was super fun.

[Sam]

I could see that. I would do D and D. I've never done it, but, yeah.

[John]

I mean, I didn't, like, show up in a cape, but it was fun.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Like, the idea of it is fun. I've never done that. My. My nerdiness goes a different direction. So for those of you who don't know, I.

[Tyson]

My.

[Sam]

Well, my son and I, who is. My son's 5, our thing right now is we go and find. Especially right now in the season, we go and find queen ants and start up ant farms.

[Jack]

Oh, yeah.

[Sam]

So we start up ant farms. I am an average, avid, also mushroom grower. Like, I have turkey tail mushrooms, Rishi mushrooms.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam]

All the lion's mane, blue oyster. So, like, I cultivate and grow mushrooms on the side as well. So Also nerdy.

[John]

Just different.

[Sam]

Different type.

[John]

Different type.

[Sam]

Different type.

[John]

Different folks, different strokes.

[Sam]

But anyways, so that's probably why we get along sometimes.

[John]

So I'm playing magic with the boys. Playing magic with the boys.

[Jack]

So we.

[John]

So we like magic.

[Sam]

Wait, what does it look like? Is it like having a few beers and just.

[John]

Yeah, like, literally, I'll cook some brisket or some ribs.

[Sam]

That's good.

[John]

Like, I have, like, five people over. We have, like, I have drinks. Yeah. It's fun. It's a good time. You just chill. But. And like, we've been doing. We're on, like, year five or six of us. Pretty freak. Pretty fre. Fre. Frequent board game night.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

So, like, once A month. Sometimes we get out of the loop during like heavy busy seasons or something. But we've been doing board games in this group for years. So then we're just like, we got tired of like the like board games because we kept replaying them. So it's like, all right, let's do something more complicated. So Magic, are you still running your referral program with spreadsheets and Venmo? Well, Vulca is going to bring your referrals into the 21st century. It's a referral program on steroids. It's fully automated with service titan integration, SMS functionality and built in tracking and payments. No more writing checks or guessing what's working. Just clean, consistent growth. Owned and operated listeners get 10% off of all contracts. Just book time with Don or the team through the custom link in the description. Volka Automated referral programs for home service companies business ways. Well, I'm going to tag this in really quick. Almost, almost. We are working on the whole senior leadership team. Almost the entire senior leadership team at this point has bought a Magic deck.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

No.

[John]

Oh.

[Sam]

So if you want to build culture at your company, get everyone highly invested in the game.

[John]

Magic Gathering, Scuba or Magic.

[Sam]

There you go.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

No, it's fun. So everyone that I play with, like these guys, they, they understand John. And John is a cold blooded capitalist. So anytime I do something, I'm always looking for, well, how can I make money off of this thing? Like hold cook off is great. Like, hey, let's hold a conference.

[Sam]

Skiing in.

[Jack]

Right. Yeah.

[John]

It was amazing. So obviously I started checking out this new hobby, Magic Gathering. Getting in, getting into it. It's a lot of fun and yeah. You know, casually start looking for businesses that are for sale related to Magic the Gathering. So we found a couple and they actually weren't that bad. So like one of the ones I was, I, I saw because like what I didn't want, what I didn't want was like a store.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

You know, that I would have to like, you know, I didn't want a retail experience. That sounds like a nightmare. But I did want. There's this whole like collectibles is a thing.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

That is a market and there are a lot of collectibles in the like car, like Pokemon Card. Like those things are worth freaking dollars. It's absolutely wild to me and I mean, I guess I'm a buyer of it but like people are spending a ton of money.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

So yeah. Just really interesting. So I think collectibles in general are kind of like just an interesting asset class. How do you, how do you get into it? Some people collect cars, Some people collect $2 million one time Pokemon cards or cards or something. In that case, I'd probably prefer the car. Just so you know, you're not that.

[Sam]

Much in the math.

[John]

Stating my level of nerdiness.

[Sam]

I would still take the car.

[John]

I would take the car.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

But I think collectibles is really interesting and so it's kind of attractive because you have this like, you can create this high volume, high retail interest in a collectible item. It's going to have high margins. So I started looking at a few of these businesses. There was some of the retail shops not interested in those, but I found two, like online businesses that were just interesting. One was on Quiet Light brokerage, which I've looked at for years and just never pulled the deal off of. And like I'm not going to go too deep because I think I'm under NDA. But like it's a. I think they were asking like 2 million bucks for it. I'll just give like the highlights of what we saw on the website. It's like 2 million bucks. I feel like it did 8 to 900 in sales, but it was like 750,000 in cash.

[Sam]

Just like crazy margins.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

And I like, I saw P. Ls like that was the cash flow. Yeah, like that was really it. And I was like me like that.

[Sam]

Maybe, maybe, maybe business owner maybe.

[John]

Ultimately decided to like, you know, cool it on. But that would have been fun.

[Sam]

That would have been, that would have been fun. And that's my point. Like weird, but also lifestyle.

[John]

Oh yeah.

[Sam]

The minute that you buy that business, you know you'd be messing with it because it's so cool.

[John]

It's a funny business. Like it was like two contractors and it was so my, sometimes I, I look at my like current life now and I'm sure people have opinions on like what I, how I should be spending my time. But like I, 10 years ago I really wanted to run a content business. Like 2013, 2011. I was like avidly learning and reading all these blogs and like trying to figure out how to build a business and make more money. And you know, I was a young adult so just trying to figure it out. So back then I was like obsessed with this idea of a content business. And it's kind of funny now because we've built one.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Like 10 years later.

[John]

Very unrelated to what I thought it was going to be. But I've wanted to do a content Business for over a decade. And the magic, this magic, the gathering thing was kind of funny because that's what it was. It was like a. It was what I would have planned on building a decade ago when I was thinking about this business type of. It was heavily ad driven, heavily traffic driven. So, like, tons of cash flow, big name. So if you're in that sphere, I think you'd know the name. I didn't because I'm not that deep into magic yet, but I will soon be. But it was a fun way to make a million bucks. I thought. I was like, yeah, that'd be hilarious.

[Sam]

And the cool part to it is if you really did enjoy magic that much, it's something that I think that you would enjoy every day as you went to work. It makes work a lot easier.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Especially when it's succeeding.

[John]

That's. You know, there's an argument some of these businesses, like, the revenue to headcount are so low. Is insane. Yeah, it is insane. Like, I've brought up my friend Matt Paulson, and he runs MarketBeat, and that's a 50 or $60 million business. It's like 20 people or 25 people. Like, it is insane. Yeah, it's 3 million bucks ahead. That's crazy.

[Sam]

That is crazy.

[John]

So, like, you said, show up to work, and I'm like, I actually don't think this magic thing. I don't think anybody has to show up to work. There's not, like much to do.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Just set. Keep it going. Keep the train on the tracks.

[John]

Pretty much. Yeah. I think leverage of audience is really interesting.

[Sam]

I mean, you can see it at an extreme for like Craigslist. Like, Craigslist was in San Francisco back quite a few years ago, was doing something crazy. It was one of the largest companies and they have their OG website with. I think it was something crazy. 15 people working there.

[Jack]

Yeah. Yeah.

[John]

Billion dollars with 15.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Like, wildly successful with such.

[John]

And I think that's sort of coming around again with like, more and more AI. Like, you just need less to launch. But, yeah, I think that's kind of fun. And I always liked this. I was a big, longtime reader of financialsamurai.com I don't actually know if it's still going. I haven't read it in a while.

[Sam]

I haven't read it in a while.

[John]

That was like an eight, nine year of that. And I was a longtime reader of a guy named Joshua Kennan. And, yeah, just like, really big fan of the content business.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

So I guess I got there.

[Tyson]

Very cool.

[Sam]

So the weird one slash lifestyle one that I'm bringing to the table today is ski wax business.

[John]

Oh.

[Sam]

So all they did was they were a mom and pop shop out of, I want to say it was northern Virginia, that all they sold was ski wax. And they sold a patented sharpening kit, like a self sharpening kit, so you could take your own skis, sharpen the edges all by yourself. You didn't need to take it into a shop. So. And the way that they did it in the way that it was designed for sharpening was that it was highly customizable so you could change the angle of the edge and everything like that. But the cool part was that 100 lifestyle. Like when I asked my marketing, they said, hey, we do a little bit of E commerce. And by a little minute it's like $2 million a year in revenue of E commerce. And then they just go around to ski towns and they go skiing and they meet with pros. And I was like, oh my gosh, this would be the best business to own. It was right as I found rapid. So I know is over three years ago. So NDA is gone. They've probably already sold.

[John]

So this was on the market.

[Sam]

This was on the market.

[John]

What was total revenue?

[Sam]

2 million.

[John]

Okay.

[Sam]

So it was like 2.4 in revenue, 2.3 in revenue. They wanted 1.8. I want to say 1.7, if I remember correctly. And it was four people and they sold ski wax. Like that's the bottom line. And the way they sold ski locks as they went skiing.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

In different communities. They showcased and demoed it at mountains, they sold it at mountain resorts. But like it really, like that was never the driver. It was all word of mouth. And it was all word of mouth because the specific wax too is like racing wax. Like it was really high quality fast wax. So they were a premium product. They didn't need to do much other than a few demos per year. But they had fun. They just went skiing and. And demoed the unit. Like I couldn't imagine having my write offs being just, hey, I flew out to.

[John]

Yeah, I had to go ski.

[Sam]

I had to go to Aspen real quick. Oh, I had to go down to Taos.

[John]

How have we not skied together? I do think we need to talk.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[Sam]

If I showed you a picture of my wall, I have eight pairs of skis that lined up on my wall in like a shrine like thing. Because I love skiing. Like love it.

[John]

It's amazing.

[Sam]

That's one of the reasons I marry my wife is I go in skiing. I took her skiing with me. She kept up and I was like, oh, she's really good at skiing. She's also from Lake Tahoe, so I was hoping to get some of that. I can live in Lake Tah the rest of my life in ski. But yeah, either way, she doesn't listen to this podcast. So we're good.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, we're safe. We're safe.

[Sam]

But she would have loved that business too. That would have been fun.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

So there's a. There. I think you posted, commented on it. The two rough. Christian Roth posted the other day about the. The 125k position to run a home service business in Breckenridge, Colorado. Yeah, I was like, oh my gosh, if I was, I'll take it. I mean, I. I might.

[John]

I'm gonna need to ski.

[Sam]

I might need to like to four every day. I'm gonna be a really bad owner because I just won't be there for.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sam]

Fridays.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Ever.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Probably not even Friday. Probably more like Wednesdays because the mountain be empty.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

But still not every store.

[Jack]

I'll be.

[John]

I'll be content creating from 9 to 12 and then skiing from 12 to 4.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

I will be a great leader via text.

[Tyson]

Yes.

[Sam]

On the chairlifts every day. Yeah, man. That. That's like. That would be one of my dreams. So that was. That was one of the really cool ones that I am sad to this day that I passed up just because I got like decently far in the process. Like, I got to see. I got to see pianos and stuff. But at the end of the day, I just. I couldn't be myself to be in E Commerce. Owner.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

It's just. It's not my style. I didn't know anything about E Commerce. Like when I bought an H Vac business. Like, I know how to like, fix things. I don't know how to do E Commerce.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

I mean that and I came out of a business that failed. Failed with E Commerce, the E Commerce Winery. It's like I knew some stuff, but.

[John]

Not like you couldn't rip it.

[Sam]

I don't think I could rip it. It would be purely for fun. And like, with an SBA alone, fun is not necessarily the greatest factor in choosing it. So that's one of my favorite. The only other favorite that we ran into and we talked about it a long time ago was a power generations. No. Oh, that. Those ones are cool too. Oh, I forgot about that. Those were good power generators.

[John]

Well, I brought up. You had that like unique asset brokerage. I brought that up to somebody as like an idea.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

So I have a friend, he. I don't know that this is lifestyle. It's just like niche as hell.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

So this guy, so my friend is working with this other guy. So like you know, two, two parts away and there's all this. I don't remember the grant, but there's this federal grant that gives you research money specifically tied to the ein of a business. So like you might get $10 million to go research this one thing and then maybe the business goes under, the project dies out or they run out of funding or whatever. But they created ip, a lot of ip and that IP is tied to that grant, which is tied to that ein. So this guy is selling off the IP and the ein attached to this very specific federal research grant which just seemed like wildly niche. I have no idea what his commission is. I feel like it could be like 20 or 30. He's like the only one. Like he run. It's similar to that website. We like ran through that website where he like sells these generators. It's like like 10 of them in the US he's the only dude selling them. It's the same shit. Like if somebody's got IP to sell that they got from this grant to go to this guy, if they want to buy really cheap IP that somebody did all the research on, they go to this guy. It was funny.

[Sam]

Yeah, that's really neat because that was the interesting part about that series was don't get me wrong, I love power generation and especially small private. Yeah, water turbine. Especially power generation. Very highly specific weird niche. You want to talk about a passive business? There's your one and only semi passive business that really just kind of let the water continue to go. Yeah, almost too passive because you have no control over if it rains or not. But there's like beside the point.

[John]

Yeah, there's I at capital camp like three years ago there was a speaker that bought YouTube channels but didn't create any more revenue. Like didn't. Didn't create any more content. So I don't, I don't remember. There's like a decay on YouTube videos. So like you put a video out on YouTube and it's going to continue like driving views over some X amount of time because of search volume or whatever. So it's about. So that, that was passive as hell because they bought a content business that has all the benefits of content. I margin like consistency shows up. You can add affiliates, you can do all that stuff and they never had to create content so they just bought these things at like a discount. So like someone stopped creating a year ago, sold the channel off and they just like held on to it. So Maybe it's like 50,000 subs and they made a million dollars over the course of two years and they bought it for $200,000. Same with that was passive.

[Sam]

Or the people that do the. Do that with music. They buy the rights to little songs and then just the royalty from it and then they let it go. They try to sell it to people.

[John]

I've, I've looked at that over the years and like I, I obviously don't understand how to value royalties, but it's like kind of a liquid market.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

Like there's a lot of websites out there to just go buy royalties on. You know, before, before this is like good and bad, but before Wilson like blew up and became like, like big.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

I was able to get like sort of like all these like rabbit hole things.

[Sam]

Typical owner.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

It's a grass is greener. Oh, I'm interested in something else. Yeah, Anything to distract you from what you actually should be doing.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, it is, it is funny because I feel like a lot of this stuff I used to look into and just spend hours.

[Sam]

Oh yeah.

[John]

Oh yeah. Like, how do we, how do we do that? And then the business passed $5 million and it's like, nope, gotta focus.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[John]

But I do think it would be on one hand it sounds fun to run these little like magic things, but on the other it's like I kind of do want to hit a thousand employees. Like, right.

[Sam]

You know, I could go buy this business that's never going to grow and it's going to be about this size forever. Maybe if I do some stuff and spend some time, it'll get a little bit bigger.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Or I can go drive my business past 40 million.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

One of the suits.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

One of the, like.

[Jack]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sam]

So I think, I think the tricky.

[John]

Thing too, like, so, you know, we run a conference called Holdco Conf.

[Jack]

Like, you know, I get it but.

[John]

You know, running different verticals gets really complicated. And arguably I'm running two verticals right now with like the content business and Wilson Plumbing. And those are two pretty different. We've been using Evoca AI for over a year and, and Tyson and the team have just been incredible partners. We've been able to catch more after hours calls, more weekend calls, and book more jobs automatically. Make sure you click the link below and tell them we sent you.

[Sam]

But yes.

[John]

So, yeah, so we, we run two verticals now. And the problem is, you know, and this is, this is meant to be like the fun ways to make a bunch of money. But it's, it's hard. Yeah, it's hard. And I have, I have friends like, and we see them at Hulko Conf. Where like you'll have people running like 10 different projects, but they're like $10 million, total revenue, $15 million.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

So I'm like, all right, I think you took hold of a little too far because a bunch of million dollar businesses sounds like a nightmare. Nightmare.

[Sam]

I mean, maybe if they're like the magic one. So I, I, and I, I've never been to hold cook. I just, I. In some of the same circles, a lot of them are high leverage, low lift businesses. Like this magic one.

[Tyson]

Right.

[Sam]

It doesn't take a ton of work. It is only going to generate a million dollars in revenue every year. But like, how much energy do you have to put in still? That being said, I would take one business doing that versus 10 businesses doing that.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[John]

Well, the problem is at a certain point, like no matter how much lift or leverage you can have to build a team.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

And it almost defeats the purpose of owning these disparate.

[Sam]

Yeah, I mean you can kind of see that actually though, within the, the H Vac plumbing, electrical space. Right. Is one of the things that I didn't understand when I started the plumbing department was that even though it's under the same roof, like running H Vac and plumbing.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Totally different infrastructure, different businesses, like completely different businesses. And so we all think, ah, you just, you know, add plumbing, just add plumbing. It's that easy and you turn it on and it's good to go to some extent. Yes. There's an easy portion like instant ip, you get some customers, but on the other end, it's like you have to market separately to those customers to get plumbing jobs versus H VAC jobs. You have to have different call boards, different trainings, different every, different managers. You lose that, some of that scale effect and so, but at the same time you do see some benefits. Like running owned and operated, owning, you know, Wilson owning this, that all kind of go in that same direction. I think that's the goal if you're going to own multiple. But this was supposed to be about fun, weird businesses.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sam]

So my other one. Oh yeah, this besides the super niche Website selling like 250,000 watt specialty generators that you're going to hold on to for six years and then finally sell it to some random company for like a 50 times. For like a 50 times wild multiple or like used wind turbines. The other one that I liked that I thought was super weird but would be fun in a sense was that restocking and supplying of jets, private jets. So remember we had that.

[John]

We did the food service.

[Sam]

We did the food service for that.

[John]

Yeah.

[Sam]

So like how much fun would that be to be like we are working with these really high end owner assistant or like business class people's assistants to restock their jets and to make sure that they're good to go, they have their food, they have entertainment, whatever they need for those jets. I always think that business would have been fun. Even though in my mind I know probably not, probably terrible. Just I think because a, you're not actually working with the person who owns the jet, which is what I would think could be the fun part. Like, hey, I get access to a bunch of millionaires and billionaires that are like flying in on jets. 2. I think that there's a very, very high level of expectation. And I mean in food service expectation, not my thing.

[John]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Like making sure that the meal is good. Like how do you make sure the meal is, you know, I'm never going to be French laundry or one of these five star Michelin star restaurants. So like how do you make sure that the food expectation is good enough to meet those demands?

[John]

Yeah.

[Sam]

But in my mind I'm going to still pretend that it's a really fun business where you get to hang out and talk to a bunch of multimillionaire business owners.

[John]

I think there could be like a problem solving business, like a concierge style business that could be fun. Like, hey, I want this unique thing. How do you make it happen? And then like that's the business. It's almost like what people say Amex Black card was like 20 years ago. Like hey, I need seashell off this beach. And like someone from Amex like goes and you know, grabs and drives it out to wherever. Like those were some of the stories from like original Black Card. And I think that type of business would be fun because it's like eccentric as hell.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

Just get to do.

[Sam]

It's problem solving too. Right. Like that's a big problem to solve. Like how do we get out there and make this happen?

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

And that's kind of a neat thing, especially for people who are like fix it mentality.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

It's like, it's a fun problem. It's different every day. That's why I liked facilities. When we did, when I did facilities, it was like, hey, one day somebody's clogging the toilet and the next day, that day wasn't fun. But the next day is like, hey, we need you to build this intricate bar out of redwood and you have a week in this budget to do it and make it look really cool. Go.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

And like me and the, our carpenter on staff would like design it and build it. And this is where the fridge is going to go. It needs a fridge. It needs this many drawers. How are we going to hang line racks and like this whole night? So we got to like design it and build these like just beautiful pieces of furniture and art and everything. It has its good sides when, when it works and people really like it. And then other times when they know, they're like, jack, that was shitty. It's not so good day. It's like you just wasted a thousand dollars on this piece of crap. It's like, I thought it was cool.

[Jack]

Good job.

[Sam]

Good job, Jack. That's how actually I lost all my hair.

[Jack]

Yeah. Yeah.

[John]

A lot of head pats.

[Sam]

A lot of head pats.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

I know you've seen some cooler businesses though.

[John]

I feel like marina would be fun. So we had a marina locally that went for sale. So the city owns the marina and they're trying to find someone to run it because I guess they can't or won't. They just don't want to, I guess.

[Sam]

Headaches, I have no idea.

[John]

I, I get. I.

[Jack]

It.

[John]

It felt like a repossession, but they needed the marina to stay open because it was kind of weird. But there was an email that was sent out. I don't know, I don't even remember how I got it.

[Sam]

Like someone's like, John, my buy these things. Buying random things all the time.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[John]

But I think marinas are kind of like a funny business. Brandon just got a new boat like last two weeks ago or something like that. And it had a three year prepaid dock slip.

[Sam]

Okay.

[John]

It's like three grand a year. Yeah, it's just like for fucking nothing. Like a dock, just park dock, they installed like 50 years ago. And then like food's high, you get rental, you get just a lot. It's just a funny business. So I feel like I can mess around with. Plus you get to tag in like the, you know, we talked about yacht repair. Like, you know, in this case it's like pontoon repair. But yeah, you can tag in boat repair, which seems extremely high margin.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[Sam]

And then back to lifestyle. You're working on the marina. You like fishing, you like boating?

[John]

Yeah, yeah. Like, get.

[Sam]

There we go.

[John]

And it's like the per. Like you. No one could tell me that the marina owner doesn't have a lake house on that lake.

[Sam]

The lake.

[Tyson]

Like.

[Sam]

No.

[John]

No one can tell me that.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

So I feel like a marina would be a funny way. A funny way to do it. You know, the problem that I always come back to all these things is like, there. There's no way to get it to 100 million. It's the same thing as like the window cleaning with kilts thing.

[Sam]

Yeah. It's like never going to be 100 million.

[John]

There's no lifestyle business built inside there. Like, I would be ill suited for the task.

[Sam]

I think you get magic, your magic one to a million before you get a marina to a million or 100 million.

[John]

Yeah, well, magic I can believe.

[Sam]

You just got to revive the sport tournaments. You revive the tour.

[John]

Youtubes.

[Sam]

You could do so much with the Face of magic. You could be that guy.

[John]

Dude, how great would it be to run like the biggest cohort of channels that are like pack cracking channels, you know, like, hey, I'm gonna like Mr. Beast. Like, I'm gonna crack 10,000 packs today.

[Sam]

I never got see what we got, you know?

[Tyson]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

Oh, this one's worth a hundred bucks.

[Sam]

I'd see what that's like.

[John]

ASMIR or asmr. Yeah, people would watch the.

[Sam]

I had friends in. In 2020 make not friends. Excuse me. Employees in 2020 make more cracking packs live than they were at their job making 35 an hour. Yeah, they're making more. Just breaking open packs and like.

[John]

Yeah, it's real. I tried to convince a friend of mine to do this, like a couple. He was. You. He. He was into something. Oh, the Star wars had like this card game that came out and it was like super hot. Might still be hot, but it was like turnip bubble, like crazy. And I was like, dude, you should. You need to go buy a thousand packs and just start cracking them because you will make a million dollars in like 90 days. And he didn't. And he didn't make a million dollars in 90 days. But yeah, I think all that random stuff. I think the problem is monetization is an issue. Yeah, you're mainly like monetizing off of views, but like, gamership in general is super low CPM. So these channels have to have like 10 million subs or followers to make any amount of money at all. So that part Sucks.

[Sam]

That part sucks. But the idea is fun.

[John]

Yeah. Well, so, yeah, so my original idea, when I was not buying this other one, I was like, let's, let's. I, I was trying to figure out how to machine it. So what you do is you go buy like a crate of packs. So like a thousand packs, ten thousand packs, whatever. It's not even that much money. And then you buy these machines, they're like $5,000 a piece. You can get three of them and they sort of them and it scans the card and then it puts it into an inventory which you can set up to all these card resalers.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

So like you make money like the whole way down the line so you can make money cracking the pack because like people are watching. There'd be, people would watch 10,000 packs being open. Like you'd get good views. And then you could like maybe auction them off right there. And then you put them into this machine, it sorts it, and you immediately set it to these card resellers and you start fired them off. If your books say you're making a lot of money, but there's nothing in the checking account, let's talk about CFO Made Easy. Most term service businesses hit a point where the money's coming in, but it's still unclear where it's all going. You've got a bookkeeper logging the past and a CPA filing your taxes, but no one helping you plan the future. And that's where CFO Made Easy comes in. They provide part time CFO services specifically for trades and home service businesses. H vac, plumbing, electrical, roofing, you name it. They help you improve cash flow, maximize profit per tech, and make growth decisions with confidence. If you're tired of winging it financially and you want to see that bank balance grow, schedule a free financial insight [e-mail] or click the link below. We'll uncover what's holding you back and lay out a path forward. No fluff, no corporate finance speak. Cfomade easy.com it's time to grow with clarity.

[Sam]

You know, this is not the direction I thought this episode was going, but.

[John]

I mean, it was the weirdest ways to make money.

[Sam]

I know. I just, I don't think I pinned you as, as going into card cracking territory with this, but I'm in. I love it.

[John]

I was looking for space. I was like, I actually think I only need like 8 to 10,000 square feet to do this. I found a spot.

[Sam]

Dude, that's like not so crazy now. Much crazier. Back then. I remember when I was mining, doing mining for bitcoin.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

We had 30.

[John]

I did ether for a couple years.

[Sam]

30 some rigs going.

[Jack]

Oh yeah.

[Sam]

And like had a full. Took apart a, like a double wide trailer, put fans on one side, jerry rigged all the electrical myself. Looking back, probably huge risk.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Also surprised the power company never came to us. But we ended up finding like an apple. An app. An old apple orchard storage facility up in Washington where it had like 3 cent power.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

And we were going to. Then it had full, you know, h vac on it and go do like a full 100, 200 unit operation. I'm sad I didn't sometimes. But at the same time, hey, you know, it is what it is. But just reminds me, I'm thinking like we went through the whole process, contacted the realtor, like it was really close to going all in on bitcoin in like 2015.

[Jack]

Oh yeah.

[John]

That would have been better.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[John]

I. I think it is kind of funny to go down these rabbit holes and like fall. I just think it's like a fun.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[John]

Mental exercise. Like ideally they don't happen because it ends up being a show.

[Sam]

I do think it's healthy to see the model and healthy to see like how margins work and see how businesses work on the inside and out and then to actually dig and think of like, is this a really. Actually a good idea? Am I going to put my, you know.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam]

Put my stuff on the line.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[John]

I'm not going to go pay $2 million for a, you know, a website. Probably not. I do think, like diving into other businesses and own and operated have helped us, like, we understand distribution better and we've been able to take a lot of the lessons we've learned from growing a media business to core business. Definitely it's helped a ton, especially in like.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[John]

Especially in the marketing department.

[Sam]

That's awesome. Sweet. So I don't even know where to start.

[John]

We covered some weird businesses.

[Sam]

Weird businesses. Magic maybe and skiing maybe.

[John]

Like you can make money doing anything.

[Sam]

I think you can. I think it's true. Monetization can be hard. Hard sometimes. But there's definitely a path to it.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Through almost anything.

[John]

Through almost anything.

[Sam]

Sweet. You like what you cards and skin, including your hobbies. So I'm going to go back and look at mushrooms and ants and figure out how to.

[Jack]

Oh yeah.

[John]

There's a way.

[Sam]

There's a way how to do it. Well.

[Tyson]

Yeah.

[Sam]

Almost started. Sweet.

[John]

Sweet. If you like what you heard, like and sub Check out owner operated.com for the workshop and drop your weirdest niche business below in the comments. We'd love to cover it.