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The $100 MBA Show
Five Lazy Ways To Start A Business On The Side This Weekend
00:23:03
Most side business advice is exhausting - websites, funnels, branding, endless prep before you even make a dollar. By the time you’re done, the weekend’s over and you’ve made exactly $0. Omar’s approach is different: five businesses you can genuinely start this weekend, with nothing more than a phone or laptop and a few hours of effort.
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Owning a small business comes with a lot of challenges. When I was starting out, I was chairing meetings, I was scripting and shooting podcasts, I was putting up social media posts. It's a lot. I know, I've been there. There is no doubt growing your small business is hard. It's even harder to do it efficiently. But with LinkedIn you get all the tools you need to grow in one place. With LinkedIn, simplify your sales, marketing and hiring so that you can, you know, actually run your small business. Learn more@LinkedIn.com mbashow for small business, a high speed fiber connection is only one piece of the puzzle. You need the Total Solutions advantage from Comcast Business. It's a first ever combination of the largest, fastest fiber powered network gig speeds with equipment and security included plus a 5 year price lock. Learn more get started for $60 a month for 12 months when you add an advanced solution to a qualifying Internet package, limited time offer restrictions apply. New customers only. Requires 300 Mbps Internet security edge and additional qualifying service, one year agreement, paperless billing and autopay with bank account required. Taxes and fees extra if you're ambitious, but you're kind of lazy, this episode's for you. Listen. Most side business advice is frankly exhausting. Build your personal brand, create a content strategy, define your niche, design a website, set up your funnel. By the time you're done with all that, the weekend's over and you made exactly $0. What I'm sharing today is different. These are five businesses you can genuinely start this weekend. No website, no logo, no business plan. Just you, a phone or a laptop, a little courage and really just a few hours. Each one I'm going to share is zero or near zero cost to start. Each one will make you real money fast and each one has the potential to grow into something serious if you want to. But if you want to do this, you gotta get serious. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask if this show has helped you in any way. Leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no fluff practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their Journey. Today's episode is actually a question from one of our listeners, Rob, and he asks, hey, how do I get off my butt and start a business this weekend? I'm not the most motivated guy, but I know I can make it happen. So, Rob, I got your back. And you know the title of today's episode is A Little Tug in Cheek, five Lazy Ways to Start a Business on the Side this Weekend. And I'm going to explain more, but this is right up your alley. You're going to really love it. If you got a question you want to ask, just go to 100mba.netq and submit it and we'll go ahead and answer it right here on the podcast. I have one rule I want you to hold onto for everything I'm about to share. The goal of this weekend is not to build an empire or build a mega business. The goal is to make your first sale. That's it. One customer, one transaction, one payment. Proof that someone will give you money for the thing you offer. Everything else, the branding, the scaling, the systems, all that stuff comes after. The most important thing is that you got to prove that somebody wants what you have. And the reason why I'm stressing this at the beginning is because most people never start. They never start because they're trying to build the whole business before they even test whether anybody wants what they have. Don't build. You need to test first, make a sale first, then, then build around that. Business is all about doing something, learning and making it better, basically, experimentation. And you don't want to waste too much time and money and effort on something that's not proven yet, on something that you don't know for sure, any information about because you haven't put it out in the world. Make the sale first, then build around that. Keep that in mind. And as we go through all five of these businesses, you can start this weekend. Let's start with number one, sell what you already know. Sell what you already know. This one is the one I start with because it's the most underused and the most overlooked. Whatever you do in your day job, whatever it is, whatever industry you're in, you've been working in this industry for maybe five years, 10 years, 15 years, some of you, 20, 25 years. The. The thing that you are overlooking is that someone out there would pay you well for an hour of your time to understand what you understand. Not because you're the world's expert and you're on CNN and you're like the panelist on all the Business channels. No, because you know something they don't know. That's it. You are steps ahead of them. Here's the thing about expertise that a lot of people don't understand. It's not about being the top in your field. It's about knowing more than the person in front of you. More, more than anybody that is a beginner. Let's say for example, you went to Disney World last summer and you had a great time. You went to all the parks, you stayed there in the hotels, you maybe drove there, even flew there, whatever it might be. Now your friend wants to go to Disney World. Your friend is going to ask you for advice because you've been there before, you've done it already. And to them you are the expert. You are the expert. They have access to the difference between your knowledge of the experience of going to Disney World and their knowledge is day and night because you've done it. If you spent five years in HR and you know more about hiring than most small business owners because they never hired anybody before, then you're valuable to them. If you spent a decade in accounting and crunching numbers, you know more about financial management than most entrepreneurs. You can help them. If you've been in marketing, in operations, in logistics, in education, in healthcare, in real estate, in management, any field your experience has value, has real value to people who are trying to figure out what you already know and have lived. You are not starting from scratch. You have information that other people want. And by the way, companies right now, big companies with money are desperate to hire consultants so that they can come in and help them out for a project based period or a time based or time bound period. And they don't need to make a full time hire. It's actually more cost effective for them to hire you as a consultant. So how do you start this weekend with this idea? Easy. Open up your phone, go into your contacts, you know that contacts little icon you got there and then just go through them and think about five people who run businesses or are in industries that are adjacent to your expertise. That simple. It's not that complicated. And guess what? This is where a lot of people stop and get stuck. They find the contact, but they don't know what to write to them. Don't overthink it. Send them a message. Send them something that sounds like this. Hey, I help people with whatever your expertise is accounting. I'm offering a focused 60 minute advisory call to get you X result, whatever that result is to save you 10%, 15% on your profit and loss sheet. Would that be useful for you or anyone you know? That's it. Leave it there. I'm gonna pause for a second. This is your first sale or your attempt to make your first sale. And you don't need a website, a calendly, a fancy proposal to start that process. Just a direct offer for a person who knows that you have something valuable that they might use or somebody they know might find valuable. If even one person, if one person says yes, you made your first few hundred dollars and you've proven your concept. You've made a huge, huge step from there. You can build a proper offer and reoccurring client base and eventually you can build an agency or a consulting practice. But the weekend goal is to do what? Make your first sale. Get your first. Yes, Go get it now. If you're selling online or out of a storefront full time or as a side hustle, you already know the challenge. You know what I'm talking about. You're hoping for people to just find your listing or just walk into your store. Whatnot flips that on Whatnot, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. If you've been following me for some time, you know how much I'm a huge fan of live video. That's why I'm so excited to have Whatnot as a sponsor of the podcast. OneNote is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashions, even cookies, sellers are building real, thriving businesses. People selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. That's because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with buyers. I'm loving the experience of shopping on Whatnot because when you're on Whatnot, you can easily see the value of the product. Because you're not just seeing a picture of it, you're seeing video. You're seeing the presenter describe it and how you can use this product in your everyday life. And purchasing something that you love is super simple. Takes two clicks and a few days later, I found the product right on my doorstep. And for a limited time, Whatnot will match your first $150 sold in the first month. Visit whatnot.com sell to start selling. That's w h a t n o t.com sell whatnot.com sell this episode of the $100 MBA show is brought to you by booking.com if you're looking to grow your vacation rental business, this is the place to be. Booking.com is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world. And for good reason. Since 2010, they've helped over 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. But here's the thing. Most vacation rental hosts don't even realize they can list their properties on booking dot. And if you're not on the platform, your rental is basically invisible to millions of Booking.com travelers worldwide. After all, they can't book what they can't see, right? I book all my travel, personal and business through booking.com and it's for good reason. I love their genius program. So because I'm loyal And I use booking.com, i'm a genius. Level three. Yeah, I say it with pride because it gets me the best prices. I also love the fact that they give you all the details about all the hotels or the apartments that you're booking. So I know exactly what I'm getting before I check in. Does the place have a gym? Does it have a hair dryer? Does it have a fridge? What about a washing machine? I know because the listing is always accurate and their app is easy to use. So when I'm dead tired after a long flight and I'm trying to check into my accommodation, it's super simple. Just pull up my booking and show it to the host. So if your vacation rental isn't listed on booking.com, it could be invisible to millions of travelers searching the platform. Don't miss out on consistent bookings and global reach. Head over to booking.com and start your listing today. Get seen, get booked on booking. Com business 2. You could start this weekend. The one person agency without doing any of the work. I've talked about this in a previous episode in detail. It's an episode that's called if you want to turn a hundred dollars into $100,000 in 2026, do this. I wanted to include it as number two on this list because it's one of my favorites and it's the closest thing to how a real business is built fast. And here's the business model in a very short and snappy way. Find a business or person that needs a service. Find someone who can do that service for less than what you charge. Pocket the difference. You see, one of the things that people get hung up on is they think that business is complicated. But it's always been simple since the beginning of time. People buy something for less than what they sell it for and they make a profit. That's basically business. In this example, we're doing this with a service and it's called labor arbitrage. And I'm sharing it with you because it works. The services that work best right now in this model are a few things. They're highly technical things like short form video editing. Every business needs it. Social media management, like things that require you to post and do a bit of labor. Now remember again, when I say you, this is not actually you. This is somebody who you're hiring to do it for your client. Writing email newsletters, blogging, let's get out of online. You can do cleaning services, lawn care, come to your home, car wash services. There's so many things that people need. You can't just let your lawn grow forever. You have to cut it regularly. So that's a problem that people have. Solve that problem by providing them somebody to cut it for them. And here's the thing about services that I love. That I love is it's so easy to differentiate and be the number one service in your area by doing really good customer service, by being somebody of integrity, of actually doing what you said you're going to do. The bar is so low, you know what I'm talking about? So many people are phoning it in. If you just do a little bit better than anybody else, you will become the number one service provider in your area. So step one, pick a service that you want to provide. Step two, find a freelancer or somebody to do the work for you. Step three, pitch businesses, professionals, people on LinkedIn, for example, or people in your local neighborhood if it's something that is physical and ask them, do you have this problem? Would you like me to solve it? That simple. Let me give you a very simple example. Let's say you go to all the local restaurants in your neighborhood and you ask them, hey, would you like to grow with social media? Would you like to get more customers? Would you like to get more bookings, whatever it might be? Right. More takeaway orders? Yes. Great. I will manage your social media and increase your visibility. And I'm only going to charge you $500 a month. I'm going to take care of all your social media on all platforms. You're going to be everywhere. You never even have to open social media. You don't even have to have it on your phone. I'm going to take care for you. This is music to their ears. Then you just pay a skilled freelancer. You can go to upwork.com for example. They're a sponsor of the show, but I've been using for a decade. They're great and you pay a freelancer $100 for it, $200. You just made $300 a month by doing no work other than securing the customer. You have five clients, you're making $1,500 a month working part time hours. You get 10 clients and you have a real agency now. So the weekend task with this idea, sign up your first client, go around your neighborhood, find somebody. One business, one conversation with one yes. By the way, to get a yes, you're going to have to endorse some nos, and that's okay. You're not going to die, they're not going to hate you, they're not going to ban you, they're not going to beat you out of the restaurant or whatever. No, they're going to be fine. They're going to be actually quite pleasant and more polite than you think, even in their nose. Get that one client and build around it. Third idea, buy low, sell high. I touched on this earlier, but you can do this outside of an agency. Now, this one requires the least amount of skill, but it is the one that requires the most hustle. Okay? It's been working for centuries. Like I said before, find things that are undervalued, sell them to people who want them at a fair price. Simple and it's timeless. And it's profitable. My first business was this. I used to find rare Air Jordans on ebay. Find a buyer and sell those Air Jordans to them at a markup. Now there's Facebook marketplace. You can do this with Craigslist if you're in Australia, something called Gumtree. There's so many different apps and sites for this. You know, buy low, go to garage sales and estate sales. Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this all the time. He geeks out about it on his social media and goes to garage sales himself to buy things that are really undervalued. You can go to thrift stores and buy like underpriced electronics and furniture and clothes and collectibles. And then you're going to go ahead and sell them on ebay, on Facebook, on Facebook, Marketplace, on Amazon. There's even apps that you can look up. I think ebay even has its own app where you can just take a picture of items and it will tell you the value of the item and how much you could sell for or how much it's selling for already on ebay. And if you see that, hey, this item is selling for $15 and you see it in the thrift store for $3, wow, you can make $12 right now on this, just one item. So if you're a kind of person that loves a good deal, loves to hustle, loves to find diamonds in the rough, then this is the model for you this weekend. Take $100, go to one garage sale or a thrift store and buy a few things that you can flip sell them online. Listen, the goal is not to get rich this weekend, okay? The goal is to learn what sells, what the market actually wants, and where to buy things at a very good price. And once you know all these things, you can start scaling and start building upon what you've learned. You might want to start niching down. Maybe you want to focus on electronics. Maybe your thing is vintage clothes or niche collectibles. Hey, this actually sounds kind of fun, too. So go ahead and choose this if this sounds appealing. But the most important thing is to get started right now, this weekend. By the way, if you're enjoying this episode, but you're asking yourself, omar, this is great, but how do I get better at selling what I'm offering to my customers? Well, you're in luck. I have an upcoming episode called how to Sell More and Make Millions. The ultimate sales masterclass. It's everything I've learned over 20 years in sales condensed, right in an episode. I'm putting the final touches on it right now, and I can't wait to share it with you. You don't need to buy some $10,000 training program. You could just hit subscribe to this podcast and you'll get it as soon as it drops. At the very low, low price of $0. Yep, that's how we roll. All right, let's get back to it. Number four, business. You can start this weekend if you're lazy. The product high service. Okay, what's a productized service? Well, first of all, a lot of people think of service in one way. Like, I'm gonna do social media marketing for somebody. That's a service. I'll do anything for anyone at whatever rate they want to pay. No, there's another way to do this. A product I service flips the model. You take one specific service and you package it at a fixed price and deliver the same thing to every customer. It's basically a menu of outcomes that you're going to deliver for a price. And that simplicity is what makes it lazy in the best sense. Here's some real examples that people are running right now. I will audit your LinkedIn profile and rewrite it for $300. I'll set up your Google business profile for $200 so that you could show up on Google and have a little snippet on the side. I'm going to write five blog posts a month for your business for $500 a month and optimize it for SEO. I'll clean and vacuum your car so it's always clean every single week at wherever location you want, like your home or your office for $120 a month. I'm going to set up your AI tools in your business and train your team with some videos for flat fee of $1,000. Notice what these all have in common. You can guess if you want. You can say it out loud in your own home or in your car. All of them are selling one specific thing with one clear, deliverable or outcome with one fixed price. The customer knows exactly what they're getting and how much they're going to have to pay for it. There's no ambiguity and it doesn't break the rule that I always talk about. A confused mind never buys. Nothing confusing about it. Simple. You're going to get this thing. This is what it's going to do for you. This is the result you're going to get, and this is how much you're going to pay. No scope creep, no endless back and forth. No custom proposals, no negotiation. And the more specific the service, the easier it is to sell. Because people don't buy vague if they know exactly what they're getting, they're going to be more convinced that you can deliver it. This weekend, ask yourself, what is one specific thing I can do for a business or a business owner? And that can save them time, that can make them money, that can remove a headache from them, package it, price it, and pitch it to five people this weekend. If one says yes, you have a business. And the beautiful thing about this productized service is that as you get better at delivering at it, the faster it gets to deliver. What takes you three hours now will take you one hour in six months because you have a system now. Same price, more margin, more time. That's when it starts to truly feel lazy. Idea number five. You could start this weekend. Teach what you know to one person at a time. Listen, you don't need to build a course, you don't need to build a membership, you don't need to launch anything. Okay, teach one person. I'm talking about one on one coaching. One on one coaching gets a lot of flack. I want to stop this one on one coaching. Hate once and for all. Coaching and tutoring and mentoring is one of the fastest ways you can get paid for what you know. It's also one of the best ways to learn what people want and how you can improve on what you do to deliver what they want. And right now, the demand has never been higher for one on one coaching. People are willing to pay for personalized guidance more than I've ever seen it in the last 20 years. And I'm talking about every area of life that you can imagine. Career transitions, fitness and nutrition, language, learning, business skills. Listen, if you speak a second language, or third or fourth, you are highly skilled. You're somebody that is rare. Most people don't speak a second language. You can just go on Facebook or your WhatsApp groups and post to your friends, who's going to Mexico for the summer, who's going to Spain. If you speak Spanish, you can easily offer some quick language lessons so they can order their coffee, their meals, they can talk to people at the hotel in their local language. If you got a skill that you could teach, clearly someone will pay you for it. I'm telling you now, I want to reiterate why one on one is a good place to start. The feedback loop is immediate. You're going to learn quickly about what works and what doesn't. You learn exactly what your students are struggling with. You can start using that in your marketing and sales materials. You discover what language, what words resonate with them. You can use that language when you are talking to your customers. You find out what outcomes people actually want and are looking for or hungry for and start selling those outcomes. And all that intelligence and data is earned through real conversation you're having with people. Because the foundation of whatever course you want to build or whatever program or whatever community or even book you want to write right now, it just starts with one student, one person. So don't overthink it. This weekend, post in the Facebook groups, in the Reddit community, in the WhatsApp groups you're part of, in LinkedIn. Put up a message. It doesn't have to be complicated. It could be something like this. I'm just on top of my head, hey, I've been helping people learn Spanish. I'm taking on two new students this month for one on one sessions. So if you're going to Mexico, if you're going to Spain, if you're going to Argentina, if you're going to Latin America, if you're interested in learning enough so you can get by, order your meals and kind of intermingle with the locals, contact me, send me a DM. If you're interested, charge between $100 or $200 a session. And there it is. You got your first customer. Don't underprice yourself for something that's valuable. What I found is that when you charge too little, people don't take you seriously. So price at a level so people feel like it's an investment and they'll show up. All you need is that first client this weekend. Go find them this weekend. Make it happen. Now, I gotta be honest with you. I called these lazy to get your attention and to highlight the fact that it doesn't require too much work to get started. But no business is truly effortless. Everything I started in my life in business is a little bit of work. Everything I shared with you today has a low barrier of entry. But you're still going to have to put in some effort. You'll still need to sell. You'll still need to deliver what you offer and what you promise. You still need to show up when you don't feel like it, right when you're feeling tired. But the good news is that no capital is required, no tech skills are required, no months of preparation. The only thing that's standing between you and your first dollar this weekend is the willingness to ask someone to pay you. That's it. You got to have a little bit of courage. And I believe that you can do it. I believe in you. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The biggest lie in entrepreneurship is that you need to be ready before you start. You get ready by starting. You'll never feel ready. Everyone, no one just says, I'm ready now. And they get started. No, never happens that way. Every one of the five businesses or ideas I shared with you today can be started with nothing more than a phone on a Saturday morning. And the decision, this is important, the decision to make an offer to someone to go ahead and go for it. Listen, there's money out there. The question is, are you going to take it? Are you going to go and take what's yours? And listen, the website comes later. The logo comes later. The perfect plan comes later. The first sale has to come now. Because the first sale is not just money. It's validation. It's proof. And it's proof that you do business. You don't play business. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. Listen, when you start building out your business this weekend, make your first sale, get some traction. The first thing you're going to start thinking about is like, how do I make a hire? Who should I hire? Well, there's an episode that I published recently that you might be interested in listening to. It's called why I've Always Hired More Women. I'm not going to share too much. I want you to go ahead and listen and hear what I have to say. And trust me, you're going to be surprised with the answer that I share in that episode. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Subscribe, hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or ever, you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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