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When you're in back to back meetings all day, you're trying to stay present, but you're also worried you'll forget the decisions that are made in the meeting. The action items you got to do the important next steps that you need to take. That's where Granola comes in. Granola is an AI powered notepad for meetings. You jot down rough notes like you always do and in the background Granola transcribes and turns them into clear, useful notes. When the meeting ends. No bots joining your calls, no distractions, just a clean notepad that helps you focus. During or after the call, you can chat with your notes. Ask Granola to put out action items, help you negotiate, or even write a follow up email. I've been using Granola for some time now and one of my favorite features is that after a meeting I just ask Granola what are my action Items. After a 30 minute or 60 minute meeting. Sometimes you'll forget to jot down a thing or two that you need to do. So it's always good to know that granola's got my back and I can just ask it at after the meeting what I need to do next. Head to Granola AI MBA and get three months free with the Code mba. That's Granola AI MBA and get three months free with Code MBA As a small business owner, you wear many hats. You're the owner, you're the marketer, you're the seller, you're the hire. I remember in the early days I was doing pretty much everything. I was writing, I was bookkeeping, I was selling, I was marketing. I was doing a lot. But lucky for you, you have LinkedIn. They have the tools to help you boost your visibility, find prospective customers, and find the best team for your small business all in one place. So while LinkedIn can hang up all of your hats, it makes it easier to wear them all. Learn more@LinkedIn.com mbashow you have $100 and you want to make $100,000. Here's the exact playbook I would run if I was starting from scratch in 2026. No BS, no fluff, and spoiler alert. It doesn't involve dropshipping crypto or going viral on TikTok, or waiting two years to see a single dollar. What I'm about to share with you is honestly boring on the surface. But boring is where real money lives. So if you're ready to stop dreaming about it and actually build something significant, let's go. Welcome Back to the $100 NBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenholm. Where practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Let me be upfront about the model I'm choosing and why I'm choosing a service based business model. I would choose this from day one, not because it's glamorous, but because it's the fastest path from $100 to $100,000. If you know how to use the model, think about what service business gives you. No product to build, no inventory to hold, no tech to develop, no audience to grow. Before you make your first dollar, all you got to do is find a customer, deliver the service to the customer and you get paid. It's actually that simple. Now the key, and this is where most people get it wrong, is that I'm not going to be doing the work myself. I'm going to build a business that delivers the work for me. There's a massive difference. One trades your time for money, the other builds an asset that grows without you. Don't worry, I'm going to explain how to do this step by step. Step one is to find a painful, boring problem. I'm serious. Find a problem that people absolutely, positively have to solve. It's an inconvenience for them. It's something that they just gotta get done. It's something they have to tick off. And it has to be a want, not a need. We're gonna make this as easy as possible. For you to be successful, the solution to your problem doesn't need to be innovative, nor does it need to be sexy. In fact, I encourage you to make sure that your solution is boring and painful. Why? Because otherwise they would just solve it themselves. But if it's boring and painful, the solution, then they're going to want to outsource it. They're going on somebody else to do it for them. What am I talking about here? Well, for example, things like lawn care. It grows back every week whether you like it or not. They're going to need to cut their lawn again and again. Garbage removal. It piles up, it smells, it attracts bugs and flies and rats. And it's a non negotiable. Got to get rid of this garbage. Moving services. People have to move whether they like it or not. There's going to be a time in their life where they're going to have to either upgrade, downgrade, they're buying a place, they're going back to renting, they got to get this done. Junk handling. Everyone has stuff they need to get rid of. Whether they're cleaning up or something happens in their family where they need to downsize or somebody passes away and they need to get rid of some of the stuff that they don't want anymore. This is reality. These are the tough problems that people don't want to deal with. Cleaning services, homes, offices, post construction, end of lease, pressure, washing driveways and decks and commercial buildings. This is what I'm talking about. These problems don't go away in a recession or when the economy's bad. They don't disappear when the algorithm changes on Instagram. These types of businesses don't need you to go viral because you don't need to convince anybody to solve this problem. People literally will just Google movers near me. And every single day, every city on the planet, there's businesses that are getting that money, that demand the cash is just sitting there waiting for you. Your job is to just show up and capture it. The question I ask myself is simple. What's a problem in my city that people dread dealing with? What would they happily pay someone else to handle? And what happens over and over that needs a solution. That's your business. Now you might be thinking, Omar, I don't know anything about moving. I don't know anything about lawn care. You don't need to know anything about it because you're not going to do the work. And that leads me to step two. You're going to arbitrage labor, not your time. Arbitrage is basically exchange. This is the insight that changes everything and allows your business to scale. Most people start a service business and immediately become the service. They think that they need to roll up their sleeves and do it. They're the cleaner, they're the mover, they're the guy pushing the lawnmower at 7am on Saturday. I'm sorry, that's not a business. It's a job, and a hard one. And it has a ceiling. You only have a certain number of hours in the day, right? You can only be in one place at one time. You can't clone yourself. And you can only do so many jobs a week before you just burn out or just run out of week. I don't want a job. I want to turn my hundred into a hundred thousand dollars. I want a business. So from day one, my role is this. I am the operator. I find the customers. I find the workers. I manage the margin in between. That's called labor arbitrage. I find someone who can do the job for, let's say, $200. I sell the job to a customer for $500. I pocket the difference, $300. This is where my business lives. This is where I'm going to rinse and repeat until I get to $100,000 and beyond. And that's the beautiful part. I can run this play five times a week, 10 times a week. I'm not capped because I'm not physically doing the work. There's no ceiling on how many jobs I can take. Scale becomes possible the moment you stop being the product. Support for today's episode comes from Square. The easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. Square lets you sell wherever your customers are, at the counter, online, through your website, or on the go, all synced in real time. You can track sales, manage inventory, monitor reports, and keep your operations organized without juggling different systems. Square supports every major payment method, including tap to pay, and gives you fast access to your earnings. Built in tools like loyalty and marketing help you bring customers back and grow revenue without extra software or contracts. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now you can get up to $200 off square hardware at square.com gomba that's sq U-A-R-E.com go m run your business smarter with Square get started today. Spring is a great time to reset. And if you've been putting off cleaning up the messier parts of your business, now's the time. Streamlining your communications is one of the quickest and easiest upgrades you can make. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O the smarter way to run your business Communications Quo is built for how modern teams work. That's why more than 90,000 businesses, from solo operators to growing teams, rely on Quo to stay connected, professional and consistently reachable. They say the best ability is availability. So let's make sure we're always available for our customers. And that's why Quo is amazing. Quo works wherever you are, right from an app on your phone or your computer and lets you keep your existing number. Add new numbers or teammates in minutes. Sync your CRM and rely on seamless routing and call flows as your business scales. Make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.commba that's qu-uo.commba's no missed calls, no missed customers. Let me make this real with actual numbers. I'm going to start a moving company. Somebody that helps others move locally or even interstate. Here's what a typical job looks like. A standard local move takes about six hours. I need two strong workers and a truck to make this happen. Let's take a look at total cost per move. Truck rental for the day is about 152 workers at $200 each for six hours. That's $400 fue 30 bucks. Miscellaneous like bubble wrap or boxes, let's say $20. So the total cost per move is $600. Now what do I charge? At minimum, I'm going to charge 1200, ideally 1500. Now this is super competitive. I've moved before with movers and it's a lot more expensive than this. But let's just keep the numbers simple. And also keep in mind I needed to have some margin for things I'm not thinking about, like insurance. I need to be covered to make sure if something breaks a marketing generation, my own time of running the operation as a manager, reinvesting into growth. Just keep that in mind. You're going to have to do that later on. So let's take a look at profit. After everything, I'm pocketing around 600 to 900 per move. Let's be conservative and say 700 per job. So how many moves do we got to do to hit that hundred thousand dollars in our bank account? Well, $100,000 divided by $700, which is the profit we make per move is 143 moves. That's the target. Now, if 143 moves sounds ambitious, here's what you do. Increase your prices and increase your margins. Just some quick maths. Even if I'm just increasing my margins a little bit, If I'm making $800 per move, I only need 125 moves. If I'm making a thousand dollars per move, I only need a hundred moves. And guess What? You have 365 days in the year. All right? So you have plenty of opportunity to hit those numbers. This is why by the way margins matter more than volume, especially early on. Thicker margins mean fewer jobs to hit your number, more cash to reinvest, and a healthier business from day one. By the way, if you're enjoying this lesson, this practical business lesson and then you're going to absolutely love an upcoming episode that I'm working on where I sat down with financial expert Ramit Sadhi and we discuss is starting a business really the best way to get rich? You'll be surprised with what gets said in this episode. It's absolute fire. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it when it hits the feed. Step three Going to run this play over and over and learn fast. Here's a mistake most first time business owners make. They spend three months planning and they build a website and they design a logo and they write a business plan and they never actually do the actual job. Do not do that. Your first month in business should be seen as a test experiment, a research project, not a polished operation. Get one job done. Do it. Learn from that experience. Ask yourself what did it actually cost you in terms of money and time? What went wrong? What did the customer care about most? How long did it really take to get that customer and then deliver that service? You're going to learn more from that single job, more than any business book or podcast, including this one. If I just get you to do that first job, then I have done my job on this podcast. And then once you do that one job, you're going to do another and another and you're going to aim for maybe one or two jobs a week. And then in one month you'll have like four to eight jobs completed by the end of month. 1. You will know so much. You have learned so much and improved your business so much. You're going to learn your real cost structure. You're going to learn what makes a reliable worker versus a liability to your business. You're going to understand where jobs come from. Are they coming from word of mouth? Are they coming from Google? Are they coming from local Facebook groups? You're going to learn what insurance you actually need and what it costs. You're going to learn how to price a job on the spot without second guessing yourself. This is your data. This is your moat. The moat that you're going to have around your castle, which is your business. Keep your expenses lean. Keep your feedback loop tight so you're learning every single time you're doing a job and every job makes the next one more profitable. Step 4 Build the system, not the service by month two or three, something starts to shift. You start learning something. You know your number's cold. You know which workers show up and which don't, right? You've have a few battle scars, right? You've learned some things the hard way. You know what a customer needs to hear before they book a gig with you. Book a deal now. You stop being an operator and you start building a machine. What does that machine look like? Well, a small roster of reliable workers you can call on short notice. You have like a pool of people that you can call upon. A simple online booking page so customers can find you and pay deposit. There's so many easy and low cost softwares you can use for this. Go High level is one of them, right? It's super simple and super cheap. A review strategy like how are you going to get five star reviews on Google so that people can find you easily and the reviews do the selling for you. You're going to learn how to build a referral system. Every happy customer should be sending you at least your next two customers. You're going to increase your margins. You're going to get them all fat so that you can start paying someone else to handle the bookings. And the moment someone else is answering inquiries and answering customer questions and booking the actual gigs for you, you've crossed the line from self employed to business owner and you start scaling. You add a second crew, a third crew. Each crew is a revenue stream running without you being on site. That's when the numbers start to compound. That's when $100,000 stops feeling like a dream and starts feeling like a real reality very soon. But here's honest truth. I'm going to give it to you straight. Most people won't follow this playbook. Not because it's too hard, because it's just not cool enough. They want the app, they want the brand, they want the passive income course, right? That they can sell online. They want to be the person on the podcast talking about their overnight success. Nobody posts on Instagram about their moving company. But you know what? The person running three moving crews in their city is clearing $300,000 a year easy. The person who started a junk removal company with pickup trucks and two guys are now making over seven figures. Boring businesses make millionaires. And every single day. You should check out one of our previous episodes where we interviewed David Royce, who sold his company for $500 million. What was the company? Pest control. Why do these boring businesses make millionaires every day? Because they solve real problems. They don't need to go viral. The customers come to them. They don't need funding, they don't need a personal brand. They just need someone willing to execute this model. And the gap between you and $100,000 is, is a lot shorter than you think. You don't need talent, you don't need connections, you don't need capital. Right? You need just to take action. I want to be real with you. This is definitely not a get rich quick scheme. This is not a get rich quick plan. There will be a job that goes sideways. A worker will no show, right? A customer will complain. A month where you'll feel like you are getting less customers. Things are drying up. Maybe the business is seasonal, but that's business. The difference between the person who hits $100,000 and the person who quits at $20,000, it's not luck. It's the decision to treat every problem as data and not failure and to move forward using their new information. This model I'm sharing with you requires you to work hard in the first 90 days, to build momentum, to have the discipline around your margins from job one so you can continue to increase them. You have to have the patience to reinvest before you cash out. You have to be able to have the willingness to learn fast and adjust fast when you learn things throughout the business. But here's the trade off. You don't need investors or outside capital. You don't need a big social media following. You don't need a unique original idea. You need $100 and a bit of hard work. And that's pretty much it. You're going to learn a lot through those first few jobs. The barrier of entry is low, yes, but something easy to do is also easy not to do. It's easy to go for a jog around the block, but it's also easy not to do. And that's why most people don't do it. Before you go, I want to leave you with this. People who build real wealth, whether it's in their 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s, they're not the ones with the best ideas. They're the ones who pick a model that works for them. They run it with discipline and refuse to stop until that number that they're looking for gets hit. That they validate that they can do this business service, business labor, arbitrage, thick margins, repeat over and over. Start with a problem price for profit, not just for survival. Never be the one doing the job from day one. Make sure. Because you got to build a system that allows you to be able to get other people to do the job and keep your eye on your first 10, 15, 20, 30 customers, 100 customers. That's going to get you to where you want to go. Put your goal, whether it's $100,000 or even a million dollars or whatever it might be, Put it somewhere you could see every day. A Post a note on your bathroom mirror, use a marker and put it on your mirror. Remind yourself what you are going after. That's how you turn $100 into $100,000 or whatever that number might be for you. Not overnight, but faster than you think. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of this episode got you moving, got you pumped, and you want to become better at negotiation, at speaking with other people, communicating in a proper way. Especially because now you got to build a business with customers and make sure that you're closing deals. Then you're going to want to check out my episode with Charles Duhigg, the author of Super Communicators. In that discussion, he shares three questions that you can ask people to allow them to open up and connect with you. So therefore, it makes it easier not only to sell, but also to make sure that you're building a relationship with the people you're working with. 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, Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever 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've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.