← The $100 MBA Show
The $100 MBA Show
If You Have Less Than $10,000 Saved- Do This And Thank Me Later.
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Watching your savings sit below $10,000 can feel heavy. It is not just about money, it is the pressure of knowing your time is limited and one wrong move could push things over the edge. When your runway feels short, the usual advice does not feel good enough and honestly, it just makes you feel more stuck.
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Learn more@chase.com Sapphire Reserve cards issued by JP Morgan, Chase bank and a member FDIC subject to credit approval if you have less than $10,000 saved right now, that means you have roughly 60 days of Runway. That's it. 60 days before losing your job becomes a crisis. I know how it feels. I was there at 32 borrowing money from my mom to pay for rent. Not a proud moment in my life. But now I'm a multimillionaire and I was able to recently treat her to a trip to Greece. The first step between those two moments I shared with you being broke as a joke to being a millionaire is actually turning $10,000 to $60,000. That's the first step if you can get there because $60,000 is 12 months of Runway and that gives you options and I want you to get there as fast as possible. I'm going to show you exactly how to do it right now.
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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. Most content that's aimed to people that have under $10,000 saved give the same advice and it's incredibly annoying. This advice sounds like this Cut your expenses, put your money in a high yielding savings account, start investing. In my opinion, that advice is wrong because it's painfully slow and it's not going to give you enough momentum and give you some wins to feel like you have some breathing room that there is hope to get out of that situation. Let me paint the picture. If you save $500 a month, which for most people is genuinely difficult, it takes you over eight years to get to 60,000. That's if you're disciplined enough to save $500 a month, month after month for eight years straight. In my opinion, that's not a plan, that's a sentence. The faster path is the one that nobody actually talks about and the one that I used to get out of my situation. And I'm talking about building a side income stream that generates real money as quickly as possible with almost no startup costs so that you're not out of pocket and we want to use the hours you already have available outside your job. This episode is not going to push some passive income fantasy. It's not some sort of drop shipping, blah blah blah. It's not crypto, it's not NFTs. None of this BS. We're going to build a business, specifically a service business, around something you already are good at that delivers a clear result to a specific customer. This is the path we're going to take on today's journey and I'm going to show you exactly how it works. Because I lived it. Before I get into the nitty gritty specifics, I want to give you the principles so that you can make decisions on your own. And here it is. People do not want to learn how to do something. I'm going to say that again. People do not want to learn something. They want to get the thing done. This is the most important insight in any service business. Your future customers are not looking for a course on how to build a website. They want a website. That's why they're trying to learn. They're not looking for a podcast tutorial. They want their podcast set up and sounding professional. They're not looking for a content strategy framework. They want content that actually performs. When you sell a service, you sell the result rather than the education you remove. The biggest objection in any sale, the objection is not price. If you're selling to the right people. The objection is time is skill and confidence and the customer does not have the time to learn this. For example, I need to put up some sound panels in my studio right now. We have a new studio in Sydney. And we have some really cool deluxe sound paneling. But I need to put them up. I need to get them cut to measure. I need to have them stuck on the wall. I don't want to learn how to cut these sound panels. I don't want to look up some YouTube video. I don't want to borrow some saw. I don't want to figure out which adhesive is not going to mess up the wall. I don't want to figure out how to line it up perfectly. I don't want to make sure that it's leveled. I don't want any of that. I'm doing this once, maybe twice. It's not a skill that I really should invest in. I want it done. The beauty of a service is that it removes all three objections in one move. Time, skill and confidence gone out the window. Because you don't need them. Because I'm going to do it for you. So what business should you start? Here's how I think about this. You are looking for a business that meets three criteria. Criteria number one, you already have success in this area. I'm not talking about theoretical knowledge. I'm talking about actual results. Maybe you've built a podcast that has grown like our podcast. Maybe you've run social media for business and the numbers really moved and you have some real proof that you could do this. Maybe you're exceptional at video editing or writing or at systems or financial organization. Whatever it is, you've done it and it has work. It got results. You have a track record for what you do. Criteria number two, the result is clear and measurable. It's huge. The customer needs to be able to see and feel the outcome. A website that looks professional and works properly. For example, a podcast that's set up, that's edited, that's published consistently. It needs to be seen by the customer. Okay? This is proof that this person knows what they're doing. A set of thumbnails that are on brand and drives clicks to a video. A month of social media content that shows up every day for the client without lifting a finger. These are tangible things that customer could see and say, yep, this is what I'm looking for. The clearer the result, the clearer picture that you can show the customer. The easier the sale, the easier for them to say, yes, yeah, yeah, I can use that in my business. Don't bank on the fact they can imagine it. Okay? I used to do this all the time because I'm a very cerebral kind of person that can picture things in my head. A Lot of people can't do that. Okay. They need to actually see it with their own eyes. They need to see examples of what you're talking about so they can see what you could do for them. Criteria number three, zero to minimal startup cost. I don't want you to have any inventory. No equipment you don't have already. Okay. No upfront investment before you make your first dollar. And some traction to see if this thing has legs. A service business built around your existing sales costs essentially nothing to start. Just it requires a little bit of sweat equity. You don't need business cards. Please do not do that. No website is required from day one. You could pitch somebody on email. You don't need to establish an LLC or a PTY Ltd or anything like that before you have your first client sell it, then you build it, and that's the order. Don't try to build something and spend months and then go ahead and try to sell it and realize, oh, that's not what people want. First make the sale, see what actually sells. And then once you say, oh, that's what people want, then you can start building it. Hey, Fidelity. How can I remember to invest every month?
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With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.
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Oh, that sounds easier than I thought.
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You got this?
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Yeah, I do now. Where did I put my keys?
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You will find them where you left them.
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Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC.
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Member NYSE SIPC
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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.com 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. I want to give you some real numbers what this actually looks like. Let me tell you my story because I did not come up with this model. In theory, I lived it. When I left my teaching job, I became a full time entrepreneur. I needed to make money immediately. Bills are coming in. I didn't have a paycheck. I I had some skills though. I knew how to build websites. Not because I was a developer, but because I taught myself enough to get the job done. For some small businesses, I knew more than my clients. I wasn't the best by any means, but in one month I found three clients. At the start I was very intimidated. I was not so confident. So I only charged $1,500 for a website. So that's $4,500 in my first month as an entrepreneur. Month two I raised my prices to $2,000. I had two clients. Now I only made $4,000 cause I had two clients at 2000. But there was more potential to make more because now I'm raising my prices. So the current running total is 8500 in 60 days. The first two months. Month three and here is a part that surprises people. I raised my prices to $5,000 per website. I more than 3x my first price, my original price and more than doubled my second price. And to my surprise, it was a whole lot easier to sell a $5,000 website than it was to sell a 2000 or $1,500 website. I got four clients easily that's $20,000 in a month. So in 90 days I had $28,500 in revenue from zero with no startup costs. I had a computer. I just used the computer I had. I didn't have a fancy office. I went to a co working space that was free. Actually at the time it was Spons. I had no team. It was just me, just a skill, a clear result for my customer and the willingness to sell it, that's it. So the trajectory from $4,500, then $8,500, then $28,500, this is not a fantasy. It happened. And what happens is that when you find the right model and you start selling and then you build and you start raising your prices to start experimenting to see what works, you start to learn more about how to make it easy on yourself. The reason why it was so easy to sell a $5,000 website is because it didn't live in no man's land. 20001500 is kind of weird. It's like, why are you charging so little? What's going on with that? Attracted really strange clients, very difficult clients. 5,000 was like the beginning of like, okay, this is a legit person that's creating a website that's not wasting their time. And I want to stay on this point for a moment because it's counterintuitive, but it's important. Most people assume that charging more makes selling harder. My experience and the experience of almost every service business owner, every coach, every consultant is the same. Here's why. At low prices, you tracked who are price sensitive. They question everything. They want to negotiate everything. They require more handholding and more revisions. And they are the most demanding clients for the least amount of money. It's like a lose lose situation. You are spending a lot of time making little money. At higher prices, you attract clients who value results over the cost. They're easier to work with. They trust you, they trust the process. They pay on time, sometimes they pay even early. They refer other people at the same level. You get high level clients referring other high level clients. The jump I made from 1500 to 5000 is not just a financial upgrade, it's a client quality upgrade. And it made me up my game as a website developer because I was dealing with professionals. Raise your prices faster than it feels comfortable. Always feel a little bit almost embarrassed to say your price. That's the sweet spot. Hey, if you're enjoying today's episode, I highly recommend you subscribe to the channel because I'm releasing an episode really soon that I think you're going to absolutely love. It's called don't make these mistakes. When starting a business from home. If you want to get going and turning your $10,000 to 60 and you're going to do it from home, which most people will, then you need to make sure that you create the circumstances to allow you to be successful, to maximize your chances of success. There are a lot of mistakes people make that I need to make sure that you don't make so that you win. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Here's a mistake that kills almost every side business I've seen before they even make their first dollar. People build first and sell second. I mentioned this earlier, but I got to drill this home. They spend weeks, sometimes months creating a thing before they even have one single paying customer. That's just bad economics. They build themselves a website, they record the whole course, they design a logo, they set up systems and then they try to sell it. And then they find out the hard way that nobody wants it or the price is wrong, or the customer's wrong or where they packaging the product or who you're targeting is wrong. Maybe your whole idea needs to be different. All that work, all that time wasted. Here's the right order. You need to sell it first, validate it to make sure that somebody actually wants to pay for it. But you might be saying, omar, I sell content, I sell courses, I sell coaching. How can I show people that I'm legit if I don't create something and show it to them and ask them for their money? Fair question. But you're building out an empire of content and then selling it. What you need to do is do what they do in the software world, which is called minimal viable product mvp. You don't need to create a whole course. You can run one paid webinar that's an hour or 90 minutes where it just talks about one aspect of what you teach or what you provide. You charge a minimal amount, $19, $20, $100, whatever you want to do. See if people are interested enough to pay for this topic, to pay to learn how to solve this problem, and then you can build out whatever you want to build out based on what you learn. Now this is if you're selling information. And the example I gave today is selling a service based business. What I like to do sometimes is I like to run a webinar to learn about the pain points so I could build a service around it. Stop guessing what people want and start actually asking them in person or in a webinar. So let's get tactical the first week. What are you going to do before you spend a single dollar? Day one, identify your skill. What have you done in your job, in your life? In any context that produced a measurable result for someone, write it down, not what you're interested in or passionate about what you actually have done that has produced a win for somebody. Day two Define the result. What result are you promising your clients when they finish working with you? What do they get in exchange for the money they're paying you? Do not say the result is better social media presence. That's too vague. You need to say something like 30 pieces of content scheduled and published every month that is tangible. I can see that result, not improved operations. You're going to say something like a project management system fully set up and your team is trained on it within the first two weeks. Specificity is what makes the sale because there's a clear picture. And like I say over and over again, a confused mind never buys. Day 3 Identify five potential clients. Not strangers, people you already know, people that you've done business with, worked with, interacted with socially, personally. You're looking for people that have the problem that you solve. Think about the businesses you frequently maybe the corner cafe that you see all the time. Maybe you can solve a problem for them. Someone in your network, somebody who's complained about this problem before. Just write down five names. Day 4 Create your proof of concept. You want to mock up a sample, a design, a template, and you can easily do this with AI. You want one example of what the result looks like in practice. Paint them. An after picture doesn't need to be perfect after, but it needs to be something that they can see and look at. Day number five. Make the approach. Send a proof of concept to the first person in your list and show them what you can do. Some sample work. I'm going to give you a perfect example because this thing works like gangbusters. When we were looking to improve our design, our UX and UI user interface with our software Webinar Ninja, somebody approached us to apply for the job. And instead of just applying with our CV and filling an application, they sent me an email with a video that shows what they would do. An actual redesign of our website. This person Chris, just did the first page of our website or homepage. But I got to see what this person can actually do. And I was impressed by the choices they made, the decisions they made. And the website looked a lot like something that I wanted. And I was like, hey, I want that. I guess I gotta hire this person. And Chris became the designer on our team and created incredible results for us. But I knew because he showed me proof before we even agreed and hired him. So you can literally use a script, and I'm gonna give you an easy script you could just send them an email or even in person say, hey, I noticed your whatever you do, website, social media, your operations or content, whatever you do has an opportunity I could help with. I put together a quick example of what I think is possible. I'd love to show you what I can do for your whole business, Website, social media channels, whatever it might be. Would you be open to a quick conversation? That's it. That is the pitch deck. You don't need to talk about pricing. You just need to show them proof that you can help them out. For the love of God, do not send the email and say, hey, I'd love to have a chat with you. Can I have five minutes of your time and not attach proof of what you could do for them? No one's responding to that because that's a waste of time. I'm not wasting my time with somebody that is lazy to the point where they can't put something together to show me proof. Now you might be saying, well, Omar, I'm going to put something together. Going to take some time and effort. What if they don't use it? What if they don't hire me? You're right. They may not hire you, but you're increasing the likelihood of all the people reaching out to to hire you when you do this. Okay? You want to make sure that you are capitalizing every time you reach out to somebody and increase the likelihood of them saying yes. So instead of having to reach out to a hundred people to get one yes, you may not need to reach out to five people to get a yes. Before we wrap up, I want to give you some honest expectations. Okay? Month one, you're learning the sales process. You're making approaches, you're landing your first one or two clients. Realistic revenue is going to be about 2 to $5,000, depending on what you charge. Month two, you'll have a proof of concept, at least one testimonial from a client that you've worked with. And now you can start raising your prices. Realistically, you can start making four to $8,000. Month three, the process starts refining even more. You're getting more referrals, you're getting more testimonials. And now you could make some serious dough, like a thousand, maybe $10,000 a month, maybe $20,000, depending on what your price point is. And that's on top of your existing job. But remember, this is not infinitely scalable until you start hiring out and getting a team to help you with the workload, because you only have 24 hours in the day. So at some point you're going to have to make that leap. And you only can tell yourself how much revenue you need to make in order to make that leap to cover your expenses and of course, to cover the business expenses. Because this is not all profit. This is just your revenue. Depending on how much time you're spending or any resources you're spending on tools or anything else to make sure that you deliver on your promises to your clients. Listen, if you have less than $10,000, maybe you have $1,000, maybe you have $500 on the bank, and you might feel like you're behind and things are tight. And that's true. But what's also true is you can change things in an instant. And you have to see this as a starting line. And the difference between the two scenarios or the two mentalities of like, oh man, I'm behind and things are really tight, or hey, I can actually change things. And the way you start moving towards the positive is you have to take action. That's just the bottom line. In the next seven days, commit to doing the steps I outlined and gave you on a silver platter. Please just go ahead and start taking action. You could commit to seven days. If you do the things I told you to do in the first seven days, you will win. It's just inevitable. You'll start to feel like a winner. You'll start to feel like things are moving forward. You'll start to feel that there is light at the end of the tunnel. But by not doing anything, you're not changing anything. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. Hopefully you found today's episode helpful and a little bit of tough love. But if you want to take things to the next level, if you want to learn more, there's a recent episode we recently published called 5 Lazy Ways to Start a Business on the Side. This weekend, it's going to give you a little bit more fuel that you need to keep moving forward. 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 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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There's a reason Chevy trucks are known for their dependability. It's because they show up no matter the weather, push forward no matter the terrain, and deliver. That's why Chevrolet has earned more dependability awards for trucks than any other brand in 2025, according to J.D.
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power.
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Because in every Chevy truck, like every Chevy driver, dependability comes standard. Visit Chevy.com to learn more. Chevrolet received the highest total number of awards among all trucks in the J.D. power 2025 U.S. vehicle Dependability Study Awards based on 2022 models. Newer models may be shown. Visit J.D. power.com awards for more details. Chevrolet Together, let's drive.