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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2634 The Easiest Business To Start
00:13:51
Ever asked yourself, “What’s the easiest business to start if I want to earn quickly and keep things simple?” Tired of hearing about ecommerce, crypto, or the latest online trends—and wondering if there’s a better way to get paid for your skills? You're in the right place.
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Stripe is the go to choice for AI companies. From early stage startups to scaled enterprises. 78% of the leading AI companies use Stripe to go to market quickly and scale globally. That includes pioneers like Nvidia, OpenAI and Perplexity. Stripe has developed cutting edge tools to improve everything from fraud detection to checkout optimization. Whether you're aiming for incremental gains or planning for enterprise transformation, see how Stripe can help@swepe.com it's smart to always have.
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A few financial goals and a really smart one. You can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover you can get this Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you'll listen to this show see termsiscover.com credit card many people ask what's the easiest business to start? It's not E commerce, it's not dropshipping, it's not crypto, it's not print on demand or what. Whatever the algorithm pushing this week, it's none of these. It's a service based business. If you want to make money as fast as possible without raising capital, without hiring a team, without building an app, offering a service is the most practical and proven way to do it. But here's the thing, if you don't build it right, it can own you. I'm talking about 80 hour weeks burnout, zero scalability, barely any profit. You're going to wish you could go back to your job. Okay, so today I'm going to show you how you can start a service based business quickly and profitably and how to scale it so you don't burn out. 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'm gonna share with you the lessons that I learned by building my own service based business was the first business that I built when I left my teaching career and became a full time entrepreneur. This is why I'm recommending it as the easiest business to start because you don't need much to get started. If you're still questioning why a service based business, well the one big reason why I recommend it is because there is a lot lower risk with service based businesses because there's a low startup cost. You don't need inventory, you don't need tech, you don't need ads. You just need a skill and time and, and therefore it makes a great first business because you can afford to make some mistakes because the stakes are not high. Right? And you're able to recover from those mistakes and earn revenue quickly. This is the second reason why I recommend is it's quick when it comes to revenue. You can land a client this week and no need to build an audience first or anything like that. You're going to get paid immediately. It's also high margin, especially if you're starting out solo just by yourself. Basically you're just trading your time for money at the start in order for you to earn exponentially. Now, when you run a service based business, obviously you're gonna be able to charge more than your normal hourly rate because you're offering a result and not just your hours. But what I love most about a service based business is that it gives you market validation. You learn what people actually want and you learn fast. A lot of great other types of businesses, like software businesses, for example, like Basecamp, they were a service based business, they were an agenc and they built a tool to manage their agency, which was Basecamp. And then they sold that tool and that became their main business. I want to encapsulate why I believed service based businesses are one of the easiest businesses to start is that it's not only easy, it's educational. It sharpens your business instincts. You get to learn a lot about your customers by serving them. And when I say easiest, it doesn't mean it's totally easy, okay? It's just easy in comparison to other types of businesses, right? Like selling a physical product business like E commerce or starting a software company. There's less moving parts, there's less overhead, there's just a lot less to worry about other than your customers. So of course we're all about action here. So let me give you a step by step how to start a service based business fast. Okay? Number one, pick a service that you can deliver. Now just throw perfection out the window. No six month certification needed. Can you do something now for somebody that needs that service? Can you build a website? Can you edit video? Can you write emails? Can you manage ads? Can you organize back offices? Finances, bookkeeping. As long as you're decent, you're good, that's good enough. You can build upon those skills later on. Now what if you say to yourself, omar, I don't have any skills that I can really monetize. I'm not really sure even what I should do. My answer to you is learn something simple and fast. Okay? Like Learn how to edit a podcast. You can learn how to edit a podcast in a couple of weekends. You could take a course this weekend on social media marketing or how to ghostwrite LinkedIn articles. You could literally just go to like Udemy and find a course on any topic you're interested in. You'll know more than 99% of the people by just taking this course and implementing what you learned in this course. And now you got a service that you can deliver. You don't need 10 years of experience, you need just getting your customer a result.
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Stripe is the go to choice for AI companies from early stage startups to scaled enterprises. 78% of the leading AI companies use Stripe to go to market quickly and scale globally. That includes pioneers like Nvidia, OpenAI and Perplexity. Stripe has developed cutting edge tools to improve everything from fraud detection to checkout optimization. Whether you're aiming for incremental gains or planning for enterprise transformation, see how Stripe can help. And@swepe.com race the rudders. Race the sails. Race the sails.
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Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.
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For example, my service based business when I started my entrepreneurial career was building WordPress websites for my clients. My clients were bloggers and creators and they wanted to have a presence online so I created a simple website for them. I wasn't a fantastic designer so I didn't charge a lot, but I was able to deliver a working website because I just created something using templates, using some drag and drop tools. I knew enough tech so I can just deploy this website on a shared server and be able to give access to my client. Yes, there were thousands upon thousands of people that can create WordPress websites better than I could. Okay, but that's not the point. I was better than my clients and my clients were willing to pay me money to deliver something that they could not do for themselves. I found a niche. I was in a good sweet spot in terms of price for them and it just worked because I just decided that it's going to work. Okay. I just decided to do the work so I can get my clients given what they paid for and just repeat that cycle number two. Package it into a simple offer. I just kind of hinted on it, right? Don't sell your time Sell an outcome. For example, in my business I had a package which was a four page WordPress website. I was able to deliver that website within two weeks and that was a package that cost X amount of dollars. When I first got started, it only was $1,200. It was not expensive at all. And guess what? If they want five pages, six pages, I can charge more for that. But now they are paying for a result. They're paying for pages, they're not paying for my time. Another example is weekly podcast promotion. You know, four episodes per month will cost you $800 a month. I'm going to promote your podcast on social media. I'm going to, you know, create clips out of your podcast interviews and I'm going to publish them on your social media platforms. Another example is sales page copy that converts. Maybe for every sales page I'm going to charge $500 flat. Maybe there's a word limit. But the point here is that they are paying for a result, not your time. Be clear, be specific and be confident in what you're delivering. Number three, get your first three clients with zero ads. How do you do this? Well, use direct outreach. Forget websites, forget funnels. In the beginning DM about 50 people in your network. 50 people that you have in your phone, right in your phone. You, you know, contacts in here, people that you've met and known and gotten to know over the years. Some of these are friends, some of these are family members, some of these are ex colleagues, whatever it might be. Reach out to everybody you could possibly reach out to.50 minimum. I say because why? It's a numbers game in business. They say business is a contact sport. The more contacts you make, the more chances of success. You want to post value driven content about your service daily for two weeks on your social media. You may want to offer a free audit, a call or example and then you can pitch your service. So you could say, hey, if anybody wants a free audit of whatever you do, say for example, you do social media content. You want me to do an audit of your social media content? I'm happy to jump on a call and audit and tell you what you need to do to improve. Ask existing clients for referrals immediately. Like as soon as you deliver the work. Ask them, hey, who do you know that would benefit from my service that can use my expertise? Ask who do you know? Not do you know? There's a big difference because who do you know? Makes them think about who do I know? Who are the people that would do this? Do I know Is binary, yes or no. And it's easy just to say, I don't know anybody. And remember, don't market. You want to connect. In the service based business industry, it's all about connections and making relationships matter. Making sure that you're connecting on a deeper level with people. So that way you could build relationships that they trust you and that they can recommend you to other people. Okay, you are willing to do the work, you're willing to hustle, but that can't last forever. You gotta be able to scale so you're not working every waking hour. All right, so how do you scale without becoming a burnout case? Here's the real difference between a freelancer and an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur thinks in systems and not tasks. Number one, productize your service. Turn your service into a repeatable standardized package. Stop reinventing the wheel. Okay? Every client that comes by, you don't have to just reinvent everything and make a custom for them. No, start templating. Because what you'll find is about 90% of what you do for every client is going to be the same template. Start batching. Build an sop, a standard operating procedure. Document every step of the way of delivering what you deliver to your clients. Do this, even if it's just you right now. Because eventually you're going to make a hire and you want to hand that over to somebody else. They can read that SOP and they can implement easily. Number two, super important. Delegate, delegate, delegate, delegate. What's the first hire you make? Well, you're gonna first hire out your $10 tasks. I talk about this all the time. $10, $100, 1,000, $10,000 tasks. Your first hire should be some sort of assistant EA va, a specialist who does the work that you don't need to do that brings in your company $10. Or you can see it as like a $10 an hour task. A VA can handle things like email scheduling, invoicing. You can hire an editor. If you have to edit raw footage, you can get a developer to build what you're selling. All those little nitty gritty tasks that suck up your time need to start getting outsourced to somebody else. That's how you get your time back without killing quality. If you want a book on this topic, Buy Back youk Time by Dan Martell is a good book to start with. The concept is basic here. You need to spend your valuable time bringing in the big bucks. That simple. Everything else you need to hire for. So as soon as you start making profit, you need to start Allocating a budget to hiring a VA or EA to start outsourcing some of those low dollar tasks that don't bring in much money but you have to kind of do to run your business. Number three, raise your prices and fire bad clients. I know that sounds crazy, but it's necessary. I learned this from my good friend Michael Port. Michael Port is the bestselling author of Book Yourself Solid and many other books. But this book has a great concept in it. It's called Velvet Rope policy. You know that you know red velvet rope you see in like VIP areas or at a premiere of a movie and there's always like a bodyguard there, right? That's opening and closing the velvet rope to only people that are on the guest list or people that are allowed to get past this area. So you should have a red velvet rope policy for your clients only. The best clients should be served by you. As demand goes up for your service, your time becomes more valuable. Raise your rates. What I did is I raised my rates with every new client. So if a client drains your time and energy and soul, you can either raise your rates to a point where it's worth it or you can simply just say you can't take their work anymore and replace them with better clients that give you fulfillment and are willing to pay your new higher prices. You're not just growing a business, you're designing your life to make sure that you can have a sustainable business. Listen, if you hate the grind of your business, if you are struggling, struggling to get up in the morning, it's going to be very hard for you to succeed. So you got to build boundaries. You got to build a business that you're proud of, but one that you are looking forward to working in. Now I want to give you some parting advice here. I started as a service provider too when I was just getting started in my full time entrepreneurial career. I was doing a lot of side hustling when I was a teacher for 10 years and then when I became a full time entrepreneur I started a service based business. Like I mentioned, I didn't have a brand, I didn't have an audience. I just had the willingness to help other people and the guts to charge for it. That led me to the a hundred dollar MBA which led to Webinar Ninja, which was my software company I built for 10 years. And then we got acquired recently by Proprofs for a life changing exit and all the dominoes kind of followed after that. If I had to start from scratch today, I'd start with a service based business. Again, it's the fastest way to revenue and to skill development. Not only in what you're providing, but your skills as an entrepreneur. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you are broke, if you are stuck, if you are tired of overthinking, start by offering a service. Help someone solve a problem they already know they have. Start with something simple, deliver it well, do what you say you're going to do, get paid and then build the systems you need to scale it, raise your prices, buy back your time and then watch it grow. Thanks so much for tuning into the hundred dollar VA Show. If you want to build a profitable service based business or any type of that doesn't own you, you're going to want to subscribe to my three Things newsletter. Why? Because it's my weekly newsletter that allows me to coach you from afar. Each week I send you three things. Something to think about, something to do, and something to learn. That way you are getting better week after week. You are growing as an entrepreneur. It's absolutely free. All you got to do is go to 1000- MBA-NET, sign up for any of our free guides and you will be a part of the newsletter. You'll get the newsletter automatically without having to do anything. Pretty cool. Thanks so much for checking us out. If you found today's episode helpful, hit subscribe. Hit that follow button on whatever platform you're using to consume this content. It's the biggest thank you you can give me. Thank you in advance for doing that. I'll check you in the next one. Did you know that the pet industry is a booming $150 billion industry? People absolutely love their dogs, don't you? If you're looking for a new investment and love dogs, there's only one name you need to know. That's Dogtopia. Dogtopia is the largest, leading and fastest growing pet franchise in North America with 300 locations. 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