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Hi, everyone, it's Morgan DeBond. Today's episode, we're going to talk all about how you can start a business with $2,000. What I would do if I needed to flip that money fast and build an empire, how I would do that. If you're looking for a side hustle, if you're looking to make more income, if you're looking for another way to step up your game and create a new business, this is the episode for you. I'm going to go into how I would do them, where I would pull the resources and plan. Hopefully this helps give you inspiration so that you can just get out of your head and start making more money. Even if you have your 9 to 5, you can absolutely have a side hustle. And it is imperative that you have more than one stream of income. I talk about this all the time. You need more than one stream of income so you can live your best life, have more freedom, and have more discretionary income to reinvest in yourself and your family. Hey, everyone. I'm Morgan debon, a passionate entrepreneur and life advisor. With the Journey podcast, you'll discover that success isn't about the destination, it's about the journey. I'm sharing stories of amazing people who've taken control of their lives. Join me on my own journey to discover the secret sauce behind reaching success. With permission from no one else, let's get into it. All right, business number one that I would start if I only had $2,000 and somebody was like, all right, girl, you got 2K. What are we going to do? I would start a transcription business. Transcription businesses are basically where you would take different, different products or people would hire you to transcribe things for them. So, like this podcast, for example, I could hire someone to transcribe what I just said. The reason why this is a really smart business is because of artificial intelligence. You can use tools that will basically do 95% of it for you, and then you can go in and make sure that it actually sounds good. Bonus tip. If you speak another language, you can also make way more money doing this because you can transcribe things from English to Spanish, or Spanish to English, whatever your language is, because people are always going to be willing to pay for convenience. Always, always, always. No matter how much technology is out there, there is someone who does not want to learn AI, does not want to look up all the tools to do it themselves. They are much more willing to pay you to do it for them. A transcription business would be super easy. I would post on LinkedIn, I would post on Craigslist, I would post on Upwork Fiverr and probably on like Facebook Marketplace or some other sort of, like, localized thing that would help me build a transcription base. And I would look for probably like older people who really just aren't trying to use the Internet, people who are just so far removed from all the tools that are out there. Because then I could charge a premium. Okay. And that's something else to think about, is how do you find the right audience and the right customer and right client who is gonna value your service or your product outsized to what you know, it actually costs you to make or build? Okay. Even for this podcast, we use Riverside FM to film this podcast. It has a free transcription service. If I were not an informed podcaster, I could have. My podcast producer could have charged me for an additional transcription fee for every episode, and I probably would have paid it because I wouldn't know any better. Okay, Now, I'm not saying take advantage of the people, but I am kind of saying to be smart, to not take for granted that knowing how to use tools and systems and products is actually a way that you can monetize your skill set and make more money. That would be one of the things I would do to flip 2k. The second thing I would use for the 2k is I would actually go on upwork to hire people who know other languages if I don't, so that I can offer a wider suite of services. So I would use some of the 2k as cash flow to just kind of hire different people, use it for a little bit of marketing and advertising. And I bet you this business would make like anywhere between three to $5,000 a month easy. Number two, video editing, similar transcription. Video editing is a commodity. It is something that is more increasingly automated using sites like Descript or other sites that will very quickly even cap cut very quickly edit your videos for you, or you can edit it for someone else. This is another convenience product because a lot of people don't want to edit videos. They are not interested in chopping up little clips and trying to make them make sense or put them into a narrative flow. They're not interested in that. But if you have the time, you could absolutely make another two to $5,000 a month offering a video editing packages to social media influencers, to podcasters, to your local small business deli who needs content for their Instagram. And they're like, I can shoot the videos, but I don't know how to put them together into something that makes sense. So video editing would be my second business, similar to the transcription business. You could absolutely hire video editors on a place like Upwork or Fiverr if you wanted to scan scale that business more quickly. But you also could totally do it yourself. You don't need to have specialized skills to do the basic type of video editing that you see mostly on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, et cetera. The next business I would do if I had 2k is a voiceover business. Now I would do a voiceover business because as things like videos rise, a lot of times you need a voiceover and there are these websites that you can upload to your voice and people will pay you like $300 or $500 to record something in your voice. You don't have to be an actor. You don't need to have training. It could just be your everyday voice. You don't need to change a thing about you and someone will pay you just to read a script. You could literally just be in your socks, in your pajamas, in a bathtub, and you could be making money doing a voiceover business. You could be driving to work. Okay, maybe not. Maybe not driving to work. You could be riding the train, you know, and the point is, think about the things that are just so easy for you. You can monetize your voice. A lot of times when people are starting businesses, they're overthinking it. And what I really try to help people understand is, do you want to be a business owner? Do you want to be an entrepreneur? Do you want to have the title more than you want to make income and actually just have a really boring business that makes money? Which one is it? Because sometimes I see people who are struggling with their side hustle with being whatever they decided to make or build, they're literally losing money. They're spending more money than they make because they had to invest in all this inventory. They're investing in marketing, they're investing in coaches, they're investing in designers, whatever. And I'm like, okay, but like, we could just go make money over here real quick. It's not sexy. You can't put it in your bio. You're not going to put it on LinkedIn, but you're getting more income. And the question that I have for you is, do you care more about making more income, or do you care more about having a title that says you're an entrepreneur and it being something that other people can look at and say, oh, my God, that's so cool. You gotta ask yourself that question. And my hope for you, if you're listening to this podcast, if you're watching this video, is that you're able to put your ego aside so that you can actually make more money this year with a side hustle that produces significant income for you without you having to work that hard. Okay, the next thing that I would do if I had $2,000 is I would be a product flipper. There are so many things on Facebook, Marketplace and estate sales where people are literally giving things away for free. Those things hold value. And I would spend all day running around Nashville, Tennessee, going over all these suburbs and say, okay, you know, I'll pick up that chair for you. I'll pick up that. That stroller that's old. I'll pick up that bassinet that you use and you only for a year. And I would resell that thing. I would clean it up, get a magic marker remover. I would, you know, do a paint job if I needed to spruce it up. I would replace a button if something was missing. A button, whatever the little it is. I would use my $2,000 to spruce something up, and then I would resell it. And. And I guarantee you, I would make three to five thousand dollars a month. Easy, easy. That's how I would do it. I ain't got the time, but if I had the time, that's what I would do. All right, the next thing that I would do if I had $2,000 is I would start a virtual assistant agency. So many people are open to having a virtual assistant, a personal assistant, or an executive assistant, but have a hard time finding really good talent domestically or internationally that can support them virtually. And also, people don't know how to use assistance. People oftentimes ask me, well, what can I delegate? What kind of task can I give someone? And I'm like, what do you mean? What are you doing all day? You know, are you scheduling things? Are you filing paperwork? Are you responding to emails? Are you booking travel? Are you researching where you're going to travel? Are you researching how to use your points in the most effective way? Any small task that you're doing can be delegated to someone else. A virtual assistant is a great way to do that. They can be US based, which is going to be a higher cost, or they can be in another country, like the Philippines, which is going to be a lower cost. The key is, if I created a virtual agency, I would just make it easy for people. I would say, hey, here's a list of the 20 things your virtual assistant's going to do for you. Here's a package of two to ten hours a week. You can scale it up, you can scale it down, but it requires a minimum commitment. And then I would go higher. Two, two to three virtual assistants who would then each have two to five clients. We would all make a lot of money together. I would take a little bit of a margin off the top for making it easy for the customer. And I would actually let the virtual assistants have all the money because they gotta do all the work. But I would charge a convenience fee for the fact that we were managing either the matching service if they want to just find someone, or actually helping that person manage a virtual assistant and make sure that they always had someone available. This business could make me bank 10k plus a month, probably more, honestly. And it's something that, I mean, people do have huge staffing companies that do this specific thing, which is just match talent A with talent B and the customer, and help make it easy for them to work together. The next thing I would do is social media graphics packages. I would do packages. Now, the key here is packages. I don't wanna do one off social media graphics, but I would absolutely spend time or money hiring another graphic designer to create templates for me. And then I would offer those templates to a potential customer and I'd say, hey, here's the 10 templates that we have. I can revise them or update them for you, but I would basically do an arbitrage and I would let the graphic designer know this is what I'm going to do. Like, I would have all the rights, I'd make sure that the contract was really clear, that I could resell their base products. But that way I would have a 10 to 20 preset templates in my portfolio. And I would say, hey, social media creator, would you like this template? And I would start to market these templates and I would charge a reasonable price for them. But let's say I spend a thousand dollars getting these templates put together, or $2,000 actually getting the templates put together. That's a sunk cost. Then everything after, once I get the return on that investment, I'm just creating profit every single time. And I could even hire a virtual assistant to actually update the graphics for me if I felt like I didn't have the time to actually update the graphics per creator. So these are the things, you guys. I need you to think differently this year. I need you to think about how you can connect services and help make someone else's life easier. I also want you to know that it doesn't necessarily mean you have to be the one doing the work. You can be the arbiter of the pieces and put all the pieces together and package it up in a way that somebody else is willing to purchase. So the next thing that I would do to make money if I had $2,000 is an oldie but goodie. I would buy products from overseas. I would likely use Alibaba to source the products because that's the most direct wholesale option in China. And then I would build a drop shipping company. I would buy a bunch of inventory. I would do research on Amazon. I would do research based off of like what I knew to be true in the world. I'd probably test a portfolio of products. I wouldn't put everything all in one basket. One of the challenges with this business is that there's typically moqs, which stands for minimum order quantities when you're buying from overseas. So $2,000 wouldn't get me that far. So I'd have to start probably with a really cheap product. I'd have to work hard on this one. But if you figure it out, if I actually was able to get people to convert, then that business runs on autopilot because you are able to get the products, ship it to the US I'd have it in my house. I wouldn't even pay for a storage unit. And then I would ship it, start shipping it out. Eventually I would give the product to Amazon to ship for me so I wouldn't have to do the work. But a drop shipping business is absolutely feasible. And there's a million and one resources on how to do this. And there's probably literally a hundred millionaires that all they do is just buy things from China and resell them to you on Amazon. The next thing that I would do if I had 2, 000 is start a balloon company. I would start a balloon design firm. Listen, the amount of money that people spend on these balloon arches in Nashville, Tennessee, in pretty much any city with mothers and women and just people who have parties, I would make a killing with these balloon companies. Everybody loves an aesthetic moment. Building a balloon arch does not require a master's degree in design. You know, there are DIY tutorials that I can look up on YouTube on how to do this. It might take me a couple of tries. I might have to practice a little bit, but eventually I would figure it out. And you can charge anywhere between $400 to $10,000. Maybe not 10,000, but a lot. You could charge a lot for these balloons, okay? People will buy them. People will always buy them. They will buy them on repeat. You can have 10 designs that you have mastered and then you just offer those designs in different colors. Boom, done. And every weekend you could make tude $4,000. If you do three to ten balloon arches for a weekend set. I would probably also use the money to hire someone to deliver the balloons. Like, I would not want to be the person in the truck driving around and doing all the things. So I would definitely hire an intern or like some other sort of administrative coordinator to help install these balloon contraptions with me. But in the beginning, I might do it all by myself because that's what you do when you're starting. Okay? You gotta start and do the work yourself. You've gotta understand how it's done, how long it takes so you can properly price it and properly build out a business. And last but certainly not least, I would start an inflatable rental company. Similar thread to the balloon company. The amount of money people spend on these little bouncy houses for their kids birthday parties. But you only need one, right? So I would start with two things. Two or three things for 2K, I would go back on next door, I would go on Craigslist and I'd go on Facebook Marketplace and I would advertise it and I would start to book it. And then after a few weeks, I'd probably make enough money that I have a return on my investment and I could buy more inflatables and I would just keep reinvesting for the first like three to six months until I had an inflatable empire in my garage. And then I would be rich. Here's the thing, people. The thing is every business that you make does not have to be an award winning Forbes 30 under 30 recognition. You know, something that your mom's going to be proud of because you're in the COVID of entrepreneurship or magazine. It doesn't have to be that way. The Internet has fooled us into thinking that everything that we do has to be something that someone else can see for it to be worthy of our time. If your main focus and your main priority and your main pillar is to increase your flexibility, increase your income, maintain your day job so you still have stability. Oftentimes starting one of these boring businesses where you're arbitraging things that people don't want to do but could do themselves is the way to go. So hopefully this episode was helpful for you. Let me know in the comments in your reviews. What boring business you're going to start this year. I cannot wait to see. And you know, let me. Let me borrow $5 while you're at it. Thanks for listening to the Journey podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave a review and head to our Instagram and YouTube to leave a comment. And look forward to hearing how this podcast has made an impact on your own Journey.