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Originally Posted by KaraG
40 businesses - that is impressive and fascinating. What sorts of businesses?
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Service businesses. Dry Cleaning, Hair Salon and Nail Salon mostly. She was a tricky one though....It was more than once where she'd sell a business and then set up a new one a block away. Ultimately that penchant for foul play undid her (well that and Parkinson's)...but there was no denying she was an able entrepreneur.
Another colleague I was cleaning things up for started in the phone repair business, later moving to accessories and rentals....then an agency, photography, interior design and finally commercial complexes. Went from delivering pizzas only on days he could rent a car of $9 for the day to having ownership stakes in $500M in real estate. Granted, he had some wickedness take hold of him as well, which is why he needed me, but there's no denying he was an able promoter of multiple things.
Another couldn't get a job so he started a jan san shop for overnight cleaning of offices. He turned those profits into condos, and when we last spoke he had 9 that were clean out the door.
Another did some sort of oven cleaning for restaurants. Trailer park kid with rough and tumble friends he organized. He now operates in 8 States and doesn't lift a finger anymore.
There's more. There's so many more. You go to any plaza and look differently, you may see them. At some point you stop figuring out what you want to do, and you just look at what people are willing to pay for that you can do, or can get people to do. And you have to have yourself inline. Keep off the drugs, bad habits, indolence and envy. Know up front some stuffed shirt is going to lord it over you....never knowing you make 4-5x what they do in a year.
Next time you drive up and you see some dude with a couple things of flowers trying to sell them to you while you're in your car....look harder. Off in a ditch you'll see more flowers. Get there at the right time and you'll see a guy dropped off that's part of a bigger organization. One that's figured out how to move excess flowers without additional lease expense....and forget sales tax...while consuming Ricardo's time even though he's been in country for 2 weeks.
Someone figured out that waxing buttholes is something people pay to have done. Sounds gross and degrading right? Now figure $50 for 20 minutes worth of work. That's $1200 on a full day. Say you've got 2/3 of that, or $800 a day. Lot of these places are open 7 days a week. That's crazy, but...it's not like there's stress. Besides, that's $5K a week or $20K a month, drop $7K on rent and consumables and that's still $13K a month...or $150K a year....net of tax effect, that's about the same as an internal medicine doctor's starting wage....and they're poking and prodding buttholes as well, but on sick people after spending 10 years in college.
One couple started painting crappy ceramics to sell at fairs. They got so big they outsourced the work and just ran the fair circuit selling things....to the tune of $10M a year.
The key is simply finding something people will pay for and having the team to actually do it. The rest is noise that you'll hire people to make better. Don't worry about that until you've figured out the first step.