Transcription
Making hundreds of millions of dollars is not complicated. In fact, I would argue it's as simple as finding a boring business that you're willing to commit to.
I'm David. I'm CEO of Filterby, an air filter company that makes $22 million a month. Every day, I'm flooded with hundreds of boring businesses to invest in, and a few I've been willing to write million-dollar checks to. In just a few minutes, you'll understand the most important concepts and business models to make billions off of boring businesses.
There are two basic types of cash flow businesses I want to focus on: Property-oriented businesses and service-based businesses. I want to start by focusing on property businesses. These are appealing because people think of them as an easy way to make passive income. Let's look at my three favorites.
This first business can make anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000 per month and only takes a few hours to operate. In some cases, people have turned $2,000 investments in this business into millions. Paul Alex, a retired San Francisco police officer, started his ATM business in 2018 to supplement his income. He purchased his first ATM for $2,100 and installed it in a nail salon. That single machine generated him $500 of profit per month. Encouraged by the results, he gradually expanded his operation and started installing ATMs in other locations. By 2021, Paul owned over 30 ATMs nationwide. His ATM business was generating over $10,000 a month in profit, which allowed him to retire from his police job. Today, his company, ATM Together, earns over $8 million a year and helps others to start their own ATM businesses.
So, what was so smart about how Paul started this business? Well, first of all, he didn't go all in at the beginning. He still kept his day job. He had a specific opportunity locally within a nail salon where he knew the owners. And then when he did expand, he didn't do it all at once. He did it slowly. He went from one to two, two to four, and gradually expanded his ATM footprint.
The key in the ATM business is location and maintenance of your ATM machines. If you don't have money in the ATM machines for people to be able to take out, your ATM machine is not going to be making any money. If your machine breaks or is not functional for whatever reason, it's not going to be making any money and you're going to be responsible for fixing it. So, making sure you understand how you're going to build the infrastructure to be able to maintain your ATM machine and also to be able to continue to negotiate to keep your ATM machines in the right places. These are going to be the keys to being successful in this type of business.
I can't make a video about cash flow businesses without mentioning laundromats. According to an industry publication, there's a 95% success rate in laundromats, almost double the national average of a 50% success rate for most businesses. So, what makes laundromats appealing? Well, everybody is in search of that elusive passive income. And at least on the surface, laundromats look just like that. You find a good location, you put in some machines, people put in money, wash their laundry, you go, you collect those machines or you collect those credit card swipes, and your work is done. You pay for the building, pay for the water, you pay for the detergent, whatever the inputs for laundry would be. And then you can set it and you can forget it.
But it's really important to understand here that in business and in life, if it sounds too good to be true, it often times is. Laundromats can be a great investment, but remember, you're still going to be responsible for the maintenance of all those machines, for actually collecting that money, making sure that you have a safe, clean environment consistently, and most importantly, have the right location because people are not going to choose you if it's not convenient and not in the right area. Laundromats can be great profitable cash flow businesses and a great entry point for people to get started. But if you want to scale it, in my experience, it takes more capital than people often times realize. And that's one downside of laundromats from my perspective.
I will pay you $10,000 a month to start this next business. I was opening up our plant in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we had a problem. Our air compressor broke. This was during COVID, and they told me it was going to be 3 weeks before we could get a new one. I didn't know what to do because without an air compressor, it was impossible for us to run our business. I started scrambling and I found a local rental company that had a diesel version of this air compressor that we were able to get up and running within a couple of hours. I paid them $500 a day to rent this air compressor, but it was well worth it to be able to keep our operations going. That's when I first started looking into the rental equipment business.
There are companies all throughout the country every single day that have a need for a piece of equipment that they do not have on site. Any type of equipment you can imagine. This is where the opportunity comes. If you have that equipment in stock, in working order, ready to go, then companies will pay you a premium to rent that equipment on a daily basis. Even better, it's an incredibly tax-efficient business. Not something people think about. If you buy equipment for $100,000 and you're able to rent it out for $60,000 over the course of that year, you're actually able to write off 100% of that $100,000 against your income. So that $60,000 you make is tax-free. And think about now with all of this talk of tariffs and all of this change, one way or another, more manufacturing is likely to come back to the US. So, I think that the equipment rental business is only likely to increase over the next decade, making this an opportune time to be thinking about it, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy.
Yes, you're going to have equipment that you have to maintain. You have to figure out the logistics of how you're going to get that equipment from your place to that customer's place and making sure you're doing it timely. All overcomeable problems, but it doesn't mean it's going to be easy. I would encourage you to start small from the beginning. Really learn the ropes before you expand it. It's not the kind of thing that I would go all in on day one.
Those businesses we just talked about are generally good for making thousands. But if you want to make millions or billions, I actually don't think property businesses are the best way to scale. Services businesses, however, cost less to start and have more upside if you do it right. If you skip college and go to trade school, I genuinely believe this business may be one of the smartest ways to become a millionaire.
So, a few years ago, I decided to do this playbook. I had already built our air filter business into a decent size, but I really saw the opportunity in the service-based business and just how big service-based businesses can be. So, I decided to partner with a friend that I met back at Goldman Sachs to go out and start our own service-based business in the HVAC space. We call it Filterby HVAC Solutions. The beauty about the service business is very capital light. What it does take is knowledge and systems to be able to go out and scale it. That's why if I were starting out and I didn't have money, what I would do is go to trade school and really learn the HVAC industry, maybe even go out and work for a successful HVAC business for a while before getting started. So, if you have the knowledge and the ability to offer a good high-quality service at a fair price, you're going to be able to find a business model that scales.
So, how do you get started in something like this? You follow my exact playbook. You start locally. You start building in one small community, become the best, build your systems around that one specific community, and then you slowly start to expand it out from there. Social media and the ability to reach local communities at scale has completely changed the game. And what I found is most local businesses are still not really utilizing it in the ways that matter. They're still spending millions of dollars on outdated marketing tactics like billboards and radio, all of these types of things. When the reality is the attention has moved, the things that the younger demographics are looking for from these services has also changed. And so if you're able to tap into that, you can ultimately find a scalable business.
The hard part about service businesses is that they can be easy to start, but that means they can be hard to stand out. That's why I love this next business so much. I'll never forget when I first came back to Talladega, Alabama to start what is now Filterby. I was looking around at the local industry and you know what? There wasn't much. But one of the richest guys in town. Local unassuming country guy that probably didn't graduate the eighth grade, but he was extremely successful. And you know what business he was in? Emergency tow truck services. If your car stalled on the side of the interstate, he was the guy that you called that would come and tow you to get you out of harm's way. But this guy was even smarter. He realized that the real money was when the 18-wheelers had a problem and they needed to be towed. If you had an 18-wheeler that went down on this long stretch of I-20, he was basically the only person in the area that had the equipment needed to be able to get your truck towed quickly. And best of all, it was a high-margin business and he could basically name his price.
The beauty about this business is you don't have to start big. You just have to start in one truck, one service area. You buy the truck, start advertising, and you're in business. If you want to scale your business, you scale the number of trucks in the service area that you have. Obviously, the downside here, of course, is you've got to have the equipment. You've got to maintain your trucks, and you've got to have qualified drivers that are rated to be able to go out and do it. Not easy, but overcomeable, and certainly can be scalable.
Not enough people are talking about the fact that there's an $80 billion boring business that you could start today. Patrick Dovigi, a hockey player from Ontario, Canada, started GFL or Green for Life in 2007. He began by managing several small Ontario waste management companies, then aggressively expanded by making more than 100 acquisitions. His big break came in 2011 when GFL won a Toronto trash collection contract, beating out much larger competitors. Under his leadership, GFL grew from a small local business to a multi-billion dollar empire. Now serving customers across Canada and the US with over 20,000 employees. Today, GFL is publicly traded and recognized as one of the top waste management companies in North America.
So, why is waste management so great? Well, it's a huge market. It's something that basically every home or business needs. They need their trash picked up. Is trash collection an easy business? No. There are environmental concerns. There are lots of large players already in the market. So, how would I get started if I wanted to get into this? Well, I would study my local market and find what is my local service missing. And the answer may be very different depending on the community. Maybe you do your research and find, hey, they're only picking up one day a week, but I know that there's enough demand for, you know, doing it two days a week or doing it on a different day of the week. Maybe that's your opportunity. I don't know. But my guess is if you study it closely enough, you may find an angle that you're going to be able to exploit. That little angle might become your gateway to a multi-billion dollar business if you play your cards right.
If you're committed to changing your life, make sure your business follows my cash flow checklist. If you do, it could save you from making mistakes that could cost you thousands. The first step to running a boring business has absolutely nothing to do with how much you make, but how much you spend.
A few years ago, I met a guy named John at a small conference that I was attending. John owns a window cleaning business. What tools did he need in order to do that? He had invested in a squeegee, a bucket, and some soap. And he started cleaning windows for a bank. Today, John runs a business doing $10 million of revenue at 40% net margins, meaning he's clearing $4 million a year in a window cleaning business. This is an example of a perfect boring business.
One of the values of starting lean and by doing the processes yourself is later on when you actually want to scale that business and start to build the systems, then because you've worked in the business and you know the pain points of that business, you're able to come up with systems that solve those pain points. That's one of the secrets for me early on when I was building Filterby. We now have a thousand employees, but there is not a job in any of our factories or in any of our processes that I have not personally done.
People will tell you stories about businesses that take months to get their first sale, but the truth is most successful businesses have models to get up and running fast. I had customers before I started our air filter factory. How do you do that? Well, I actually started out by drop shipping. Very low margin. Made almost no money in the early days doing that. But I was doing that to keep my risk low in order to prove out my business model. Only after I was convinced I had a system that was going to repeatably get me new customers consistently did I take the leap and actually invest the money in the manufacturing process to make those filters. If you take that approach, then it's way lower risk. Maybe it takes you a couple more months to get to market because you're delaying yourself a little bit, but it keeps your risk effectively zero.
You can do this in any type of a business if you're just a little bit creative. If you have a service, think about creating a landing page, running some Google ads to it, and seeing how many people will click to buy. Then maybe you find somebody else to actually deliver that service for them if that's what it takes once you sell it. But you've validated the idea, and you know whether or not you have a system that is going to get consistent business for whatever it is you're looking to build. And that's exactly what you need to do in validating your boring business early on.
Even though you need to watch your costs and be plug-and-play, you still need to be able to compete. If you follow my third step in the checklist, you'll instantly be able to. When Domino's started in the 1960s, it focused on just one college town, Michigan. The founders learned exactly what local students wanted: fast, affordable pizza delivered right to their door. They tailored their menu, hours, and delivery processes to fit the needs of their local community. This hyperlocal focus allowed Domino's to perfect its delivery model and customer service before it expanded. The lessons learned from serving one neighborhood became the foundation for building a global franchise. Even today, Domino's are run by local operators who know their neighborhoods, which helps them to stay competitive and responsive to local tastes.
I love this example because it highlights just how important it is to be local when building a cash flow business. Oftentimes, a mistake I see people make is they try to expand too quickly. Focus is the key to success. If you spread your resources too thin early on, you're going to lose focus and ultimately are going to fail. You're way better off focusing on a narrower customer segment, whether that be a super local community or a specific avatar for a customer base, and really focus on your systems before you expand.
If you like this video, this was the first one on a series of how anyone can make $10,000 per month. Subscribe if you want to see episode two.