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6 BORING Businesses that Always Make Millionaires (90% success rate)
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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-doll 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 on the
beginning. He still kept his day job. He
had a specific opportunity locally
within 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 if it sounds too good to be
true, it often times is. Laundry mats
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 CO 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
taxefficient 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 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
taxfree. 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 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 filter by
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 highquality 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 Tallaladega,
Alabama to start what is now filter by.
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 I20, 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 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 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 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 cost 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
taste. 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
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