A thread on how to turn $100 into a lot more:

People are spending a lot of money on their homes right now. Its time to go get some of that money and help out some of these people.

Sound silly? Good.

It really is this simple sometimes.

Lets go 👇

Get on your computer and buy a web domain.

Get a freelancer (upwork or fiverr) to make you a logo/flyer and get $45 worth of flyers printed at your local print shop.

Buy a box of sidewalk chalk if you really want to grind and get gritty.
Go downtown with the sidewalk chalk and write “pressure washing and home cleaning 888-555-1234” as many times as you can in high traffic areas.

Go to a middle class or high end neighborhood and hand out flyers on porches and wherever else.
Get creative. You might get ran off but its low risk. Target those with dirty payment.

Your cell phone will start ringing. Book all of the jobs for Saturday.

Rent a power washer Saturday morning with the other $50 and go make $300 in one day.
Do the same thing the next weekend and then buy a power washer. Then put $200 into a website and nurture a Google My Business location.

Get reviews, upload photos, make it look nice. 50% of your biz will come through here.
Make sure you pre-treat the concrete with a bleach mixture. It makes the job 2x as easy. Get some $1 gallons of bleach and cut it 1:5 with water in a 5 gallon backpack sprayer for $60 on Amazon.

Ask the customers nicely to use their water. Borrow Gma's Prius to haul the washer.
Make a youtube video introducing yourself and put your town and power washing in the title. Link to your website.

Make posts on Facebook Marketplace (this one is key).

Within a few weeks you'll be bringing in $1,000 every weekend.
When you hit $4k in a month its time to quit your job and get serious.

“On demand” is going to be your competitive advantage so you can charge a higher price. Make sure you can offer next day service or same day service. As soon as you get too busy to do that its time to hire.
Make sure that person is presentable and clean cut. Get a business polo shirt made at your local embroider.

Target students at first because they work hard and are reliable. They have summers off which is your busiest time.
Provide amazing customer service. Answer the phone every time and be in a super eager positive mood.

This along with the “on demand” nature will put you ahead of 99% of your competitors.
Make friends with realtors in town or watch the MLS and visit homeowners the week before an open house. A home looks a lot newer with a clean driveway.

Use google maps to measure concrete area and provide instant quotes over the phone. Put out yard signs with your logo.
Eventually buy a cargo van and have your own generator and water tank inside so you can be mobile and do more jobs and charge more money.
Grow from there. Start power washing entire parking lots for shopping centers.

Get the contract to do it twice a year for $15,000 per service.

You can get one of those big ride on power washers eventually and start doing larger commercial jobs.
As your company grows launch a branch in a neighboring city with a management hire. Then another city.

Sell the company or just cash the checks and sit on the beach with your family. You’ll likely get bored and end up building another business.
Side note:

I hired one of these guys to wash the exterior doors and walls at my Pittsburgh facility a while ago.

1 out of the 10 that I called could bring their own water.

3 weeks later he showed up with a crew of 2 folks. Took them 1.5 hours. Billed me $1,000. I was happy.
Don't like power washing?

This model works for any business (including my storage business we founded in 2011).

Here is a list of others to consider:

https://t.co/j73lX3rA0v
The big idea here:

Start SMALL.

Don’t try to change the world. Make that first $1000 and then level up. Then level up again.

Then you look back 10 yrs later and you’re making serious money and ready to change the world.
If you like this kind of thing you’d love my podcast - The Sweaty Startup.

I’m about to launch a private community on small business and entrepreneurship - get notified here:

https://t.co/FEt1sBoSWS

More from Nick Huber

Don’t have much cash but want to invest in real estate?

Want to get SBA loans and special loan programs so you can buy real estate investments with only 5-10% down?

One word for you:

Don’t.

Here’s why

👇👇👇

Leverage can be a beautiful thing.

Appreciation takes over and all that value you bought with debt grows and you amplify your returns.

But there is another, darker side of debt.


Values drop 5 or 10% and you’re underwater. You have zero equity or negative equity.

Ask the folks who were over-levered in 2007 what happened on 2011?

Real estate is a frothy space right now. Money flying everywhere and values higher than they’ve ever been.

Debt is cheaper and easier to get than ever.

Will it continue?

Probably.

Money could stay cheap for a long time. There is a ton of negative yielding debt abroad and liquidity ready to flood our market at the drop of a hat.

Rates will likely stay low. Gov will probably keep subsidizing these loans. You’ll probably be okay.

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THIS.

Russia hasn't been a willing partner in this treaty for almost 3 decades. We should have ended the pretense long ago.

Naturally, Rand Paul is telling anyone who will listen to him that Trump is making a HUGE MISTAKE here.


Rand is just like his dad, Ron. 100% isolationist.

They've never grasped that 100% isolationist is not 'America First' when you examine it. It really means 'America Alone'.

The consistent grousing of pursuing military alliances with allies - like Trump is doing now with Saudi Arabia.

So of course Rand has also spent the last 2 days loudly calling for Trump to kill the arms deal with Saudi Arabia and end our alliance with them.

What Obama was engineering with his foreign policy was de facto isolationism: pull all the troops out of the ME, abandon the region to Iranian control as a client state of Russia.

Obama wasn't building an alliance with Iran; he was facilitating abandoning the ME to Iran.

Obama wouldn't even leave behind a token security force, so of course what happened was the rise of ISIS. He also pumped billions of dollars into the Iranian coffers, which the Mullah's used to fund destabilizing activity [wars/terrorism] & criminal enterprises all over the globe
I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x