Why "Foot in the Door" Business Models Are the Best

AKA offering 2+ services, where 1 is the easy sale to get your foot in the door, & the other is the real cash cow2 cool examples:

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1st emample:

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My buddy owns a company that does vent hood cleaning for restaurants, but that's not his moneymaker. He'll quote the job at break-even to undercut his competitors that only offer that 1 service. Once he's done the job and earned their trust, he'll sell them on the real recurring moneymakers:

Degreaser & frying oil recycling

He'll sell them 5 gallon buckets of powdered degreaser that he white labels and drop-ships from a manufacturer, and they LOVE IT. It takes almost no work on his part. That's good for a couple hundred per month. But the real money is in the frying oil...Restaurants will pay him to pick up their used frying oil. >100% gross margins? Yes, please!

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If the oil is in good condition then he will actually pay the restaurant for it, because of how much easier it is to recycle. He takes it back to his processing facility where he refines and and resells it to a wholesaler. This is where the stupid margins are made. His biggest customers are regional franchisees with 10-50 locations. He has operations in about a dozen states and it's a massive biz. You'll never see this guy on X, or any social media for that matter. His website is ugly and he drives a beat up truck. But he is quietly printing millions.

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2nd example:

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I once owned a company that would recycle broken iPhone screens. The sales call went like this, "Hey, you know that box of broken iPhone screens under your desk right now? We'll pay $4 each for them. Where should we email the shipping label?" Stupidly easy. Once we earned their trust we'd sell them $2,200 worth of new iPhone parts every month, with a 93% reorder rate. We scaled to 8 figures and then exited with that exact model.

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What other foot in the door B2B opportunities are out there?

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Follow me @mhp_guy if you think business is cool.