Grind to 5

Happy Sunday!

Remember my podcast with the alpine slide guy? We spoke again! This time about how he copied an indoor sledding business. You’re gonna love it:

• Youtube
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

I’ve got a great new Q&A episode coming out in a few hours and a holdco bros episode on Thursday. Enjoy!

And hey, if you wanna meet me in Shreveport to tour an RV park we have under contract, LMK here! It’ll be fun.

And hey again, thanks for your help last week! I’m feeling much more optimistic about my ability to continue to find things to write about now. I just want to write what I’m excited about, whatever that may be.

Remember my email about gem mining? Well I reached out to the Galleria Dallas with my idea and look at what they said:

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Booo! But is anyone surprised? I asked her about both bull riding and gem mining. If this were the only thing I were chasing right now I would find a few alternative ways to MIH - make it happen. But since I’m chasing a handful of things, I am going to let this simmer for now.

Remember my tweet about stump grinding? Well I’m still excited about that idea! So I did something about it. Here’s exactly what I did:

• I scraped 200 tree trimming companies in DFW.
• I texted all of them exactly this

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• Here are my results, give or take:
  • 15% response rate (30 people)
  • 4 are interested in subbing out jobs
  • 13 own a stump grinder
  • 8 sub it out
  • 5 don’t offer it as a service

I wasn’t super enthused by this, but I wasn’t discouraged either. Here’s what I’m thinking:

• There are ~1,000 tree trimming companies in DFW
• There are ~2,000 landscaping companies in DFW
• These companies do about 5-10 stump jobs per month
• If I can capture 5% of that market then I can do ~1,000 stump jobs per month at $350 each (very conservative), so $4.4m/year top line
• That would take about 7 crews and 1 manager.
• The labor costs on this including taxes would be about $1.2m/year
• The gas and overhead would very conservatively be $400k/year
• Back of the napkin says this could be a $2m+/year net profit business in DFW alone, and VERY franchiseable.
• Each crew would be x1 $60k grinder, x1 truck, x1 trailer and x1 person

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The beauty of this business is that the crew doesn’t need to drive out there twice to quote and then to actually DO the job.

The companies that refer all the work to us know our pricing and quote it for us, so we only need to drive out there once.

$350 isn’t super high ticket, but with basically no marketing costs and no wasted time and gas to go quote jobs, the margin is quite good.

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So what are we doing now about this?

We are hiring a hispanic cold caller this week to get 200 companies on the phone to conduct market research.

It’s basically phase 2 of what I did via SMS. Since he’s hispanic, he’ll be able to speak Spanish to Spanish crews, and non-hispanic crews will get the impression that we are more affordable since the caller is hispanic.

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Will it works? Who knows. But I’ll let you know either way.

Worst case, we waste some time and $500.

Best case, we have a cash cow on our hands.

This is why I love business. Thanks for reading. Short and sweet.

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As always, thanks for reading! Please share with a friend.

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner