Friday | Episode #185

🎤 Jay-Z likes to say he's not a businessman. He's a business, man. He built an empire by owning the parts nobody saw: the label, the catalog, the brands, the assets.

That's the energy we like. The best businesses aren't always the trendiest. They're the ones quietly built around ownership, cash flow, and overlooked opportunities.

Proof over hype. Numbers over noise. Last call before the weekend.

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What’s the problem?

Every home and business with a septic tank needs it pumped on a schedule, forever. Nobody wants to become a septic hauler, learn the disposal rules, or buy the truck. And thousands of these old local companies are run by owners near retirement who never modernized.

That's the gap: the best opportunity often isn't starting something, it's buying a boring, working business and running it better.

What's the big idea?

Buy an established local-service business with recurring demand, then add the basic systems the old owner never did: routing, scheduling, pricing. The route is already there. The efficiency is the upside.

►Dan Spracklin bought Gray Brothers, an 80-year-old septic-pumping company doing about $1 million a year with 22,000 customers, in 2013 with no industry experience. In two years he grew it to $3 million and pushed margins from 10 to 15% up over 30%, mostly by reconfiguring routes, adding GPS dispatch for emergencies, raising rates that hadn't moved in eight years, and adding inspections and repairs. He actually cut the fleet from five trucks to three while raising output.

Zooming out: the goal isn't pumping tanks, it's owning a recurring route and running it tight.

Think: grease-trap cleaning, portable-toilet rental, well service, drain cleaning, any unsexy route business a boomer is retiring out of.

🥢 The winners buy density and add services. Once you own the trucks and the customer list, every inspection and repair you upsell is margin on a route you already drive.

🍜 The risk is that this is an operational grind. You're hiring drivers in a labor shortage, following state hauler licenses and EPA disposal rules, and a used vacuum truck runs $40,000 to $300,000 before it earns a dollar. Buy the wrong route density and the math stops working.

The Ramen Hustle next step:.. find one retiring owner. Look for a boring local-service business with recurring customers and an owner near retirement, and learn what it would take to buy it.

The goal isn’t to pump tanks.

It's to own a recurring route and make it efficient.

You might also like ⇢ How I turned one laundromat into 24

Fake teeth, real fortune

In the mid-1990s, Jonah White, fresh off failing to make the NFL and about a year of actually living in a cave behind his parents' cabin, saw a guy wearing fake buck teeth at a Missouri football game. He learned to cast teeth in a dental lab and funded the first run by pawning his handgun for $400.

By 1998 he was shipping about 9,000 sets a day out of his parents' house, and Billy Bob Teeth closed on its 20 millionth set sold by 2012.

Still cooking: yes, now a ~200-product novelty company that also sells a million-plus Instant Smile veneers.

The cave was the cheap part. The teeth were the fortune.

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

Who used it: Tom Alder grew Strategy Breakdowns to 55,000 subscribers in 14 months, 74% of them from LinkedIn.

The recipe: Every day, spend ~30 minutes before you post your own thing. Leave 15 to 20 thoughtful comments on the posts of bigger creators in your niche. Then publish, while your profile is warm.

🍜 Why it works: a good comment on a big creator's post gets shown to that creator's audience, not just your followers. You're renting their reach for the price of one sharp sentence, and posting right after means your profile is warm when curious readers click through.

Swap this for your niche: change whose posts you comment on. Pick the accounts whose audience already overlaps your customers.

The case for: 2.7 times earnings for a 26-year-old certified aerospace and medical shop, with $6.5M of hard assets and real estate included, looks like buying a business and getting the building nearly free.

The case against: a 77% SDE margin is impossible for a real machine shop that pays machinists and buys tooling, so the SDE is padded. The listing itself concedes EBITDA is about $1.2 million, which makes the real multiple closer to 5.6x, a full price, not a steal. Add aerospace and medical customer concentration and a 76-year-old owner walking out the door.

🥢 Buy or pass? At 5.6x EBITDA with concentration risk and a retiring owner, is the free real estate enough to say yes? Hit reply with your call.

💡 On Our Radar: The biggest self-storage operator closed the quarter at 93% occupancy, proof the boxes stay full even as the building boom cools.

🧲 Swipe File: SaaS Landing Page curates roughly 940 SaaS landing pages you can study section by section, from pricing tables to testimonial blocks.

🛠️ Useful Little Tool: Dub, the open-source link shortener, gives you branded short links, QR codes, and click tracking on a real free tier.

💰 Solopreneur Win: A freelance writer-designer posted every line of his math and made $33,816 pre-tax in his first 12 months on his own.

🌱 Quiet Opportunity: Radon mitigation jobs run $1,500 to $2,000 each, and 40% of operators report rising demand as disclosure rules tighten.

🧾 Money Model: App-based wash-and-fold laundry prices dirty clothes at $1 a pound with a $30 minimum and no storefront required.

🎯Check out our free Replace Your Rent Calculator

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