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From Zero to Side Hustle
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The feedback you get after your third draft
🧁 The Great British Bake Off has run for sixteen years on a tent, a simple format, and contestants who are mostly competing for bragging rights. Every attempt to make it bigger or louder seems to miss the point.
That’s the kind of business we like. Small by design. One unglamorous thing, done well, on repeat.
You don’t need a hundred million dollars or perfect timing. Sometimes you need a truck, a list, and someone willing to do the boring part on a Tuesday.
Ovens on.
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First Up, Our Sponsor
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The Next $435B Energy Empire Is Being Minted
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The Pews Wear Out Every Thirty Years
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
A sanctuary full of oak pews is a serious asset, and the finish eventually goes. The wood scuffs, the upholstery flattens, and a board finally has to decide.
They want them restored. They don’t want a capital campaign or a volunteer with a belt sander.
That's the gap: church congregations want the sanctuary to look right again, and replacing it costs five times what fixing it does.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Refinishing and reupholstering church seating, priced against the alternative. A twelve-foot pew costs roughly $2,400 to $6,000 to replace and about $540 to reupholster at Woods Church Interiors rates.
The job is furniture repair. The sale is a board meeting about money.
►Greyson Boerner searched eighteen months before buying Worship Interiors Group, a 28-year-old shop in Riverside, California, for roughly $1.15 million against $400,000 of seller's earnings, on an SBA loan at 15 percent down. Revenue climbed to $1.38 million while the deal was still in diligence, quietly dropping his effective multiple closer to two times earnings. He is pacing toward $2 million in year one.
Zooming out: a customer who never returns is not a customer you cannot find.
A church needs this once every 25 or 30 years, which should be fatal. It isn't, because churches don’t relocate. This year's measurements are the leads for 2050.
🥢 The winners will be the operators who advertise in a niche where everyone waits for the phone. The moat is not that nobody else can do the work, it is that nobody else goes and gets it.
🍜 The risk is a shrinking customer base. Lifeway counted 4,000 US churches closing against 3,800 opening in 2024, and no customer repeats in a lifetime, so every dollar has to be bought again from scratch. The marketing is the business, not a lever on it.
Schools, courthouses, lodges, theaters. The goal isn’t to refinish pews. It’s to own a permanent map of buyers nobody else mails.
You might also like ⇢ The Steeplejack Business: Nationwide, Family-Owned, Zero Competition
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Funko Pop Flipping
Why everyone's here: for a few years this was the cleanest entry-level flip in retail. Camp a Target exclusive, grab the chase variant, list it that night at four times what you paid. It needed no skill, no storage and no capital, and it genuinely worked.
The evidence it's crowded: Funko releases thousands of figures a year in runs of tens to hundreds of thousands of units. The company manufactured away its own scarcity, then had to deal with the consequence: rather than keep paying to store what it could not sell, Funko destroyed between $30 million and $36 million worth of inventory. Its own FY2025 results put net sales at $908.2 million against $1.05 billion the year before.
🚩 What's happening to prices: Antique Trader put Funko on its avoid list, with common Pops now moving at $5 to $15, loose figures at $3 to $8 and often not worth the postage, and the retailer exclusives that were the entire trade landing at $15 to $30. Figures that once sold for hundreds now resell for a fraction, and collectors tracking the market land in the same $5 to $15 band. Nobody pays $30 for something they can still buy new for $12.
The narrow door: genuine convention exclusives and true grails still clear $40 to $150 and up. That is a collection with good taste, not a business. There are only a few hundred of them, you have to already know which, and the ones worth owning are the ones nobody sells.
The skill that made this work, spotting mispriced inventory fast, still pays. Point it at a category where supply is finite and somebody else controls it.
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The Ten-Cent Notebook That Boeing Paid $1.5 Billion For
In 1930 a Boeing Air Transport mail pilot named Elrey Jeppesen bought a small black notebook for ten cents. Flying the mail meant flying in weather with no charts worth the name, so he started writing things down: runway headings, field lengths, the phone numbers of farmers who would tell him what the sky looked like. To get the elevation of the hills he was flying between, he climbed them on foot with an altimeter.
Other pilots wanted copies. He started selling them out of his basement at $10 apiece.
Seventy years later, Boeing paid $1.5 billion in cash for the company that notebook became, buying it from Tribune. By then Jeppesen was doing $235 million a year at an operating margin above 25 percent, and essentially every US airline flew on its charts.
Still cooking: ninety-plus years on, the charts are still in the cockpit.
He wasn't selling a notebook. He was selling the eight weekends he spent walking up hills with an altimeter
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Hit reply if you know a business that only gets called once a generation. Forward this to whoever keeps texting you Funko listings. See you tomorrow.
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