23 Beginner Friendly Businesses You Should Start In 2026⏐Ep. #255

Welcome to the corner office podcast. This is Chris Kerner and this is episode 255. Today is December 8th. You're probably listening to this on or after December 9th. And today was a big day for me. I appeared on the Diorevis CEO podcast with Steven Barlett and it is the second biggest podcast in the world. And the first biggest business podcast in the world. And so I assume I have a lot of new listeners today. So I wanted to do something a little different and I wanted to make an episode that would be great for both my existing, my OGs, my current fans that have known and followed me for a little while. And an episode that was great for all of my new fans coming over from Diorevis CEO. So whether you're new to me or old to me, you're going to love this episode and it will apply to all of you. What I'm going to do in this episode is take all 254 episodes of this podcast and distill down the best ideas, the best learnings, takeaways, guests, everything. So you don't have to go back and listen to all of them yourself. You're going to get the best of the best right here. And if you heard all or some of those episodes already, it's going to be a great refresh on some of the best episodes. And I'm going to add kind of my take to these ideas, why I like them, what I don't like about them. And some of these episodes didn't do super well for whatever reason. Maybe they had a title that didn't describe it well enough or something. But the common theme between all of these ideas is that they are approachable for almost anyone to start. Whether you're in the US or abroad, you have a lot of money or a little. So let me intro myself real quickly and then I'll get into the ideas and I'm going to rank them based on how much I like them. So there are 23 of these episodes slash ideas and I'm going to rank them from 23 to one, one being my all time favorite. Okay. But who am I? I'm Chris Kerner. I live in the suburbs of Dallas for worth. I have been married for almost 18 years. I got married at 21. We had all four of our kids in our 20s. My wife, her name is Jesse. We were high school sweethearts. She is an amazing person. She's incredibly loyal, incredibly patient with this wild entrepreneurship ride that we've been on. And I couldn't do without her. My four kids are between the ages of nine and 15. I have three boys and a girl. We are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We used to go by Mormons. You probably see missionaries walking around with white shirt and ties. That's us. That was me from 06 to 08. I served my mission in Hungary and it was the most transformative, most amazing two years of my life. Hands down. Our faith is a big part of what we do. And we're pretty tight family. We live on a few acres. We've had animals in the past. We've been in the same house for about nine years. We don't plan on moving anytime soon. I'm a huge foodie. I used to do endurance events running ultra marathons between 30 and 140 miles. I'm basically an all or nothing person. I mean, they're going to be fat and just sit around and watch TV all day. Or I'm going to be up and about doing way too much all day every day. I've learned that about myself. And so I try to say on the right side of this spectrum, because I did spend about 10 years of my life obese, all of my 20s. I was still building businesses, starting a lot of businesses I talk about in this content, but I just didn't take good care of my health. And at age 31, I fixed that. I lost all the weight. I started running these endurance events and I've kept the weight off ever since. I was born in Utah. As you've probably heard, my first business was selling used golf balls. And it's funny because a lot of the comments on my interview, like, oh, you grew up poor, but you lived across street from a golf course. Yeah, I did. Both of those things are true. Look at Park Avenue in Logan, Utah. We sold our home for $40,000 in 1998, which was today's equivalent of about $80,000. It's a 70 year old thousand square foot home. That was the cross street from a golf course, Logan River Golf Course. I dad worked in a greenhouse, a nursery at Utah State University. He ended up getting a job at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. So when I was 11, we moved to Florida. I started going to the beach, making friends, wrestling, dating girls. That's when I met my now wife. I worked a bunch of odd jobs in middle school and high school. I bus tables, I waited tables, I delivered pizzas for pizza hut. I sprayed pest control every summer. I mow lawns, just whatever it took to have some income. My parents got divorced about four years after removed to Florida. I was 15. I lived with my mom. My dad lived across town. My mom now lives in Utah. My dad is still in Florida living in the house that I lived in in Florida. As I was growing up, my parents are awesome people. I have three siblings and older sister, a younger brother and a younger sister. They live all over the country and I love them very much. My mom waited tables as she raised us at the same Mexican restaurant where I bus tables. It's still there. Ellie and Sito right on us one in Titusville. And my parents taught me the value of being charitable, being kind, being honest, and working really hard. And I'm grateful for them. Again, I served a mission for my church. At age 19, I got home when I was 21. I was a very average student in high school. I was kind of the class clown, but also introverted. If you knew me really well, I was extroverted, but to everyone else on the planet, I'm very introverted. I got home in March of 2008 from my mission. I proposed to my now wife one month later to the day. We had never dated before. We just kind of had a crush on each other from ages 13 to 14. And then three and a half months after that, we got married on 0808. I spent hours and hours and hours that summer of 2008 reading books, business books and real estate books at Barnes and Noble in Melbourne, Florida. And I basically took all of that brand new business knowledge and paired it with all of my rejection experience, sales experience and grit experience that I gained on my mission and hungry. I put them together. My wife was a student at the University of Alabama. I moved to Alabama right after we got married so she could finish her school and I could start school. And I took all that knowledge from those books and I just hit the ground running. We bought a single family home to live in about seven months after getting married. Then we bought another single family home with $8,000 tax credit that Obama gave first time home buyers. We were waiting table at a tie restaurant together and taking classes. I did my first two years at Shelton State Community College. I got my associates degree and then I transferred to the University of Alabama. In addition to waiting tables, I worked at the Tuscaloose County jail as a guard. It was the worst job ever. I also worked for a company called Game Day Tense. I worked for Jimmy Johns, delivering sandwiches, whatever it took to make ends meet. I started my first real business in Tuscaloosa called phone restore. That business has since been sold two times over. But that first retail location is still there a whole 15 years later, which is crazy. And to summarize, the last 17 years since that point, I finished college at the University of Alabama. I got an MBA at Masters in Business Administration from TCU, Texas Christian University here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I did that in 2019. And from 2008 to 2025, I started about 80 different businesses. And I've actually documented every single one of those businesses that I've started on this podcast. If you go back to episode 14, episode 21, episode 88, and then there's one more in there somewhere. I can't remember. I've spoken about every single one of those businesses entrepreneurship is my absolute passion. Content creation is something fairly new to me. I've been tweeting about business in real estate for the last four or five years, but I just started like other forms of content not even two years ago. I started this podcast in February of 2024. I released 255 episodes at this point. Oh, I forgot to say this. I love email music from the early 2000s brand new Take Max Sunday Manchester Orchestra. I love Tim Robinson, the show. I think you should leave. And I love working on the art. Also, you can tell I have ADHD because I'm all over the place. I got diagnosed at 35, I think, and it was life changing. The diagnosis, I really, really, really wish I would have been diagnosed earlier. But my life has been immeasurably better since the whole theme of this podcast. I try to keep it tactical, right? I've had a few episodes where we kind of go high level and talk about frameworks and stuff. And I love some of those episodes because I learn a lot from them. But 95 plus percent of these episodes are very specific, very tactical. Use this tool, use this wording on your subject lines, start this business. Here's how you do it. Here's a seven step plan, et cetera. That's how I like for this podcast to be. And it's kind of a double-edged sword because the more tactical a podcast is, the less broad it is, right? So the chance of me becoming as big as a direvcio is almost zero because it's so specific and tactical and it just doesn't apply to the general population. But it is in my experience, the most effective way at encouraging people to start or grow their business. They need real specific steps, real tools. So we don't hold anything back. And every time I interview a business owner about their business, I go into it, telling them, people will want to copy exactly what you're doing. So if you're not okay with that, you're probably not a fit for this podcast. And for that reason, a lot of people don't come on the podcast because if I start interviewing them and I'm like, how much revenue do you make? How much profit do you make? Where do you find your customers are like, I'd prefer not to just like, okay, never mind. You know, some episodes will talk about five to 10 different ideas hypothetically, not ones that we're doing, but just ones that we think are interesting. Some episodes all talk about stuff that I'm actively doing because I do launch a lot of these ideas that I talk about. And then some episodes I'm diving deep on one idea with one business owner. And I only do this when I survey my newsletter. You can join my newsletter for free at tcopod.com. And I ask them, Hey, here's 40 businesses, niches, ideas, whatever vote on five to 10 of them that you want to learn more about. And then I will specifically reach out to owners of those ideas that you guys, my listeners, watchers, followers, whatever really, really want to learn about that way. I don't hit publish on an idea that just isn't interesting to people. It took me a while to learn how to do that, but that's been working really, really well. I don't do much prep at all for my podcast because I want to go and I'm not a good actor. I can't really fake surprise if I'm asking a question that I already know the answer to. So usually when I go into an episode with a business owner, I know like a couple things. Their business makes X amount of dollars. It only took them why amount of months or years to make that money. It cost them so much to start it and the industry is what it is. That's about what I know. So without further ado, here are my 23 favorite episodes/ideas/guests that I love the most or my listeners/viewers love the most. So if you like any of these ideas and you want to learn more about them, I will say the episode number in the idea. Episode one is my oldest episode 255. This one is my newest. You can just scroll down on Spotify, Apple or wherever. And we will also for your convenience link to all of them in the show notes. So you can go binge him later. Okay, idea number 23 was episode 55. How to start a six-figure side hustle exclusively on Facebook marketplace. I came across this guy named Alex on Instagram who was making $15,000 of profit every month making simple garage shelves from his garage and delivering them locally. He found all of his customers on Facebook marketplace. I found this incredibly fascinating because that's a lot of money. He quit his full-time job to run this. So that's episode 55 and I actually did a follow-up with him just last month. That was episode 250 where he told us how it's been going over the last couple of years. I love this business because anyone with a hundred dollars saw and some two by fours can start it. You just posted face to face with marketplace and you find customers. It's more competitive than it used to be for sure. But he's doing other unique things like building beds that have storage underneath them and building other things and more custom things and doing garage clean out and business is going great for him and it's going great for all of the people that started the business based on hearing that episode. So that's number 23. Number 22 is starting a drone business. This was episode 229 and my best friend slash mission companion Nick was on this episode with me and we both independently dove really deep on the drone roof inspection business and then we came back to this podcast reported on our findings talked about what we loved and what we hated about the idea. This was one of the ideas that my newsletter said I want to learn more about drone roof inspections. I never would have guessed that you guys would find that interesting, but you did and sure enough it became one of my top performing episodes. This is a great business because there's a crazy stat in there that I can't quite remember, but like 50 or 60% of like insurance adjusters are baby boomers and we'll be retiring soon. Also, it's a huge liability. It's dangerous to get on a roof and inspect it. So drones are replacing that, but there's not enough supply of drone roof inspection operators to meet all the demand that there is for these jobs. You can make hundreds of dollars per job. You can get long term contracts with roofing companies with insurance companies with commercial property managers there's just a lot to love about this business and you can start this business for like a thousand bucks. All right. Now my 21st favorite idea from this podcast is going to be episode 226. This is about domain name investing. I have a friend that I'm on Twitter. His name is Peter Ascue and he makes really good money buying interesting domain names and then building businesses around them. So instead of saying, oh, I have a business idea. Let me go find a domain name to fit that idea. No, he wakes up every morning. He drinks his coffee and he starts shopping for expiring premium domain names. Vidalia onions dot com onions dot com dude ranch dot com. He'll buy a domain name and then he'll bail the business around it and because of the fact that he does it in the reverse, he has immediate traffic on day one because people are typing in these EMDs exact match domain names and giving him business from day one. He's an incredibly interesting guy. He's eclectic. He does a lot of really cool things. We had a double episode, but I believe the first one was episode 226 and my 20th favorite episode is about laundromats episode 239 with Tyler Purcell. This guy builds really, really, really nice laundromats in areas that already have a ton of laundromats because those areas usually have a ton of crappy laundromats and so he thinks that the more competition there is the better because that's a signal that his market already has a ton of people that frequent the laundromat. So all he needs is a better one, not a different one, but a nicer one a cleaner one. And yes, it is more expensive, but he is transforming these communities with a laundromat and they are extremely profitable making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in net profit each with very, very few employees. Now this one is kind of an exception because it's not nearly as approachable as most of these businesses. It costs more money to get started, but this episode crushed it regardless. And it's an awesome idea. All right. My 19th favorite episode was about Etsy print on demand. How to start reverse engineer research and build these print on demand businesses where you sell stuff on Etsy like printables like sticker designs or picture designs or mugs with custom design on it. I had my friend Cody Schneideron. He's doing this. He talked about using AI tools to create hundreds and thousands of listings on Etsy and see which ones are winners. Then once you post like a thousand designs to Etsy 10 to 30 of them start doing well. Then you triple down on those 10 to 30 of them very approachable, very affordable. You can use a few AI tools to start. This is a banger of an episode, episode 210. All right. I'm going to combine my 18th favorite episode because they're kind of similar to the issue. And also I thought of a new episode, but I've already said 23 ideas. So I'm going to keep this 23 and not 24, but I'm going to combine two of them. So my 18th with an asterisk favorite episode slash ideas are porch pumpkins and mailbox repair. Okay. Both of these are happening in the front of the house. So, hey, it's my podcast. I can combine these porch pumpkins is owned by Heather Torres. I saw her on Instagram a year and a half ago. And she decorates, porches with pumpkins for the fall. That's it. And she makes over a million dollars a year. And she's absolutely crushing it. And this can be done at any market. She finds her customers from organic videos on Instagram. No paid ads and referrals. It's very profitable. It can be done in the Christmas time. It can be done with seasonal flowers. I interviewed another guy that does that in Long Island with flowers. The porch decoration business is booming. That is episode 73. And then the mailbox repair episode part B of this one. That was episode 186. And this is another one that my newsletter really wanted to learn about. If you look at Google Trends, everyone is searching for mailbox repair. And no one is thinking to start a business repairing mailboxes. I've sent spoken to a few different guys that have started this business based on this episode. And they're doing well Chicago Nashville Austin. You put up Google ads and you fix mailboxes and you make hundreds of dollars an hour. You can sell mailboxes. You can maintain them. You can get referrals from the mailman. There's a lot of ways you can grow this business. And you will not have very many competitors. So that is episode 186. All right. My 17th favorite idea here is episode 196 forestry mulching. I interviewed a guy named Alex who is up in Ohio. And he was a digital marketer by trade. He knew nothing about home service businesses. Until he needed to get some land cleared. He bought some acreage. And he had about five acres that he need cleared. And guess what? He could not find anyone to do. No one. And he was in Cincinnati. This isn't like the middle of nowhere here. And so he started doing a bunch of research on keywords and traffic and Google Trends and SEO and all this type of stuff that would show him how promising this idea is or not in Cincinnati. And he learned. Wow. Yeah. There's a gap in the market here. And so he started a forestry mulching business. And this business is crushing. These machines are expensive, but you can rent them to start. He uses YouTube ads and Facebook ads to get all of his leads. His average job size is I think $3,400. And he's spending like $100 to find these customers. Okay. So he's turning $100 into $3,400 with ads on Facebook and Instagram. It's I think my third or fourth most popular YouTube video of all time. And it's way up there on my audio podcast as well. So that's 196. And my 16th favorite idea is. Episode 162 lessons learned from starting 75 plus businesses. This was a little more high level, not as tactical, but I really spent hours to think and take notes and ponder and reflect on what I've learned from all these businesses. And despite the fact that it wasn't as tactical as my usual episode. It performed really well. And the feedback was awesome. And my 15th favorite idea slash podcast is number 170. How to get a yes from everyone. I interviewed this guy named Stu Heinike. He wrote a book, a best seller called How to get a meeting with anyone. And it is incredible. Very, very tactical on how to find a white whale of a customer or of a business partner or a vendor. How to get Mark Cuban to answer your emails. How to get really important. And awesome people to pay attention to you. This was an incredible episode. And my 14th favorite episode is episode 175. This was with my good friend Sam. He's been on the podcast like 15 times. He's so entertaining. He's always growth hacking and buildings. These awesome businesses. And in this episode, episode 175, he talked about how he launched a hummingbird food e-commerce brand in like a few hours because someone on the internet said, if it's so easy, why doesn't anyone do it? And that made him so mad and so fired up that he went out and did it. And now he's making thousands of dollars selling sugar water to people that want to feed the hummingbirds in their backyard. I had no idea this episode would do so well because it was just like Sam at his best. Maybe I just take him for granted. But this is a banger of an episode, especially if you're interested in e-commerce. All right. Now my 13th favorite episode is similar to number 15. How to get a yes. from everyone. This one's called How to Get Everything You Want Out of Life. It's episode 144 with my friend Jordan. And this is called Permissionless Marketing. It's a lot like how to get a yes from anyone. It's basically how to stand out. Jordan has always done very interesting things to get the attention of NBA players, of business moguls. And he built a framework around this. How to stand out? How to get attention? How to sell anything? And it is incredibly inspiring. Number 12. This was a solo episode where I just talk about which AI should you use to make money, which is best at making money. It's episode number 207. And I think this is the one where I put a bunch of the AI's against each other. Grock, Claude, Gemini, Chad, GPT, perplexity. And I had them invest in stocks for me. And I actually invested in those stocks. I put my real money into it based on their suggestions. And I wanted to see which one was more accurate. I had a ton of fun doing this. I actually made money doing this, believe it or not. And I learned a lot about options trading, which caveat, disclaimer for all the lawyers out there. This is not investing advice. Okay. I'm an idiot. But this is really great info on like what AI to use. And my 11th favorite episode is episode 233 beginner friendly ways of making 10 grand. And this one I had my friend Brandon on. He's been on about a half a dozen times. And we just rift on cool business ideas that will help you make 10 grand. In like a very, very short amount of time. Yeah. I think we talked about ideas to make 10 grand in a day, a week, a month, or a year. And this one jam packed with business ideas. And my 10th favorite episode was episode 228 $3 million a year from tiny AI tools. Here's how you can too. I chatted with this guy named John Rush. We met on Twitter. He makes over $3 million a year in recurring revenue from these little AI tools that he built. An SEO tool, a scraping tool. A lot of these can be vibe coated. If you don't have any coding experience, which most of my audience doesn't neither do I. And he just shared his screen and he showed how he's doing it. And it was really good. But my 9th favorite episode was episode 203 how to make a million dollars in six months. We discussed different ideas. This was me and my best friend Nick again. I think by download count, this might be my most popular or third or fourth most popular. It's really, really tactical. And we did what Brandon and I kind of did with the $10,000 idea. We just talked about specific ideas of making a million dollars in 10 months. We got really excited. The energy was high. And you're going to love it. And my 8th favorite episode of all time was episode 230 how to copy businesses and white label them with go high level. So gohilevel.com is a website where you can sell software without having to know how to build software or build a website even. And so what I do in this episode is I just go reverse engineer companies that are already white labeling everything they do on high level because it's listed online. And then I go to the web archive and I look at how they got to where they are. How do they grow? How do they find customers? What are they selling? What are they doing differently if anything at all? And my 7th favorite episode is episode 205 overlooked business. The most overlooked business idea you've ever heard of my friend Kyler. He lives in Utah. He rents out washers and dryers on Facebook marketplace. He makes $10,000 a month in net profit. It's actually more that was like six months ago when he told me that and he's been growing ever since. So he makes over $10,000 a month of net profit just renting out washers and dryers for 60 to 80 bucks a pop on Facebook marketplace. You can start this with $200 and a trailer. You can rent a trailer from Home Depot if you don't have one. This is probably my most viral episode ever. But it's not number one because it's not my number one. But it's very approachable. And if all the ideas that I've talked about that people have reached out to me and said, hey, I started that. This is by far the most popular because it is so approachable. And Kyler props to him. He basically invented this industry. Right? Washers dryer rentals have been a thing from like rent a center and big companies. But it has not been a thing for individuals or for being done on Facebook marketplace. And my 6th favorite episode is again with my friend Nick episode 248. Eight ideas for you to start this weekend. And we just talk about eight awesome business ideas. That's it. And they're awesome. My 5th favorite episode of all time episode 169 25 tips tools tricks hacks to use chat Gbt to get the most out of chat Gbt. This is a solo episode. I basically just share my screen and show everyone how I'm using chat Gbt to get everything I want. How to prompt it. How to massage it. How to upload references. What model to use for what purpose. I had no idea this one would do so well. But it is a banger 169. And my 4th favorite episode of all time. I talk all about VO 3 which is Google's video generation software. This is episode 161 how to start an ad agency with AI video generation. How to generate videos with AI how to use VO 3 why VO 3 will slash is changing the world why AI video is changing the world. How can you make money from this? Who cares if it's changing the world if we can't start a business from it. So I share my screen and I show exactly how I would do that. And how to prompt VO 3 to make beautiful videos. And my 3rd favorite episode of all time is all about reselling liquidation items with my friend Shannon. Shannon has been on this podcast about 12 times. I think this was our best performing episode. But if you go on YouTube to my playlist, you'll see all of my episodes with Shannon are on YouTube. Unfortunately Spotify, NorApple has a playlist feature. So it's kind of harder to sort those all out. But what Shannon does is he goes to websites like Bstock.com which sells over stock Costco supplies, Costco returns and govdeals.com which sells stuff that the government is liquidating and he will buy pallets of items for pennies on the dollar like or penny on the dollar 90 to 99% off. He'll get his ship to his garage his house. He'll listen on Facebook marketplace on eBay. He'll sell it. He'll make a few phone calls and he'll sell it. And this is such an approachable business. Anyone with a few hundred bucks could start it. Anyone with an iPhone with Facebook marketplace access can start this business. So check out episode 156 for that. My second favorite episode of all time is my directories episode episode 164. I had a guy named Frey Choo and he builds directories and I talked about this on the Diurvisio podcast. What is a directory? It's an ugly looking website that lists out a bunch of stuff, a bunch of locations. All the dog parks in the area, all the fencing repair companies in the area, all the Thai food restaurants in the area. Thanks to AI directories are needed more than ever. People think the AI is competing with directories. That is absolutely not true. AI is referencing these directories because people have questions they need answers and directories are a great way of getting that done. So Frey makes six figures a year building directories and this is incredibly passive. I don't say the P word a lot on this podcast passive. I don't do it because most things aren't. This is like it takes activity to get it started to get it launched. But then once it's launched it's incredibly passive. And my first my number one my favorite episode slash best idea ever covered on this podcast is episode 204 which is called I started an online business in 56 minutes. Okay. This was posted on August 4th. It's better to watch on YouTube or on Spotify video because it is kind of visual. But this episode got me so hyped up to film. What did I do in this video? I couldn't sleep. I was so excited about AI and starting businesses that I sat down at my desk at like 430 in the morning on a Saturday and I started to business from scratch from absolute zero sharing my screen the whole time. And at the end of 56 minutes I had a customer. That's it. A customer that didn't know me. I didn't use my audience. I didn't use any cheats. I used tools that anyone on the planet can use and I had a customer. Now what was I selling? I was selling an AI voice agent to him as a service. I don't know how to build an AI voice agent but I know how to use Go High Level. So with about six clicks within Go High Level I had created an AI voice agent for a garage door repair business and the guys like I'm in. Sign me up. I was so excited when I got him as a customer because I honestly didn't think that would happen. It wasn't like a faked video filmed over days or weeks. It all happened over the course of this video. And that's why my number one favorite idea right now is implementing AI into small businesses. Period and of story. AI and/or automation and a lot of my excitement for this idea stemmed from this video. From when I took this video and I fell in love with that idea so much that I actually started a community called Playmakers where there's about 150 people and they're doing exactly that. They're starting an AI implementation and/or automation business and AI consulting business. You can learn more about it at Playmakers AI.com. It's also linked below and people are finding customers. We have three to seven live calls per week. There's tons of hours of content. There's templates. You can go from a brand new beginner to an expert all within the confines of this community. So check out Playmakers AI.com. And if you don't really like that idea but you want to do something with one of these ideas or any of these ideas that I talk about, you should check out my other community called TK owners TK O WN E R S dot com where there's about 700 people in there starting their first or their second or the third business or growing their business. It's very broad. We're not going all in on one idea. We're discussing all kinds of ideas. We also have weekly calls with me. I do ask me anything's in both communities every single week. Other experts are in there. We have a Slack group. We have tons of exclusive content. So check out TK owners dot com as well. If you've been with me for a while, thank you. I appreciate you. If you're just now finding me from the Darvice O podcast, welcome. I appreciate you as well. Please hit subscribe. Share it with a friend if you found this helpful. If you want to binge one or any of these episodes that I've talked about today, they are all linked in the show notes. We'll see you next time on the corner office.