Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show MBA2634 The Easiest Business To Start About this episode Ever asked yourself, “What’s the easiest business to start if I want to earn quickly and keep things simple?” Tired of hearing about ecommerce, crypto, or the latest online trends—and wondering if there’s a better way to get paid for your skills? You're in the right place. In today’s episode, Omar uncovers the most practical—and surprisingly overlooked—path for new entrepreneurs. You'll get a step-by-step guide to finding a business model that works, landing your first clients (without ads or a fancy website), and scaling up without losing control. Plus, learn when to raise your rates and how to free up your time while growing your income. Curious? Hit play at the top of this page and dive into Omar’s game plan. Get paid fast, serve real clients, and build something that truly works for you! MBA50 Must Reads: Book Yourself SolidMBA2228 Extended Interview: Dan Martell – How to Buy Back Your TimeWatch the episodes on YouTube: https://lm.fm/GgRPPHiSUBSCRIBEYouTube | Apple Podcast | Spotify | Podcast Feed
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Small business owners, listen up. You started your business, but you can't do it alone. And that means you have to hire people to help. That's where Justworks comes in. Justworks is the payroll, benefits, and global hiring platform to unburden your brain from all the complicated small business stuff. They handle the things you can't afford to get wrong, so you don't have to worry. So you can focus on the parts of running a business that you enjoy, knowing everything else is running smoothly. You don't have to worry when it just works. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? For example, I really wanted to love the show Mad Men. I really tried to watch it and love it, but it just didn't do anything for me. As a marketer and business person, the show was a little bit of a disappointment.
0:45 Speaker 00 Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, like impressions. But then we don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn Ads. Cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBAShow. Terms apply. Many people ask, "What's the easiest business to start?" It's not e-commerce, it's not dropshipping, it's not crypto, it's not print-on-demand, or whatever the algorithm pushing this week. It's none of these. It's a service-based business. If you want to make money as fast as possible, without raising capital, without hiring a
1:29 Speaker 00 team, without building an app, offering a service is the most practical and proven way to do it. But here's the thing: if you don't build it right, it can own you. I'm talking about 80-hour weeks, burnout, zero scalability, barely any profit. You're gonna wish you could go back to your job, okay? So today, I'm gonna show you how you can start a service-based business quickly and profitably, and how to scale it so you don't burn out.
2:01 Speaker 00 Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.
2:14 Speaker 00 I'm gonna share with you the lessons that I learned by building my own service-based business. It was the first business that I built when I left my teaching career and became a full-time entrepreneur. This is why I'm recommending it as the easiest business to start, because you don't need much to get started. If you're still questioning, why a service-based business? Well, the one big reason why I recommend it is because there is a lot lower risk with service-based businesses, because there's a low startup cost. You don't need inventory, you don't need tech, you don't need ads. You just need a skill and time. And therefore, it makes a great first business, because you can afford to make some mistakes, because the stakes are not high, right? And you're able to recover from those mistakes and earn revenue quickly. This is the second reason why I recommend it is it's quick when it comes to revenue.
2:59 Speaker 00 You can land a client this week, and no need to build an audience first or anything like that. You're gonna get paid immediately. It's also high margin, especially if you're starting out solo, just by yourself. Basically, you're just trading your time for money at the start in order for you to earn exponentially. Now, when you run a service-based business, obviously, you're gonna be able to charge more than your normal hourly rate, because you're offering a result and not just your hours. But what I love most about a service-based business is that it gives you market validation. You learn what people actually want, and you learn fast. A lot of great other types of businesses, like software businesses, for example, like Basecamp, they were a service-based business. They were an agency.
3:43 Speaker 00 And they built a tool to manage their agency, which was Basecamp, and then they sold that tool, and that became their main business. I want to encapsulate why I believed service-based businesses are one of the easiest businesses to start, is that it's not only easy, it's educational. It sharpens your business instincts. You get to learn a lot about your customers by serving them. And when I say easiest, it doesn't mean it's totally easy, okay? It's just easy in comparison to other types of businesses, right? Like selling a physical product business like e-commerce or starting a software company. There's less moving parts, there's less overhead, there's just a lot less to worry about other than your customers. So of course, we're all about action here. So let me give you a step by step, how to start a service-based business fast.
4:28 Speaker 00 Okay. Number one, pick a service that you can deliver now. Just throw perfection out the window. No six-month certification needed. Can you do something now for somebody that needs that service? Can you build a website? Can you edit video? Can you write emails? Can you manage ads? Can you organize back offices, finances, bookkeeping? As long as you're decent, you're good, that's good enough. You can build upon those skills later on. Now, what if you say to yourself, Omar, I don't have any skills that I can really monetize. I'm not really sure even what I should do. My answer to you is learn something simple and fast, okay? Like learn how to edit a podcast. You can learn how to edit a podcast in a couple of weekends.
5:12 Speaker 00 You could take a course this weekend on social media marketing or how to ghostwrite LinkedIn articles. You could literally just go like you to me and find a course on any topic you're interested in, you'll know more than 99% of the people by just taking this course and implementing what you learned in this course. And now you've got a service that you can deliver. You don't need 10 years of experience. You need just getting your customer a result. Be honest, as a business owner, how much of your day is actual work? And how much is it just getting ready to do the work? Answering emails, tweaking presentations, hunting for numbers? That stuff adds up fast, which is why upgrading to the premium tier of Google Workspace with Gemini is a game changer.
5:53 Speaker 00 One subscription gets you Google's AI right into all your apps like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet, so it can handle all the heavy lifting across your day. Need a reply drafted in your exact voice? Gemini handles it in Gmail. Need to turn messy spreadsheet data into visual insights? Done in Sheets. Missing a meeting? It takes notes and gives action items in Meet. It acts like a full-time assistant connected across your entire business. Make work less work. Try Google Workspace with Gemini at g o o dot G L E slash Workspace with Gemini.
6:28 Speaker 00 Today's episode is sponsored by Whatnot. You've probably heard about live selling and it's taking off on Whatnot. Sellers on Whatnot don't need a storefront or paid social media ads to reach customers. This is what I love about it because with live video, you interact and engage with your customers. You just need your phone and buyers can ask questions, they can make purchases in real time. On Whatnot, you could see people selling from living rooms and warehouses, selling sneakers, electronics, vintage, even a guy on a boat selling lobsters he just caught. Thousands of items are sold every minute because customers get to know sellers and see the products live. For many sellers, it's gone from side hustle to full-time job since they're selling 10 times here than on other marketplaces.
7:11 Speaker 00 I've personally shopped on Whatnot and found the whole experience actually pretty fun. I got the bid on a product that I was looking at, which was a little tripod for my phone. And when I won the bid, the seller gave me a shout out and gave me a little demo of how the tripod works. In a couple of days, the tripod was at my front door. It couldn't be easier. Search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store, download and start selling right away.
7:37 Speaker 00 For example, my service-based business, when I started my entrepreneurial career, was building WordPress websites for my clients. My clients were bloggers and creators and they wanted to have a presence online. So I created a simple website for them. I wasn't a fantastic designer, so I didn't charge a lot. But I was able to deliver a working website because I just created something using templates, using some drag and drop tools. I knew enough tech so I can just deploy this website on a shared server and be able to give access to my client. Yes, there were thousands upon thousands of people that can create WordPress websites better than I could. Okay, but that's not the point. I was better than my clients and my clients were willing to pay me money to deliver something that they could not do for themselves.
8:22 Speaker 00 I found a niche, I was in a good sweet spot in terms of price for them, and it just worked because I just decided that it's going to work. Okay, I just decided to do the work so I can get my clients, give them what they paid for, and just repeat that cycle. Number two. Package it into a simple offer. I just kind of hinted on it, right? Don't sell your time, sell an outcome. For example, in my business, I had a package, which was a four-page WordPress website. I was able to deliver that website within two weeks. And that was a package that cost X amount of dollars. When I first got started, it only was $1,200. It was not expensive at all. And guess what? If they want five pages, six pages, I can charge more for that. But now they are paying for a result.
9:05 Speaker 00 They're paying for pages, they're not paying for my time. Another example is weekly podcast promotion. You know, four episodes per month will cost you $800 a month. I'm going to promote your podcast on social media. I'm going to, you know, create clips out of your podcast interviews, and I'm going to publish them on your social media platforms. Another example is sales page copy that converts. Maybe for every sales page, I'm going to charge $500 flat. Maybe there's a word limit. But the point here is that they are paying for a result, not your time. Be clear, be specific, and be confident in what you're delivering. Number three, get your first three clients with zero ads. How do you do this? Well, use direct outreach. Forget websites, forget funnels in the beginning.
9:51 Speaker 00 DM about 50 people in your network. 50 people that you have in your phone, right? In your phone, you have, you know, contacts in here. People that you've met and known and got to know over the years. Some of these are friends, some of these are family members, some of these are ex-colleagues, whatever it might be. Reach out to everybody you could possibly reach out to. 50 minimum, I say, because why? It's a numbers game in business. They say, "Business is a contact sport. The more contacts you make, the more chances of success." You want to post value-driven content about your service daily for two weeks on your social media. You may want to offer a free audit, a call or example, and then you can pitch your service. So you could say, "Hey, if anybody wants a free audit of whatever you do,
10:35 Speaker 00 say for example, you do social media content, you want me to do an audit of your social media content? I'm happy to jump on a call and audit and tell you what you need to do to improve." Ask existing clients for referrals immediately. Like, as soon as you- Deliver the work, ask them, "Hey, who do you know that would benefit from my service? That can use my expertise?" Ask, "Who do you know?" Not, "Do you know?" There's a big difference because "who do you know?" makes them think about, "Who do I know? Who are the people that would do this?" "Do I know?" is binary, yes or no, and it's easy just to say, "I don't know anybody." And remember, don't market, you want to connect. In the service-based business industry, it's all about connections and making relationships matter. Making sure that you're connecting on a deeper level with people.
11:19 Speaker 00 So that way, you could build relationships that they, they trust you and that they can recommend you to other people. Okay, you are willing to do the work, you're willing to hustle, but that can't last forever. You gotta be able to scale, so you're not working every waking hour, alright? So how do you scale without becoming a burnout case? Here's the real difference between a freelancer and an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur thinks in systems and not tasks. Number one, productize your service. Turn your service into a repeatable, standardized package. Stop reinventing the wheel, okay? Every client that comes by, you don't have to just reinvent everything and make a custom for them. No, start templating, because what you'll find is about 90% of what you do for every client is going to be the same.
12:02 Speaker 00 Template, start batching, build an SOP, a standard operating procedure. Document every step of the way of delivering what you deliver to your clients. Do this even if it's just you right now, because eventually you're going to make a hire and you want to hand that over to somebody else that can read that SOP and they can implement easily. Number two, super important, delegate, delegate, delegate, delegate. What's the first hire you make? Well, you're gonna first hire out your $10 tasks. I talk about this all the time, $10, $100, $1,000, $10,000 tasks. Your first hire should be some sort of assistant, EAV, a specialist who does the work that you don't need to do. That brings in your company $10, or you can see it as like a $10 an hour task.
12:47 Speaker 00 A VA can handle things like email, scheduling, invoicing. You can hire an editor if you have to edit raw footage. You can get a developer to build what you're selling. All those little nitty-gritty. tasks that suck up your time need to start getting outsourced to somebody else. That's how you get your time back without killing quality. If you want a book on this topic, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martel is a good book to start with. The concept is basic here. You need to spend your valuable time bringing in the big bucks. That's simple. Everything else you need to hire for. So as soon as you start making profit, you need to start allocating a budget to hiring a VA or EA to start outsourcing some of those low dollar tasks that don't bring in much money, but you have to kind of do to run your business.
13:32 Speaker 00 Number three, raise your prices and fire bad clients. I know that sounds crazy, but it's necessary. I learned this from my good friend, Michael Port. Michael Port is the bestselling author of Book Yourself Solid and many other books, but this book has a great concept in it. It's called the red velvet rope policy. You know that, you know, red velvet rope you see in like VIP areas or at a premiere of a movie and there's always like a bodyguard there, right? That's opening and closing the velvet rope to only people that are on the guest list or people that are allowed to get past this area. So you should have a red velvet rope policy for your clients. Only the best clients should be served by you. As demand goes up for your service,
14:13 Speaker 00 your time becomes more valuable. Raise your rates. What I did is I raised my rates with every new client. So if a client drains your time and energy and soul, you can either raise your rates to a point where it's worth it, or you can simply just say you can't take their work anymore and replace them with better clients that give you fulfillment and are willing to pay your new higher prices. You're not just growing a business. You're designing your life to make sure that you can have a sustainable business. Listen, if you hate the grind of your business, if you are struggling to get up in the morning, it's going to be very hard for you to succeed. So you got to build boundaries. You got to build a business that you're proud of, but one that you
14:55 Speaker 00 are looking forward to working in. Now, I want to give you some parting advice here. I started as a service provider too, when I was just getting started in my full-time entrepreneurial career. I was doing a lot of slot hustling when I was a teacher for 10 years. And then when I became a full-time entrepreneur, I started a service-based business like I mentioned. I didn't have a brand. I didn't have an audience. I just had the willingness to help other people and the guts to charge for it. That led me to the $100 MBA, which led to Webinar Ninja, which was my software company I built for 10 years. And then we got acquired recently by Pro Profs for a life-changing exit. And all the dominos kind of followed after that. If I had to start from scratch today, I'd start with a service-based business again. It's the fastest way to revenue and to skill development, not only
15:40 Speaker 00 in what you're providing, but your skills as an entrepreneur. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you are broke, if you are stuck, if you are tired of overthinking, start by offering a service. Help someone solve a problem they already know they have. Start with something simple, deliver it well, do what you say you're going to do, get paid, and then build the systems you need to scale it. Raise your prices, buy back your time, and then watch it grow. Thanks so much for tuning into the $100 MBA Show. If you want to build a profitable service-based business, or any type of business that doesn't own you, you're going to want to subscribe to my three things newsletter. Why? Because it's my weekly newsletter that allows me to coach you from afar. Each week, I send
16:25 Speaker 00 you three things, something to think about, something to do, and something to learn. That way, you are getting better week after week. You're growing as an entrepreneur. It's absolutely free. All you got to do is go to 100mba.net, sign up for any of our free guides, and you will be a part of the newsletter. You'll get the newsletter automatically without having to do anything. Pretty cool. Thanks so much for checking us out. If you found today's episode helpful, hit subscribe, hit that follow button on whatever platform you're using to consume this content. It's the biggest thank you you can give me. Thank you in advance for doing that. I'll check you in the next one. Hey, Fidelity, how can I remember to invest every month?
17:09 Speaker 01 With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.
17:15 Speaker 00 Oh, that sounds easier than I thought.
17:17 Speaker 01 You got this.
17:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, I do. Now, where did I put my keys?
17:22 Speaker 01 You will find them where you left them.
17:25 Speaker 02 Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC.
Previous MBA2633 Q&A Wednesday: No One Wants To Invest In My Business. What Do I Do? Next MBA2635 How To Be More Successful Than 99% of Other People Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
