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Boring Businesses

12 min read

Boring Businesses: The MFM Guide to Getting Rich Without the Glamour

In 1987, a man named Greg Flynn took out an SBA loan to buy a single Applebee’s franchise. Today, the Flynn Restaurant Group generates $6.3 billion in annual revenue—more than the parent companies of KFC or Domino’s themselves. Flynn never invented anything. He never went viral. He just kept buying restaurants that most people consider unsexy.

What if the fastest path to becoming a millionaire is not a tech startup, but a laundromat? On My First Million, guests like Codie Sanchez, Nick Huber, and Brent Beshore have made compelling cases for what they call “boring businesses”—unglamorous enterprises that quietly generate wealth while everyone else chases the next AI unicorn.

The pattern repeats across industries that most ambitious people refuse to consider. And that refusal, it turns out, is precisely what creates the opportunity.

What Are Boring Businesses?

The term itself is a marketing trick. Calling something “boring” repels the people most likely to overcomplicate it—MBAs seeking intellectual stimulation, engineers chasing scalable technology, investors hunting for unicorns. What remains is a subset of operators who care more about cash flow than cachet.

Codie Sanchez, who runs Contrarian Thinking and a portfolio of service businesses, has a useful frame for the entry point. She calls laundromats “gateway drug businesses”—simple enough for a beginner to understand, though not necessarily where you build massive wealth unless you learn to scale.

The category includes self-storage facilities, car washes, HVAC companies, property management firms, plumbing businesses, and franchise concepts ranging from fast food to pet grooming. What unites them is not the industry but the economics: recurring revenue from essential services, limited competition from venture-backed disruptors, and customer acquisition that happens through Yellow Pages rather than growth hacking.

Sam Parr once pointed listeners to EggCartons.com—a website selling packaging for eggs. No design awards. No Product Hunt launch. Just a multi-million dollar business that prints cash. “Boring businesses are the best businesses,” he observed. The statement is provocative precisely because so few people act as if they believe it.

Why Boring Businesses Work (The MFM Case)

The core thesis is counterintuitive but simple: talent follows prestige, and prestige follows technology. This creates a vacuum in industries where the smartest people refuse to compete.

Brent Beshore, who built Permanent Equity into a $350 million portfolio of holding companies, captures the dynamic well. The opportunity in small business, he notes, “is dressed in overalls and likes hard work.” The metaphor is intentional. These businesses require effort that cannot be outsourced to an algorithm or delegated to contractors in a different time zone. That effort requirement functions as a moat.

The numbers reinforce the point. Franchising alone represents 8% of U.S. GDP—roughly $800 billion flowing through 4,000 different brands annually. Yet the industry remains nearly invisible in mainstream business media. One franchise consultant who appeared on the podcast made an observation worth sitting with: there are more millionaires generated from franchising than from all players who have ever competed in the NFL, combined.

The returns can be striking. A typical real estate investor celebrates a 12 to 16 percent IRR. A franchise owner gets upset if their returns fall below 25 percent. The gap exists because the work is harder and the prestige is lower. Most people choose the easier path with worse returns.

Consider that for a moment. Higher risk-adjusted returns exist in categories that require showing up, managing hourly employees, and occasionally dealing with clogged pipes. The opportunity persists because human nature finds these tasks distasteful.

Boring Business Examples from MFM

Theory matters less than evidence. The podcast has catalogued dozens of specific operators who have built meaningful wealth in categories that never make headlines.

Self-Storage: Nick Huber’s $100M Empire

Nick Huber first appeared on My First Million with 15 properties and 103 million in acquisitions. The growth trajectory is impressive, but the capital source is more instructive.

Ninety-six percent of his investor capital came from Twitter. His entire real estate private equity company was built on the back of a social media platform—not by going viral with entertainment, but by consistently sharing the unglamorous mechanics of buying storage facilities. The combination of content and boring business proved synergistic in ways that neither alone could replicate.

Laundromats: The Gateway Drug

The economics of a laundromat are modest but accessible. Codie Sanchez estimates the average laundromat generates somewhere between 500,000 annually, with margins in the 10 to 15 percent range. Not transformative wealth. But the simplicity creates a learning environment.

One podcast guest, a franchise consultant named Alex, bought a laundry business during his freshman year of college. He had to learn what seller financing meant at age 18. Four years later, he sold the business for more than ten times what he paid. The laundromat itself was not the point. The education was.

Home Services: Gutter Cleaning to Millions

Shaan Puri once devoted airtime to what he called “the greatest marketing landing page of all time.” The website was SuckMyGuttersClean.com—a gutter cleaning business in Alabama. The name is memorable, but the underlying business is more so. The company generates 2 million annually, run by a marketing-savvy operator who happens to be cleaning gutters rather than selling software.

The lesson is not about gutters. It is about what happens when marketing sophistication enters categories where competitors still rely on door hangers and Nextdoor posts.

Holding Companies: The Portfolio Approach

Andrew Wilkinson built Tiny into a portfolio of 40 companies worth roughly $500 million. The remarkable detail is that he does not run any of them day-to-day. Each has a CEO. His role is capital allocation and occasional intervention.

Wilkinson describes his personality as “incredibly lazy”—not as an insult to himself, but as an explanation for his strategy. He structured a life around not being operationally involved in the businesses he owns.

Brent Beshore takes a similar approach at Permanent Equity, though with a different temperament. His observation about the reality of ownership is worth remembering: “All businesses are loosely functioning disasters. Some just happen to make money.” The quote functions as both warning and encouragement. Perfection is not the standard. Cash flow is.

How to Find Boring Businesses to Buy

The path from employee to owner is shorter than most people assume. It requires less capital, less expertise, and less courage than starting something from scratch—though it still requires all three.

One guest articulated the philosophy directly: anyone who wants to buy and operate a small business can do so. It is not a matter of can or cannot. It is a matter of will or will not. This remains one of the few areas of the American dream where effort and elbow grease can build something substantial.

Codie Sanchez offers a practical starting point. She made millions before ever running her own venture. The key was buying businesses while still employed, using her corporate salary to de-risk the transition. Fear of leaving the “big corporate canopy,” as she calls it, can be managed by building ownership gradually.

The mechanics involve several elements. SBA Loans allow buyers to acquire businesses with as little as 10 percent down. The baby boomer retirement wave means 10,000 business owners exit daily, many willing to offer seller financing because they cannot find successors. The 5 million revenue range represents a sweet spot—too small for private equity, too large for pure lifestyle buyers, and therefore less competitive.

Platforms like BizBuySell list available businesses, though the best deals often come from direct outreach to owners who have not formally decided to sell. Acquisition Entrepreneurship has become a recognized path, with its own terminology and community.

The Critical Question: Job or Business?

There is a fundamental distinction that separates wealth-building from self-employment.

Andrew Wilkinson frames it as a question: are you buying your own job, or are you buying a business? The difference is mathematical. If the business returns more than the cost of replacing the owner’s labor, it is a business. If it requires the owner’s presence to generate returns, it is a job with better branding.

The threshold for transition is roughly $300,000 in annual profit. At that level, an owner can afford to hire a CEO at a reasonable salary and step back into an investor role. Below that threshold, the economics force continued involvement.

This creates what Wilkinson calls “Door 3.” Most founders believe they face a binary choice: run the company forever (Door 1) or sell and exit (Door 2). But there is a third option—hire a CEO, retain ownership, and receive distributions without operational responsibility. The option requires sufficient profit to fund management, but it offers a path that most entrepreneurs never consider.

Common Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

The boring business movement has attracted enthusiasm that occasionally exceeds competence. The guests who have succeeded also offer cautionary notes about what goes wrong.

Codie Sanchez identifies the biggest killer: running out of cash. The cause is usually one of two scenarios. Either the seller lied about the financials, or they simply never tracked them properly. Due diligence matters more in small business than in public markets precisely because the information asymmetry is greater.

Nick Huber offers a more personal reflection. The last five years of his career, he admits, convinced him that business was easy. Building executive teams seemed straightforward. Customers appeared to arrive automatically. So he started more than ten companies over a three-year period. Four have been shut down.

His evolved perspective challenges the holding company narrative he once championed: running a HoldCo is overrated. He has been labeled a “HoldCo guy,” but the reality is that managing multiple companies requires capabilities that most operators lack. The wealthiest people he knows focused on one thing for a long time.

Focus beats diversification. The statement is uncomfortable for those attracted to the romance of empire-building, but the evidence supports it.

The Digital vs. Boring Debate

Not everyone on My First Million has embraced the boring business thesis. The hosts themselves maintain a digital-first orientation, even as they respect the operators who choose differently.

Sam Parr articulates the counterargument directly: making money digitally is significantly better. It requires close to no capital, permits location independence, and scales more easily. He believes it is “way harder to make a million dollars a year from a brick and mortar business than it does digitally.”

Shaan Puri shares the preference. He does not want to worry about roof damage at a self-storage facility or an hourly employee calling out sick. The headaches of physical operations hold no appeal.

Yet there is something refreshing about the alternative. Parr has also observed how pleasant it is to talk with operators who are not obsessed with AI discourse. “These guys are actually doing the damn thing in real life,” he noted after interviewing a young window washer. The variety itself has value.

The resolution may be hybrid. Nick Huber built his boring business empire by combining content creation with unglamorous real estate. The audience generated the capital. The storage facilities generated the returns. Neither strategy alone would have achieved the same outcome.

FAQ: Boring Business Questions Answered

How much money can you make with a boring business?

The range is enormous. A single laundromat might generate 500,000 annually at 10-15% margins—enough for a comfortable living, not transformative wealth. A franchise location of Dave’s Hot Chicken averages 600,000 in profit. Nick Huber scaled self-storage to $100 million in acquisitions. The ceiling depends on the operator’s ambition and the scalability of the specific model.

What are the best boring businesses to start?

Podcast guests consistently recommend categories with recurring revenue and essential demand: self-storage, laundromats, car washes, HVAC and plumbing services, property management, and franchise concepts with proven unit economics. The common thread is services that customers cannot defer indefinitely and that resist technological disruption.

How do I buy a boring business with no money?

Seller financing is the primary mechanism. If an owner claims their business is excellent and easy to operate, there is no logical reason they would refuse to finance a portion of the purchase price. SBA loans allow 90% leverage. One guest bought his first laundromat at 18 with seller financing and sold it for ten times his purchase price. The constraint is not capital. It is conviction.

Are boring businesses better than tech startups?

The comparison involves different risk profiles. Tech startups offer higher ceilings with 90% failure rates. Boring businesses offer lower variance, tangible assets, and immediate cash flow. Sam Parr prefers digital. Nick Huber built $100 million in boring businesses. Both paths work. The question is which matches your temperament and circumstances.

What is the “gateway drug” business?

Codie Sanchez coined the term to describe laundromats. They are simple enough that a beginner can understand the operations, limited enough in downside that failure is not catastrophic, and educational enough that owners learn the skills of due diligence and management. The laundromat is not necessarily where you build wealth. It is where you learn how to buy and operate.

Sources and Episodes

This article draws from the following My First Million episodes:

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