Shaan reverse-engineers the economics of a million-dollar kids dance studio from a recital program, then dives into obscure local businesses including an Amish email-to-fax service, at-home pet euthanasia, and a restaurant phone-ordering company. The episode closes with Sam and Shaan discussing business coaching, hiring bar-raisers, and the value of getting a coach for every new skill.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
The Million-Dollar Dance Studio [00:00:00]
Shaan: I have a business that no one on a podcast has ever discussed. It’s literally the first time this has probably ever been talked about on YouTube or in the audio format. I’m breaking grounds here. Okay, Jackie Robinson.
So this weekend I went to my daughter’s spring recital. And Sam, when you see this, what does this look like?
Sam: This just looks like a great ballerina program. Yeah.
Shaan: Show program. And that’s what everybody in that crowd thought. But not me. I saw a business plan. I saw information. I saw a giant information leak.
So check this out. This woman has built a million-dollar-plus kids dance studio just down the street from us. And I think this is remarkable. It’s a good reminder that there are million-dollar businesses all around you. You don’t have to do something really grand or innovative. You just got to provide a service that people love and scale it the right way.
On the back of the program is a list of all the dancers in the show — all the dancers across her three locations. Basically everyone performs. I look at this and everyone else is looking for their kids’ name. I’m looking for topline revenue numbers. I’m trying to figure it out.
Each column is about 50 names. So you’ve got 300 kids in the program. I know we pay something like $250 a month to be part of the dance studio. This is the spring recital, so immediately my head says we’re doing at least spring and fall — might even be four recitals a year.
I just bought tickets to this recital, so I know that in addition to the $250 a month membership, you’re paying for uniforms, paying for tickets to watch the show. Every single parent is going to watch their kid. We brought grandparents and a few extras. You look around that theater — totally sold out, standing room only. I know a mom in our class who didn’t log on early enough and only got two tickets in the back. She kicked her husband out and got her mother-in-law to come with a walker so they could sit in the ADA seat. That’s how insatiable the demand is.
Sam: So 300 names, $250 a month — that’s $75,000 a month in sales just off that.
Shaan: Just off that. Then you add the shows, the tickets, the photos — a hundred bucks for the photo package, one thing after another. We’re happy customers.
She does basically no marketing. The show is her marketing. She brings out the teachers to take a bow at the end. I’m like, “Oh, thank you. Now I see the opex line.” Seven teachers. Got it.
I’m pretty sure this dance studio is netting somewhere between $500,000 and $700,000 in EBITDA every year.
Sam: Did she arrive to the recital in an S-Class? Like what type of car was she driving?
Shaan: I installed a tracking device underneath just to see where she lives now.
Sam: Did her Birkin bag give out any hints as to how well the business was doing?
Shaan: So I just thought this is inspiring. A local service — dance classes for little kids — scaled to three locations, is a great business for somebody. She’s been doing it for 25 years. She’s an institution locally. Has a great community of people around her and is making families happy.
Let me show you something interesting. Have you ever heard of Goldfish Swimming Classes?
Sam: No.
Shaan: It’s a franchise that I’m pretty sure does about $600 million a year in revenue. It’s children’s swim classes. This guy was basically telling me each location does like $2 million in revenue and they have something like 300 locations.
Sam: I’m on their site. They got a lot of locations.
Shaan: Another hidden-in-plain-sight business. But I have a hidden-in-plain-sight business that is actually not hidden in plain sight — a business that no one on a podcast has ever discussed.
IBuyFax: The Amish Internet [00:08:00]
Shaan: I just slacked you a URL. Go to dysbuilders.com.
So you know how the Amish are famous for creating amazing furniture? I wanted to buy a bed for my kid — an heirloom quality bed where I was like, man, I wish I still had my crib from when I was a kid. How cool would it be to give my daughter a bed that we reuse for all our kids and eventually grandkids can sleep in?
So I was looking up Amish furniture and I came across this website randomly. It’s dysbuilders.com — I think they make homes. Scroll all the way to the bottom where it says contact and read me the email address.
Sam: Dybuilders at ibfax.com.
Shaan: I noticed on many of these Amish websites when I was looking at how to place an order, I had to email some really weird URL — like Amish furniture at fax.com. There were all these weird URLs that I had to email to fax. I got really curious.
Go to ibyfax.com. It says: send and receive emails with your fax machine.
I got a tip from one of our listeners, Andy Allen, and it was all coincidence because six months prior I was already wondering what this was. So let me give you the background.
If you’re Amish or Mennonite, a lot of them are very entrepreneurial and they work with the outside world. They make furniture they sell to people like me. They have websites. However, according to their religion, they are not allowed to use certain technology that’s considered individualistic. Looking down at your iPhone or sitting at a computer screen — they feel that it takes them away from other people.
But they have all these websites and they sell furniture. How do they do it?
There’s this website — ibyfax.com — where you pay something like $20 a month plus 10 to 50 cents per fax. On the campus of a lot of Amish towns, there is literally a small house — a shanty. In that small house is a fax machine. If you’re an Amish guy running a website and you want to see your orders, or somebody emails asking about a bed frame, you go to this fax machine. This phone they have in their small box — I have a photo of it — it’s like a tiny outhouse where you make the call.
Sam: This photo is outrageous. It looks like a phone booth slash porta-potty. In the middle of the road. On the wall is a tiny phone with a cord.
Shaan: Some of them have fax machines, some have just phones. IBuyFax will either call you and be the middleman — “Hey, Linda@gmail.com wants to know, can you make a bed in this color?” — or you talk to them and they’ll be your middleman. Another thing they’ll do: if you need to figure out what something costs on eBay, you can ask IBuyFax, and they’ll reply back by fax or telephone answering your question.
This way the Amish can do business with the rest of the world without breaking their rules. This website is used across all of the Amish furniture sites. And the Amish community is not tiny — it’s about 400,000 people. They’re very entrepreneurial; self-reliance is part of the community rules.
This guy who emailed me — he owns a business that buys and sells wooden pallets, based in Pennsylvania, works mostly with Amish people. He said whenever they communicate with him, they only communicate through ibyfax.com.
Sam: And this website — who owns it?
Shaan: Here’s where it gets funny. I looked on LinkedIn. The only thing I could find: the owner’s first name is Jamal. And he lives in New York. I’m like, is there a brother who just came up with the brilliant idea to create an Amish faxing website?
Sam: Is he Amish?
Shaan: No, he lives in New York. And his first name is Jamal. I can’t find a photo of him. But you can’t be part of the community anyway — you have to be like an ally. They call those people “English.” Like, they have an English guy — their front man who can work with the world. They trust him. He’s had their back for decades.
Sam: So Jamal is basically the English.
Shaan: Exactly. And by the way, on this doc it says “AWS for the Amish.” What do you think about that?
Sam: That’s good. I like that.
Shaan: 400,000 Amish people. If you say even 5% are entrepreneurial — so 20,000 people. Pretty easily you get to some version where you have 5,000 customers paying $20 a month. That’s a $1 million to $1.2 million business.
Sam: That’s the exact math I had.
Shaan: I’m pretty sure it’s just this one guy. And I just know these Amish guys — once you get a customer, you’re with them. They measure churn not in percentages per year but per generation, because this is absolutely something passed down from generation to generation. And the website looks like it launched in Web 1.0. There’s like seven sentences on the site.
At-Home Pet Euthanasia: Lap of Love [00:18:00]
Shaan: So this episode is basically local million-dollar businesses. Do you want me to do one more?
Sam: Go ahead.
Shaan: When you have to euthanize your pet, it’s a horrible experience. I used a service that came to my house and it was the best of the horrible situation. A few months later, I was like, this service was phenomenal. How did I learn about it? Google “at home pet euthanasia.” First one that comes up — they crush SEO.
Sam: Not googling that. Don’t even want it in my search history.
Shaan: It’s called Lap of Love. Lapoflove.com. Here’s how this business works. They have vets — they contract it all out. They have best practices, and then they’re like the call center that dishes it out to a local vet. They teach them their ways.
They put out a press release saying they’re getting 10,000 customers a month, and they charge roughly $600. If you do the math, this business is making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, split with the vet.
Sam: 10,000 a month? How’d you even know that was a thing? How’d you find out about it?
Shaan: Word of mouth. Like, you know, your wife or someone was like, “We don’t want to do this,” and they said, “Well, I used this service where they come to your house.” And you hear that one-liner and you’re like, oh my god, that’s so much better than the alternative.
And what they do — I was googling — they just own the Yelp pages in every city. It’ll be like “at home pet euthanasia in New York,” “in Nashville,” “in this city.” They grow entirely through local search.
Sam: That’s a crazy business.
Shaan: Crazy business. 10,000 a month, anywhere from $500 to $1,000 depending on a variety of things. This is another one of those services where it sucks, but it’s incredibly necessary, and I was amazed at how large this is.
Tarro: Filipino Call Centers for Restaurants [00:24:00]
Shaan: Here’s another under-the-radar business that just crushes it locally. I saw this guy on Twitter who said: “Today I learned about Tarro, a $100 million company that routes phone orders from Chinese, sushi, and pizza restaurants in the US to call centers in the Philippines.”
What these guys did — two brothers back in 2015 — they basically said, “Hey, we’ll help local businesses take orders over the phone. We’ll be your phone staff.” Your staff is busy, you don’t want someone constantly on the phones interrupting their workflow. We just take the call and put the order into your system.
They started doing that. They’ve serviced 3,000 local restaurants in the United States with phone ordering. Simple proposition: get more revenue, and I can do it for you at a lower cost than you could do yourself. Nobody cares who picks up the phone to take the order.
As of this year, they say they’ve reached a $100 million run rate. And it stands for Technology All Restaurants Run On. It’s the Adidas of online phone ordering.
Sam: Is this bootstrapped?
Shaan: I don’t know for sure, but it could be — this is the type of business you could definitely bootstrap. Heavy cash flow business.
Now it says they’re AI-powered. Funny things are happening with AI and call centers — there are tools that change the accent of the person on the fly so they sound American. AI handles like 50 to 70% of the routine calls and routes the rest to a human. Basically AI makes their call center need half as many people as before, and the rest falls to the bottom line.
Sam: It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. Are call centers going to be extinct or are they going to survive but become much more profitable because they’re AI-powered?
Shaan: Yeah. And by the way, I’ve got to bring up owner.com because I think you might actually be an investor. Are you in that?
Sam: Yeah.
Owner.com and the Restaurant Software Stack [00:30:00]
Shaan: What they’re doing is they go to restaurants across America and say, “Hey, you need software. You hate your current software. You’re using 15 different tools. Use the owner system instead.” Not that new of a pitch — other companies have claimed to be an all-in-one or have the best point-of-sale system. These guys have just gotten it really, really right because they’re growing incredibly fast.
There’s a great case study on their website. Most case studies on business websites are awful — god awful. I watched this one and was thoroughly convinced. If they do their case studies this well, imagine how they’re doing the other important parts of their business.
It was a pizza shop owner in Pennsylvania basically showing: if you Googled my pizza shop’s name, the first result is Slice, the second is DoorDash, third is all these other companies stealing my customers. People are searching for me, not for DoorDash. They make these websites that rank in SEO and push the actual business to page two.
He’s like, I started working with Owner — now I’m the first result. Those orders come through me directly. I don’t have to pay DoorDash the 15% fee. My online ordering works really well out of the box. I get customer emails and phone numbers, I can text them, we have promotions. I’m making an extra $10,000 a month. That’s the difference between being on the brink of failure or having a margin of safety.
Sam: The way I invested in him was way less fancy than yours. Lumpkin was like, “He’s the best,” and I just said, “Okay, in.” When I talked to him — I think this was four years ago — he was 21 years old. Once I heard “21 years old” and Jason Lumpkin saying “he’s the best,” I was like, I’m in. The valuation was really expensive, I believe — a nine-figure something valuation.
Shaan: When I had a conversation with him, I was like, “You’re going to destroy everything in your path.” I could sense that. He gave me the vibe where I was like, I do not want to be your enemy.
On his YouTube videos he comes off like a really sweet, nice guy. When I talked to him one-on-one — he’s incredibly intense. He will annihilate people in an ethical, good way. The type of guy where I do not want to compete against.
Hiring Bar-Raisers: The Furcon Story [00:42:00]
Sam: So I’ve been trying to help certain people in my life either start businesses or upgrade their business.
Shaan: Like your trainer?
Sam: Like my trainer. His calendar is full, he’s got more clients than he can handle, but he’s still trading time for money. He can only train so many people per day. He can’t double his money if he wanted to. He started an energy drink company, an apparel company — all these side hustles. But I’m like, dude, the beverage industry is brutal. The apparel business is just brutal.
I was like, “Have you thought about getting another trainer? Or starting a studio?” And he’s like, “Oh, I would love to have my own studio.”
I basically told him, I was like, “Look, the way I got in shape — instead of winging it, I hired you as my trainer. I think you should have me as your business trainer. Don’t pay me anything. Just book your first assessment.”
I’ve been trying to be a better coach. So I leave them every time with one blue sticky note with one thing. This is the one action. Do this between now and the next session.
I realized most people don’t approach business this way — just paying attention to businesses around you and doing a little napkin math. Figure out how many customers a place has, times the price every customer pays. That’s a good approximation of topline. Then just Google what’s a typical profit margin for this type of business.
Shaan: Yeah. The way I think about it is you’re going to have some learning curve — might take 6 months, might take a year. You could definitely get there on your own. A coach is pretty much just a guaranteed way to speed up that learning curve. And you’re much less likely to quit during plateaus because a coach has seen those plateaus many times before.
I probably have five active coaches right now.
Sam: What categories?
Shaan: Fitness and nutrition. The food coach one felt the weirdest and in retrospect is the most obvious no-brainer of all. People think, “Oh, so they’re giving you a meal plan and macros.” No, no, no. She’s helping me figure out why I don’t stick to any food plan or macros I’ve ever set for myself in the last 10 years. Slowly uprooting those and being in my corner along the way.
I started learning piano this year, so I got a piano teacher. Actually, I ended up with two — one of the realizations I had is there’s a massive difference between an average coach and a great coach. There’s definitely a 10x coach.
Business coach, executive coach.
Sam: So basically anything you do now, your first step is to start the same day you have the idea?
Shaan: That’s my rule. You want to do X? Same day, you need to do something in that area. Have your first session in some way. Drop everything and do it. And then find a coach because a coach is going to speed up the process.
There’s a guy in our basketball league, Alex, who’s just nasty on the court. He’s smaller than me. It’s not his athleticism. This guy’s just better at basketball. He told me this story — when he was young, he didn’t have any money for a coach. He saw a trainer training another kid. He went up and asked, “How much for a session?” The trainer said $75. He’s like, there’s no way my parents are paying $75. So he asked a great question: “Is there anything I could help you with that you’d give me a session for? Could I be a rebounder? Could I shag balls? Could I help you with scheduling?”
The guy said fine. So he ended up learning while helping somebody else, then had his own session at the end. He got so good as a young kid just doing that. And eventually built his own training business while getting trained.
Sam: To add to it — after getting a coach, I put a date where I must perform. If it’s a fitness thing, I want to achieve this body fat by this date, or run this race on this date. It’s not just a goal. It’s a performance.
Do you remember that MTV show “Made” — where they’d teach people to learn something in approximately 30 days?
Shaan: I love that show.
Sam: They’d take a young woman who wanted to do a backflip on a BMX bike, hire a BMX coach, and she’d end up doing it in a competition. We should do an MFM version of Made — MFM Made. It doesn’t matter what the challenge is. You just pick a thing, you have a short amount of time, you have to hire help, and you jump off the cliff a little bit to master or just learn a skill.
For you it would be a piano recital. Or play a song for friends.
Shaan: I totally love that idea. It’s like a cousin of the My First Muscle Challenge we did last year.
I did something similar once in Australia. Three of us each wrote down a thing we’d love to have done but are scared as hell to do. One person’s was to do an open-mic standup comedy set — five minutes. Another guy had just broken up with his high school girlfriend, never asked anyone out, and he just wanted to approach someone and ask them out. Overcome that one thing.
Another person’s — at parties when the dance circle forms, they wanted to go in and do a thing. So we took a hip-hop dance class together, prepping for the circle the whole time.
Sam: By the way, when you go to that class, it’s two different classes if you just show up for fun versus if you show up thinking “I’m going in that circle at some point.”
Shaan: We got kind of addicted to it. We’d start making up new ones every few days. I’m going to go for a walk and give a smooth compliment to three people along the way. I’m not going to answer “how are you today” with the word “good.”
Sam: My friend Noah Kagan used to have this thing where he’d ask for a discount on every single thing he bought. He just needed to get over the nerves and not be afraid of asking for things.
Shaan: We had a board in our living room called — corny name — “Fear Nation.” We’d write everything we were afraid of and try to cross them out. Pick one each day.
We’re going to do MFM Made instead of MTV Made. What’s yours going to be?
Sam: I’d have to think about it. I don’t think it would be fitness — too easy. It’d have to be an emotional thing, like the equivalent of asking a girl out. I think it’d have to be dancing.
Shaan: Dude, that would be the worst.
Sam: Maybe. Yeah, I would rather punch myself in the stomach 20 times. All right, edit this out. We’re not doing this.
Shaan: All right. Amish faxing, dying pets, Furcon, kids dancing — very eclectic episode. All right, that’s the pod.