Happy Thursday!

Rally quick before I dive in, I get this question all the time: “How do I actually make money with all these AI tools?” Thats why I built Playmakers- my AI agency program where I teach you how to charge local businesses $500-$5,000 a month to set up and manage AI for them. You get three live calls a week, plug-and-play automation templates you can deploy for clients on day one, a 5 Day First Client Challenge, and my personal lead lists with businesses in your area ready to connect.120+ people are already in the community building agencies right now. Go to playmakersai.com and check it out.

Okay, let’s get into it.

The last couple weeks have been very AI and digitally focused so I am switching gears. I want to tell you about a guy named Mike. He's a tile installer from Iowa City, Iowa, who a few months ago decided to start a second business on the side. He had no experience in the industry, no training, and no connections. He just watched some YouTube videos and started flying the plane as he built it.

I flew him out to my new studio recently to learn about it. His business is awesome and I want to walk you through exactly how to copy it. If you want the full conversation, go watch or listen to it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Here's what he built: a concrete coatings business. You know those flake garage floors you've seen at your neighbor's house or your buddy's shop? The ones that look like polished showroom floors? Mike does those. Base coat, color flakes thrown across the surface, top coat. Grind the floor, coat it, done in a day. He charges $8 a square foot. A typical two-car garage runs $5,500 to $6,000. His first real month in business, he did $60,000 in revenue. The month I talked to him, he was on pace for $69,000. Profit margin above 50%.

He's been booked solid, four days a week, for months. In Iowa City, Iowa: population 77,000.

The Unit Economics:

Mike reverse-engineered his pricing from his actual cost structure, which is the right way to do it. Hard materials (base coat, flakes, top coat) run $2.06 per square foot. Miscellaneous supplies like rollers and gloves add another $0.50. Monthly overhead (advertising, shop, insurance, vehicle costs) comes out to about $7,300, which works out to roughly $1.00 per square foot at his current volume. A good helper runs $25 to $35 per hour. At 7,000 square feet of work per month, your all-in cost lands around $3.90 per square foot.

He sells at $8.00. That's roughly 50% gross margin on every job, before it gets better with scale.

One crew of 1-2 people does the job per day. A job takes about 10 hours with two people. Three to four grand in profit, for one day of work.

What You Actually Need to Start:

Mike's startup equipment came to about $22- $25K all in. The anchor piece is a 20-inch propane-powered floor grinder, which runs around $19,000 new. You also need a heavy-duty vacuum, spike shoes, rollers, and scrapers. But if you want to test the model before committing, you can rent a grinder for around $300 a day or $1,000 for a week, buy the materials, do one job, and recover your entire outlay before you've spent a dime on equipment of your own.

For the vehicle, Mike's crew started with a used U-Haul box truck for $10,000. It has a ramp, which you need because the grinder weighs 570 pounds. It works great. They later added a Ford Transit for easier maneuvering, but the box truck got them all the way to $60,000 months.

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The Marketing Side:

Ninety percent of Old Cap Coating’s leads come from Meta ads, almost entirely Facebook. His target customer is a 55-plus male who owns a multi-car garage and has money to spend on things that look great. That customer is on Facebook. The ads are short vertical videos, around 20 to 25 seconds, showing the process. Grinder on the floor. Flake getting broadcast. The satisfying before-and-after. People can't stop watching it because visually it's compelling in the same way that pressure washing content is compelling. You're watching a transformation happen in real time.

His best-performing ad leads with one question: how much does it cost? Because that's the number one thing every potential customer wants to know, and almost no competitor will just tell them. The pricing is right there in the ad copy. He gets higher-intent leads as a result, spends less time on tire kickers, and closes at a higher rate. His brother calls within minutes of a form submission, books an in-person quote the same day if at all possible, and closes roughly 20% of all leads at an average ticket of $5,500 to $6,000.

Cost per lead on his best-performing ad: $30. Customer acquisition cost: around $150, give or take. Return on that spend against a $5,500 average job is not bad at all. (On top of paid ads, Mike actively builds his Google Business Profile and asks every customer for a review. It's free reach and it compounds.)

The Job:

You don't need to be a contractor to do this. Mike was a tile guy, but he told me the overlap is minimal. His real training was doing his own garage in February to learn the process, partnering with a couple of guys who had field experience, and then just doing it on paying customers.

Here's the process in plain language: You grind the concrete floor with a diamond-head grinder to open up the surface and make it porous. You apply a polyurea base coat with a squeegee. You broadcast colored flakes across the wet base coat until the floor is covered. You blow off the excess flake, scrape the edges flat, and apply a polyaspartic top coat. Let it cure. Walk away. The whole thing takes one crew one day on a standard two- or three-car garage.

For materials, Mike's crew uses Simiron polyurea for the base coat, Torginol flakes, and a top-coat polyaspartic sourced through their local distributor. He was transparent that there's a lot of tribal debate in this industry about which base coat is superior. His take: polyurea lets you complete a job in one day, whereas epoxy requires an overnight cure before you can top coat. Faster turnaround means more jobs per month, which means more revenue.

This Market Is Wide Open

There is a huge gap between the demand for this service and the number of operators running a professional, responsive business. Show up on time. Answer your phone. Give people your price upfront. Be prompt. Mike said he calls his clients back same-day and they're stunned, because that is apparently not the norm. The bar is low enough that basic professionalism is a competitive advantage.

His market of 77,000 people in Iowa City, with a 50-mile service radius pulling in Cedar Rapids and the Quad Cities, is producing $60,000-plus months with one crew. Run this in Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, or any metro area with a million-plus people, and you start to see what the ceiling actually looks like.

Start This Week:

-Rent a grinder, buy $500 in materials, and do your own garage or a family member's.
-Learn the process.
-Film every step of it for your first ad.
-Build a one-page website with a lead form, your service area, and your pricing.
-Launch a Facebook ad targeting homeowners 45-plus within 50 miles.
-Budget $20 to $30 a day to start.
-Call every lead within 10 minutes of receiving it.
-Go give the quote in person.

Mike said it better than I could: "You can just start a business. It's not that complicated." He's doing $60,000 months in Iowa. You can do this.

And again-And if you’re inspired to do the same, and want the full conversation, go watch or listen to it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Let me know after you’ve done you first garage floor over $5,000!

Have a great week!

Chris

P.S. I share deep dives on business ideas and complete playbooks three times a week on YouTube and every podcast platform.