Welcome to Biz Brainstorms –

My name's Connor.

I go down weekly rabbit holes of business ideas, lessons, & good finds.

All 3 of these ideas came from a recent podcast recording that I did with Chris Koerner on his Youtube channel. If you like this content, you’ll love his.

Speed Tests, Unsellable Companies, ToastMasters For Zoom

Today's Outline:
🪦 Unsellable Companies
🏃‍♂️ Employee Speed Tests
🥂 ToastMaster For Zoom (this would crush)

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Unsellable Companies  🪦

Let me break a narrative for you here.

You’ve probably heard of the Silver Tsunami.

12 million baby boomers own a business… a $10 trillion dollar transfer of business assets

Here’s the catch though…

• 40% are shutting down when they retire
• And 80% of businesses that are listed to sell will never sell (really high)

So only 1.4M businesses are truly changing hands.

What about the remaining 10.6M companies?

There has got to be an opportunity there.

Let’s be honest though, they are shutting down because they are very high paying jobs.

You have small service business operators making $200,000-400,000/year. It’s great money, but it’s hardly an asset. So what’s the play here?

In my opinion, this is where the no-money down offers start coming in. You can pay for the first year of their retirement, and in exchange begin collecting these small service businesses. What’s the value there?

3 Options:
1. Depreciate – If you’re buying an older business that is going to shut down otherwise, you can depreciate 50% of their used equipment, so long as it’s new to you.

2. Customer Data – A lot of these operators have great relationships that have been around for 40+ years. Buy roofing companies for pennies on the dollar and sell the leads of customers who got their roofs replaced 15-19 years ago

3. Help Them Close Up Shop – Companies like Simple Closure will automate the process of shutting down a business by filing paperwork with the state. Perk of this is that you get paid for an easily automated service & build up a database of older wealthy customers.

How would you build in this category?

Employee Speed Tests 🏃‍♂️

Alright get this, I type fast. (75 word per minute, nbd).

But I’ve never realized how slow others type. I was recruiting for customer service agents via ConstantHire and the client wanted us to administer a typing test to candidates (this is the one we used).

Some of the top candidates typed at 35 words per minute!

When hiring, I never considered the idea that someone might be perfectly qualified, great attitude, but just slow.

2 ways we can solve this problem:

Test Project designed for speed assessment – Create a sandbox environment and build a list of tasks from clearing emails to updating fake briefs. The employee will likely think the goal is output, but speed will be the factor to screen on.

New Employee Training – Build a 2 hour course that trains employees on keyboard shortcuts. Investment Bankers train new analysts how to avoid ever touching a mouse. This can be built for PC’s and Macs but offered up to every company.

ToastMaster for Zoom 🥂

ToastMasters is a worldwide organization designed to help companies executives present better.

Get ready for some quick facts:
• 300 of the 2020 Fortune 500 companies offer in-house Toastmasters clubs (92 of top 100 all have one)
• They have 364,000 international members as of 2024.
• They charge $60 USD per six-month period (or $120 USD annually)
• $21M in annual revenue not including all of their other one time fees and other services. I bet this is a $50M annual business.

Want to know what we do a whole lot less in 2024?

Public Speak.

But companies still want to invest in their employees…

That’s where ToastMasters for Zoom comes in.

Similar to all of the AI note takers, it sits in a zoom meeting with and send you feedback after the call.

• You used 17 ‘ums’
• You are overusing the following idioms
• When you presented on X, you spoke for 2 minutes 25 seconds. We rewrote your points to be more succinct below:

I think this could be a huge business.

There are 300M DAILY Zoom users.

Let’s use 20% of the Toast Masters 364,000 members (though I think it would be much higher). Sell a $99 annual plan.

That’s a $7M ARR business alone.

That’s a wrap!

What did you think? Also, if you’re new here, say what’s up!

✌️ See you next week

-Connor