The Market Discovers Boring Businesses

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The Market Discovers Boring BusinessesIf you’ve ever paid any attention to the small business community on social media platforms like X, “boring businesses” are as popular as ever. The “bad” part of a boring business is that it’s not glamorous. The fun part? It reliably returns cash flow, day after day, month after month, year after year.

The Category

In case you’re still struggling to visualize these types of businesses, they include:

  • Self-storage
  • Laundromats
  • Vending machines
  • ATMs
  • Car washes
  • Bookkeeping/accounting
  • Home services

Other telltale signs of boring businesses include:

  • A fax number
  • No website
  • No internet presence

Codie Sanchez, one of the prophets of this category, even has a list of 130 of them you can peruse. She’s even started a holding company that strictly acquires and scales home service businesses.

The Opportunity

Some of the opportunities lie in the telltale signs we just mentioned. For example, a fax number indicates a business that has been around a long time and has established customers. But it also means that there’s probably been a lack of voluntary tech upgrades. Those upgrades would include an updated website, branding, and the right type of digital marketing and SEO.

All of those upgrades necessarily reach a broader audience, instantly adding new low-hanging revenue for mostly one-time investments.

Because a lot of boring businesses tend to be mom-and-pop (less so self storage since it became a PE darling) the possibility of a roll-up is also present, magnifying the financial effects of someone cutting inefficiencies/poor practices out of a mom-and-pop-style business.

For example, you buy a laundromat which is decently kept up, but perhaps you add branding, vending machines, wifi, etc. which brings in more customers. That means you can then apply those same changes to the next laundromat you buy, making it part of your new “chain.” This adds even more value for a future exit.

Not Complicated

Perhaps what is most attractive about boring businesses, both for rookie entrepreneurs and seasoned business owners, is that these businesses are not overly complicated, nor do they require a significant training/certification period. They involve a discrete list of tasks that need to be completed by you or your team each day, week, month, and year. Some businesses, like ATMs, for example, can run pretty much on auto-pilot. They already have built-in customers. They can sometimes offer lower overhead, which is a great help to a first-time business owner.

Guess who also loves boring businesses? Banks. These boring businesses are the types of companies who have already been part of transactions at the bank or who bank there now.

As you build out new customer acquisition funnels through digital marketing, etc., you will learn how to add these new processes to what you’ve already been doing.

Does a boring business sound exciting to you? Let’s find you one! Give us a call.