Most people struggle to start one decent business. Chris Koerner started 75 businesses in 15 years, and he's still the same type of "average" guy on paper, no secret family money, no magic degree, no perfect plan.
What makes this a useful success story is how repeatable his thinking is. He stays curious, tests demand before spending real money, and keeps his operations lighter than you'd expect (including running a tree trimming company without owning a chainsaw).
Who Chris Koerner is, and what he runs today
Chris Koerner describes himself as a serial entrepreneur. Over the last 15 years, he's started businesses across healthcare, software, home services, and e-commerce. He says the businesses he runs today are worth about $25 million.
When he talks about his current focus, three areas come up:
- Real estate, mainly RV parks (he also invests in mobile home parks).
- E-commerce, selling Texas-flavored snacks worldwide.
- Software, a product that helps skilled nursing facilities save money.
He works from a home office and likes it for a simple reason: no commute, and he can see his kids leave for school and come home. He estimates he spends about 50 hours a week working.
The early story matters because it explains his "why." He didn't grow up with much money, and he remembers it being frustrating. As a kid, he'd run small schemes just to buy what he wanted, like selling golf balls to get enough for a bike. In high school, he did whatever jobs were available: mowing lawns, waiting tables, delivering pizzas, the usual grind.
There's also a piece that shaped his tolerance for rejection. He served a two-year church mission in Hungary and says he knocked doors for two years straight and got rejected roughly 40,000 times. That kind of repetition changes your nervous system a bit. You stop treating "no" like it's fatal.
"Being broke kind of forces you to find solutions that others miss. It's kind of like a superpower."
If you like seeing how other simple home services turn into real income, this related case study on scaling a lawn care business to $125K/month is worth keeping in your back pocket.
The first big wins: iPhone repairs, then a $10M screen loop
Chris's first "real" business was Phone Restore, started when he was a sophomore or junior at the University of Alabama, right when iPhones were new and breaking a lot.
The way he found it is the whole lesson.
He read about LSU students opening an iPhone repair store and doing well. Around the same time, a classmate gave him a broken iPhone for free. He didn't even know what a smartphone was, but he smelled opportunity. Then he saw a flyer at the university: "I'll fix your iPhone for 60 bucks." Chris went to the guy's dorm room, watched him fix the phone, and asked a million questions (where the screens come from, how the process works, how he learned it).
He left thinking: this is my next business.
Phone Restore grew to four locations, and he sold it two years in. The day after selling, he started another business: LCD Cycle.
The model was simple, but kind of sneaky smart. Repair shops end up with piles of broken iPhone screens. Chris would buy those broken screens from shops, ship them to China, have them remanufactured, ship them back, then sell them again as remanufactured units.
That business hit $10 million in sales in its first three years, and Chris says it paid for his house.
Here's the part most people skip: he didn't "hope" repair shops would sell him screens. He validated demand first.
He scraped every iPhone repair shop in America (about 20,000), put them in a spreadsheet, loaded them into a CRM, hired three virtual assistants, and had them cold call with a clear offer: "Do you have broken iPhone screens? We'll pay $3 each. We'll send a prepaid label, then send you a check."
About 40% said yes. That's not hype, that's a market raising its hand.
If you want a deeper, practical guide on validation in another "unsexy" category, this case study on a recession-proof junk removal business model pairs well with his approach.
His "idea muscle" method: turn anything into business ideas
Chris's "secret" to finding so many business ideas isn't a private database. It's a habit.
He says he's naturally curious. When he walks into a restaurant, he'll count tables, count chairs, look at the menu, and casually estimate what they might make in a day. Not because he's judging them, but because his brain keeps asking, "How does this work?"
He even practices it like a game: he'll ask a friend or family member to point at something in a room and challenge himself to turn it into a business. That sounds silly until you realize what it does. It trains you to see offers, not objects.
A good example was sitting in his office with a painted red truck (something he made with his daughter at a pottery place). His idea started with a small upsell: put a camera on a tripod over the painting station, create a time-lapse, and offer the customer a "before and after" or a shareable time-lapse video for an extra $10 at checkout.
Then he pushed it into a standalone business: provide the cameras, tripods, software, and point-of-sale integration to pottery studios. The studio sells the upsell, and Chris's company takes a percentage for providing the whole system.
That's the pattern: start with "what's an easy add-on?" then ask "can it become a business on its own?"
He does this in real life too, not just as a thought experiment. While walking around his property, he talks about building a private pickleball club in a shop out back. His reasoning is classic Chris: he wants one for himself anyway, so he might as well monetize it.
He points out that pickleball has been the fastest-growing sport in America for years. Nearby clubs are full and charge about $140 a month. His plan is a "secret" private club for $100 a month with key-card access, cameras, vending machines, a cleaner, and insurance.
The rough math he shares: 150 members at $100 a month equals $15,000 a month, and he estimates about $12,000 net profit.
The tree trimming business, built without owning a chainsaw
The tree trimming section hits because it's so blunt: Chris runs a tree trimming business and says he doesn't even own a chainsaw.
The model is not "be the best tree guy in town." It's "be the best at demand and dispatch," then subcontract the labor to experienced crews.
On a job site in Southlake, Texas (DFW suburbs), he walks through a real example: a mature oak tree (about 15 years old) that's leaning, and after a windstorm the roots pulled up. The homeowner called because the risk went up.
The job price: $2,800 to cut it down and grind the stump.
Crew size: three people.
Target time: four hours.
His margins surprised me, in a good way:
- Around 50% gross margin
- Around 40% net margin, because overhead stays low
- Monthly revenue around $20,000 to $40,000, with storm months higher and winter slower
The overhead stays low because they don't run a shop or yard the traditional way. They subcontract everything to crews. That makes it seasonal, yes, but also flexible.
He also stacks the business with a related side play: a small firewood business. In the off-season, you see big logs seasoning on his property. He says you don't want to sell firewood green, so they let it dry naturally.
That firewood idea started on a church campout, when some high schoolers asked him what business they should start. He offered his property, bought a log splitter (about $1,500), and let them source wood from his tree trimming company. They sell on Facebook Marketplace. Over about six months, he says they sold a few thousand dollars' worth and it's close to 100% profit, since the main "cost" is time.
He even mentions you can rent out the splitter for about $70 a day.
The bigger point is that one business can feed another, literally, in this case.
If you're curious about the broader tree service industry basics (equipment, safety, planning), this guide on how to start a tree service business is a solid reference.
Getting the first 100 customers: remove friction, drop pride
When Chris talks about customer acquisition, he doesn't start with ads. He starts with ego.
His advice is simple: drop your pride. If you feel embarrassed calling people you know to offer a service, you're building extra friction into the hardest part of the business.
He frames entrepreneurship as momentum versus friction. You want momentum fast, so remove the friction.
Instead of saying, "I'll learn Facebook ads and then get my first 100 customers," he suggests starting with your phone and your existing relationships. Call 10 people you know and offer something obvious that most homeowners delay (pressure washing, tree trimming, yard cleanup). Offer it half off, or even free, and ask for referrals.
It's not glamorous. It's just fast.
For the tree trimming business, the biggest early win wasn't homeowners. It was referral sources, especially real estate agents. His logic: don't market to people who might buy once, market to people who touch homeowners every day.
His first customer came through that channel. It was a woman in Allen, Texas who was about to sell her house. The timing mattered because when someone is selling or buying, they're already in "spend money to fix things" mode. The job was about $1,600 to $1,700, and he says they made about $800 profit in around two hours.
That's also why the subcontracting model works. You can focus on demand, quoting, and dispatch. The crews handle the work.
Creative marketing that's scrappy, but works
Chris clearly loves marketing. The examples are fun, but they're not random. Each one ties the offer to a moment when the customer is already thinking about the problem.
One early example: when his iPhone repair shop was slow, he thought about where students break phones. Bars. He didn't drink and had never really been to bars, but he knew wristbands were common. He bought Tyvek disposable wristbands, printed his offer on them ("20% off iPhone repairs" plus address and phone), and gave them to bars for free.
His pitch to the bar was perfect: you're already giving out wristbands, use mine instead, you don't have to buy yours.
The next day, students showed up with broken phones and the wristband still on.
Another one: he helped a friend with a local bread business that sold in 200 grocery stores across DFW but didn't sell online. The bread was too fresh for long distribution. Chris printed flyers advertising online ordering, trained the staff to insert them into every loaf, and turned the bread itself into an ad channel. The friend sold about 10,000 loaves a week, so even a 1% conversion could become real direct-to-consumer revenue. Chris says it worked well, and it helped during COVID when online sales mattered more.
Then there's the perfume vending machine business. He saw a perfume vending machine on Instagram, realized it wasn't in the US yet, and posted a quick video about why it was interesting. It got over 20 million views. People flooded the comments asking where they could buy the machines.
The manufacturer didn't care at first. So Chris built a website with a lead magnet and captured demand. He collected over 4,000 leads of interested buyers before the manufacturer agreed to talk seriously. That turned into a real partnership where he helps sell the vending machines around the world.
If you want to follow his own long-form content outside social feeds, his newsletter post, I've Started 75+ Businesses: the things that matter, adds more of his thinking in one place.
Validation, fear, and failure, without the fairy tale version
Chris doesn't pretend everything works. He treats failed tests like part of the price.
When people bring up fear of failure, his take is blunt: the only way to guarantee failure is to never launch. He also mentions Jeff Bezos's regret minimization framework, the idea that people regret what they don't try more than the attempts that don't work out.
His validation filter is also pretty grounded. Before he "really" launches an idea, he wants two things:
- The idea has to give him energy. If he doesn't like the niche, he won't push through the boring parts.
- He needs proof of demand before spending money.
He gives examples of demand testing: posting on Facebook Marketplace, sending emails, talking to friends and family, or comparing competition counts in Google Maps between cities.
The iPhone screen business cold call test is still the cleanest example, because it was measurable and done before the launch.
He also shares a wild chapter from 2018: he built a theory to predict crypto price movement based on "hype" (mentions on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook) divided by market cap. It worked in his trading. Then he tried to get John McAfee's attention, guessed his email address by trial and error, and eventually got invited to McAfee's house in Tennessee to pitch in person.
That partnership led to McAfee promoting the project weekly on Twitter, a community of 70,000 people, their own cryptocurrency reaching a $30 to $40 million market cap, and six figures of net profit over about a year.
On the failure side, he talks about buying a Bitcoin mining facility right as Bitcoin peaked. On paper, it looked perfect. For the first three months, it was a rocket: $9.8 million in sales and $1.1 million in profit. Then Bitcoin dropped, and the next three years turned into a grind. His lesson: avoid businesses where you're not in control and the market can crush you no matter what you do.
For a broader perspective on timing and why "now" can still be a good moment to start, this piece on is 2026 a good time to start a business fits the same "test fast" mindset.
Partners, hiring, systems, and the day-to-day that keeps it together
A lot of the "75 businesses" thing only works because Chris isn't trying to be the hero in every company. He partners, delegates, and structures roles.
He says one of his biggest regrets is partnering with the wrong people because he got excited about an idea and didn't do enough diligence on the person. He also doesn't love 50/50 partnerships. In his view, they work only in a specific scenario, both people are side by side, fully committed, no other distractions. Otherwise, he prefers 80/20, either he's the majority owner and driver, or he's a passive advisor with 20%.
For hiring, he looks for people who can handle ambiguity. He admits he's vague with tasks, gives a direction and a few suggestions, and wants high-agency people who can run with it. He also says he's had better results hiring young, moldable people than expensive "industry experts," which surprised me a little, but I get it. Experts come with habits and expectations, and the bill is higher.
He claims you'll spot your rock stars early, often in the first two weeks. If you see red flags in that window, it usually gets worse.
Incentives are interesting too. He likes perks that feel bigger than their cost. For example, instead of a $100 cash bonus, covering streaming subscriptions might cost him $50 to $80 but feel like $150 to $200 in value to the employee. Cash still matters, but the point is to think like a human.
His systems approach is aggressively simple: Google Docs, Google Sheets, Apple Notes, Gmail, Chrome tabs, reminders, a calendar he tries to keep open. He warns against thinking one fancy tool will fix chaos. Usually it adds more work because you have to learn it.
His daily routine is almost boring. He wakes up around 6:30, helps with the kids, then goes straight to work. He batches meetings and business tasks on certain days, then keeps other days open for creative work.
He also believes in Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time you give it. He uses that idea in a weird way: he says yes to a lot of opportunities, and if something consistently falls by the wayside, that's a signal it wasn't important enough to deserve attention.
What I learned from this (personal notes I'm keeping)
I've heard a lot of people talk about "ideas," but this one landed differently because it wasn't about motivation. It was about behavior.
The biggest thing I'm taking away is how often Chris tries to sell or validate before building. Not in a sketchy way, more like, "Let's find out if anyone wants this before we spend months on it." That one habit alone can save you from so much wasted time. It also makes you calmer, because you're not guessing in the dark.
I also liked the reminder that being new in an industry can be an advantage. It's easy to talk yourself out of a plan by interviewing the most burned-out operators you can find. Chris basically says, don't do that, form your own opinion, then pay for expertise (subcontracting) while you get good at demand.
And yeah, the "drop pride" part stung a bit, in a useful way. The first customers usually come from people you already know, or from knocking on doors, or from simple outreach that feels awkward. That's normal. If I were starting something this week, I'd probably start there, not with fancy ads.
Finally, I'm writing down his last line because it's the right kind of pressure: be impatient with small things, patient with big things. Test fast, but don't quit the moment it gets slow.
Conclusion: the repeatable blueprint behind 75 businesses
Chris Koerner's success story isn't about finding one perfect idea. It's about building a loop: stay curious, spot business ideas everywhere, validate demand before spending, and keep operations lighter than your competitors expect.
If one part is worth copying first, it's the simplest one: run a demand test this week. Post the offer, make the calls, collect the leads, see what the market says. That's how you turn curiosity into momentum, and momentum into something real.
Note: "We analyzed this interview to bring you the best takeaways for your next startup,"
Image Source: UpFlip