My 2025 Profit Reveal: A Full Breakdown of Every Income Stream⏐Ep. #261

Chris Koerner (0:00)

Welcome to The Koerner Office. It's a wrap on 2025, and every year I do this year-end episode where I talk about my investments this year, businesses I started, businesses that failed, net worth updates, income updates, where I'm making money, how I'm making money, what I'm working on, what I'm failing on, personal life, business, everything. This is an episode that won't do big numbers, but for the people that like this podcast and come back every week or every month, you should like it a whole lot. And I appreciate you. I appreciate you for liking more personal episodes like these. I'll try to be as specific as I'm comfortable being, but it's just tricky because I build a lot of stuff in public. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. And people ask in the comments sometimes like, hey, how's this going? How's that going? And sometimes they're going really well, and sometimes they're already shut down. So I have a huge list of everything that I've been talking about, working on, et cetera, and another huge list of things that I've never really talked about that I want to cover. So I want to tie up my 2025 in this episode. I did the same thing from a hotel room in San Francisco when I was on a trip across the West Coast with my family a year ago. And you can find that in the show notes if you're interested in how my 2024 went. But at the end of this, I'll talk about some of my income sources, where my income is coming from and what it looks like. But first, let's touch on the businesses. The businesses that I own or have owned in the recent past or present. These will be in no particular order. It's just basically as I remembered them and jotted them down on this Google Doc I have in front of me. So I started a firewood business with some teenagers from church a little over a year ago. This was a spontaneous idea that came up on a campout. And it was just a way to help them earn money for college. It's called College Fund Firewood. And I bought a log splitter. And I asked my tree trimming company to drop off big oak logs on my property. And it was just a way for me to kind of teach entrepreneurship to young people and support them in that. And it went well. We did it last season. We made a couple thousand bucks. And all of it went to the boys, to their college. And now they're either on missions or in college. And we're doing it again this year. But it's been slower to get it picked up. I haven't been super proactive about getting the next generation, if you will, over to my place to start splitting logs. But the splitter's ready to go. It's gassed up and I got lots of logs for them. So the next business I'll touch on is BFH, Backyard Fun House. This is actually going pretty well. So we built a sport court in our backyard and I was too cheap to hire it out to a general contractor. So I found a bunch of subcontractors to do it myself. A concrete guy, a fencing guy, a guy to paint lines on the court, a guy to do the electrical and the lights and all that.

At the end of the day, I spent about $28,000 to build this and it would have cost about $50,000, $55,000. And that includes a pad for a shed that I put in. So very happy with that. And I turned that into a business where we install sport courts and putting greens and you know, basketball hoops and in-ground trampolines in people's homes. And we have Facebook ads running for that right now. We've got a bunch of quotes out, like a ton of quotes out, a lot of good stuff in the works, but no revenue yet. We have yet to close any jobs. I've spent about $4,000 in Facebook ads. My business partner James, who is the same partner for Fast Street Care, he built the website and it looks amazing. And it's just, it's hard to get your first customer, especially if it's a high ticket service like this. I mean, the jobs we're quoting are between $10,000 and $100,000 each. And so it's a long sales cycle and it's not really the right season for it. But this is one that I'm just as excited about today, if not more so than I was when I originally talked about it a few months ago. And it's one that we're actively pursuing. Next business is Fast Tree Care, the other business I have with my business partner, James. This one's been pretty slow lately. I haven't put much attention into this. And it's also the wrong season, but we're still doing thousands a month, sometimes tens of thousands a month. And it's just pretty flat. We're just kind of complacent and it could be doing a lot better. But it's profitable and it's still there. Next one is Secret Pickleball. If you'll remember, I have a shop behind my house. It's about 2,100 square feet and I wanted to launch an indoor private pickleball club for this. And I posted a bunch of Facebook ads for it with a type form that had 19 questions. And I got a ton of inquiries. I was incredibly enthused at the response. And this club, so the business model is basically 99 bucks a month. And you can play pickleball a defined number of times, either in doubles or singles. And if people don't play that often, I can fit up to 200 members. If they play a lot, I can only fit about 100 members. So my Facebook ad test showed me that it will not be hard to fill this to capacity, that it would gross about 15,000 a month and net, call it 10 to $12,000 a month. But a lot of big problems here. I need to add a new septic system, which is like 12 grand. I need to expand the building, which is like 20 grand. I need to add a bathroom because you can't have a pickleball club without a bathroom. That's going to be like 15 grand. I got to paint it. I got to demo this weird structure inside of it. I got to add gravel. I got to add a security system. It was going to be a lot of money, a lot more than I thought. I budgeted about 30 or 40,000, but after getting a bunch of quotes, it was going to be about $70,000 to $90,000, which is still a great return on investment if it nets 10 to 12,000 a month. But I was afraid that the city would shut me down because it wouldn't be zoned appropriately. And it was just going to be a big lift to maybe get shut down by the city. And I want to do other stuff with my shop. I don't want it all tied up. I want to do woodworking out there. I want to liquidate pallets of washers and dryers, which is what I'm doing with it right now. And I'll touch on in a minute. I just want freedom and flexibility with that building. I don't want to tie it up as a big wall club. So the validity of that business idea is still very strong, as strong as it ever was. But I just decided not to go through with it because it's just too much. I invested some money into it, but not too much where I didn't feel too bad backing out. There was a business called Side Vending. You may remember a year and a half ago, I posted a video about perfume vending machines that went mega viral, 20 million views. We got in touch with the manufacturer, we started importing them, we sold them, and it just did not go great. We had a hard time with the sales cycle. We had a hard time managing salespeople. We had a hard time in a few different areas of this business. So we sold a handful of machines. We did six figures in a short period of time. We were profitable, but then we just said, you know what, the ROH on this return on headache is not great. And when you're publishing a ton of content, you get a lot of inbound for cool opportunities and cool stuff. And so the opportunity cost of doing one thing becomes higher and higher and higher. And so as the months wore on and other opportunities started presenting themselves, it was like, you know what, this isn't worth the headache right now. So much like the secret pickleball business, like it's a very viable thing to import and sell vending machines. Extremely viable, you make thousands of dollars profit per machine. But it's just not something that I wanted to mess with. So we just moved on from it. Next Business was a agency that helped people get more leads for their local or home service business. And that was going pretty well. We were doing thousands of dollars a month in monthly recurring revenue. We were getting results for our customers. But back to opportunity cost, we just moved on from it. So long story short, we just moved on from it. Still a very valuable business where you weren't the first or thousandth people to start that business. It wasn't a new idea. But like any business, it's usually harder than you think it's going to be. And the opportunity cost wasn't worth it. Next Business, Texas Snacks. That is my Buc-Ease resale business, which you've heard about a zillion times, so I won't go into. But it's doing great.