In today’s post, I’m including the inaugural chapter to my new book, Get Paid TODAY: What Most People Don’t Know About Starting a Service Business.

The easiest type of “Bizness” to start is a service business; it usually takes a minimal investment, has almost nonexistent overhead, and (if done correctly), delivers immediate profits.

Note that I said “immediate profits“, NOT get rich quick. When your gross sales exceed your expenses by one penny, you have a net profit. You don’t necessarily have an endless stream of huge amounts of cash.

So it ISN’T time to tell the boss to go to h-ll the minute you start showing a profit… just yet. But! That day is not far off… 😉  Because by following the Shoestring Principles you can grow and scale your small “Bizness” into a full-time income.

Five Steps to Five Figures per Month

In this very blog I recorded the startup of a small service Bizness that I founded in order to teach teenage son about entrepreneurship. Check out this post about the challenge we undertook to use less money than you might raise from holding a garage sale — $62.66 — and turning it into $1,000 profit by the end of thirty days (we actually made over $1500). Also check out this more recent post when that small business exceeded the Five Figures per Month level when we recently had out first $500+ profit day.

There are many different types of businesses you can start and profit with waaay less than $500 seed money: an info product like my stock and options investing book, a sticks and bricks business like my martial arts studio are good examples.

But the quickest way to hit the road moving is to start a service business. The tradeoff is that services businesses are generally harder to scale… though there are ways around that.

I’m digressing… AGAIN… 🙂 so let me introduce you now to the first chapter of… (drum roll) :

Get Paid TODAY!

Starting and Growing a Small Business… WITHOUT Taking Out Loans, Taking On Partners, or Risking All Your Savings

I was sitting in my car watching a bit nervously as my teenaged son used his sneaker to push the wire stakes into the soft earth at the street corner. He was setting the fourth of six signs in high traffic areas as the cell phone in my pocket buzzed.

“Hi, is this the uh… Screen Repair guy?”

“Yes! Do you have window screens or a screen door that needs repairing, or both?”

     “Umm, yes. We have both. By the way on the sign it says ‘we come to YOU’. So that means you do all the work here at the house?”

“Yes, that’s our  deal. We come to you. Same day you set the appointment for, we come and repair your screens. No waiting in line at the hardware store, TWICE… no messing with getting it out of the track… and back in again. That’s our job.”

Pierce was running back to the car. With our initial investment of $66.62, we had bought six signs. They listed our service, our Unique Selling Point (We come to You), and our contact information. We still had two more signs to plant, and already had our first customer.

By thirty days later, we had generated over $1500 profit, part time.

And recently, about a year afterwards… that small business had its first $500 profit day.

I wasn’t surprised. Pierce and I were using a proven Five-Step system to grow our fledgling small business. These Steps are what this book is about.

WHY Start A Service Business?

This book, Get Paid TODAY: What Most People Don’t Know About Starting a Service Business actually came as a step along the journey of writing another book that I call Shoestring101.

Shoestring101 is about lifestyle design; it’s about experiencing freedom and fulfillment by truly doing what you want to do, while getting paid to do it. The crux of Shoestring101 is helping you to fashion a “Bizness“… a small (or not-so-small) business based on what motivates you most.

A “Bizness” is a business designed to take your hobbies and interests and make them pay YOU instead of the other way around.

Now, while I’m sure that sounds exciting to a lot of folks… getting paid to do something you love. And there are already a bucketload of books and programs, websites and seminars– even reality TV shows– already dedicated to that proposition. You no doubt have heard of The Four-Hour Workweek, The $100 Startup, ABC’s Shark Tank.

It’s awesome to think you can paid to do something that you are passionate about, and would likely do anyway. And it certainly IS possible to make money by being knee-deep in people and activities you really appreciate.

But before we can arrive at that, before we are able to monetize our hobbies and interests… it’s important to know how to start, promote, operate, and scale any business properly.

The purpose of this book is to challenge you to actually make some money in a small business endeavor, and to do it right now.

Before you try it on your ‘real’ Bizness.

Earn While you Learn

You can take almost any interest that you have and turn it into a small… or NOT-so-small Bizness.

But it’s really difficult to live on your startup while it’s still taking root.

Shoestring101 employs Five Steps to Five Figures per Month, a repeatable formula for starting, marketing, and scaling a small business. These Steps work for any almost kind of business; I’ve personally used them to market an information product, a sticks-and-bricks business, and a number of service businesses.

(I haven’t personally used these Steps for network marketing, but have interviewed or coached many that have used them with great success.)

“SO Kurt,” You might be asking. “Why not just get moving right now and start a Bizness based on what interests me most? I don’t have a passion for carpet cleaning. I’m not all about window washing. I could care less about aerating lawns. What I REALLY like to do is __________ !”<==== fill in your favorite interest, hobby, or activity here.

That’s a good question. Say your passion is scuba diving. If all businesses follow the same principles and all business plans follow the same Five Steps, why not ‘dive in’ start a Bizness right now that serves your insatiable appetite for all things scuba, while generating all teh cash you need to live on?

 One I’m going to answer this questionfrom experience: It IS possible (and desirable!) to own a Bizness that’s based around what motivates you most. However, you’ve got to take care that you don’t take what you appreciate doing more than anything in the world… and turn it into drudgery or obligation.

A small Bizness structured properly gives you freedom and fulfillment. But an improperly structured business ends up owning you instead of the other way around.

The way I figure it, it’s best to learn to start a run a profitable small business that you’re “practicing” on first. That way you can make most of your newbie mistakes on a business that you could take or leave… one that you have very little invested in in terms of emotion or capital.

I would rather that you make all your mistakes doing something that doesn’t drive you. I would rather that you exercise patience and learn the skill of how to run a ‘normal’ business (and do it profitably) before spreading your delicate wings and flying a potentially super-rewarding Bizness… into the ground.

In other words, learn by practicing the Steps of growing a small business. Once you have mastered the Steps, the world is your oyster. This is because the same Five Steps to Five Figures per Month can work to make you a success as a window-cleaner or an Underwater Basket Weaver. Or whatever activity you most love… but would love even more if you got paid to do it.

Can YOU imagine what it would be like to earn $10,000 or more every month for doing something you enjoy so much that you’d do it for free… even pay to do it?

This Book is Not Just for the Dreamers

…It’s for anyone that wants (or NEEDS) to really hustle and start making bank immediately. As the title suggests, you can truly Get Paid Today. In early 2002, a friend of mine was let go from WorldComm. Yes, that Worldcomm. He was  a Project Manager with a high-falutin’ benefits package and a pretty high-rolling lifestyle. He owned a number of real estate rental properties as well as a mortgage on his own home, plus a wife and two kids living at home.

When Dwight was ‘let go’, he had a choice: either compete with the HORDE of equally qualified, equally impressively resume-ed professionals flooding the market all at one time, OR..! Start making a comparable income right away in his own business. He chose the latter.

Working with me, Dwight began to clean windows as a very profitable side business. He saved his home, his rental properties, and was able to tread water without dipping into retirement savings. Dwight’s dream was NOT to clean windows; he began to pursue what he really wanted to do later. But in the near term, an immediate stream of income was both necessary– and possible.

In the following chapters of Get Paid TODAY, you will learn the Five Steps to Five Figures per Month and begin to profit almost immediately. Because a service business has the lowest startup costs and overhead (as compared with most traditional businesses), it’s easiest to make it profitable quickly.

Why Start a Business NOW?

I started my first business at sixteen, and founded dozens more over the next decades. I’ve also helped a good number of friends to start their own businesses that were immediately profitable. Those businesses were profitable from the get-go because of some secrets I learned from pretty remarkable entrepreneurs along the way. You’ll see them in the following chapters of Get Paid Today:

Joe’s Secret: How to (actually!) make money the same day you decide to.

Keith’s Secret: How to sell something before you actually even own it.

MY Secret: How to use the shotgun/laser Secret marketing technique to get clients at the lowest per-customer acquisition price.

TURBOCHARGING… The Secret That FIRST Catapulted Me to Five Figures Income per Month

Mike’s Secret: The Secret to ensure that you own your business instead of it owning you.

So, dear Reader… I hope you’re as excited as I am to jump in and Get Paid TODAY. Please write to me on my blog, http://www.shoestring101.com with your questions, comments, and requests.

Keep Stepping,

Kurt