I Discovered the Best Businesses to Start in 2025 ($1M Potential)

I spent the last 30 days analyzing thousands of businesses, and these are the best businesses to start in 2025. As Warren Buffett always says, great businesses have good gross margins.
What are gross margins? Well, if I sell a coffee for $5 and it costs me a dollar to make it, my gross margin is $4 or 80%. So I'm going to go through the most profitable businesses with the highest gross margins that you can start today.
Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.
In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martellmethod.com.
Starting with idea number one, chat sales agency. Gross margins for this business around 40 to 50%.
Here's the deal. It's the future.
2025, chat sales are on the rise. I have clients making over a million dollars over chat.
No sales call, no funnel, sales chat only. My top sales guy in commission makes over a million dollars a year selling over chat.
Here's how not to mess it up. First thing is you have to find a growing industry.
If you haven't heard roofing, solar, consulting, these are all massively growing and expanding industries. My easiest way to do this is search fastest growing industries on chat GPT or Google and get into those industries.
But there's more to it. Second part is you got to tap into demand.
If you're going to start finding clients that you can do this for, you have to find people that already have built their audience, not somebody that's starting with zero existing audiences only. Find people with massive followership.
It's crazy, but some people with massive Instagram accounts or massive social media accounts have never talked to all of their followers because they don't have anybody to do it or know how to do it right. And you could be the person to get money to flow into their pockets.
The third is you got to connect to a CRM. The only way you can manage massive volumes of chats is with a CRM tool, some kind of platform that allows you to connect all the social media accounts and manage those chats.
Our team uses a product called Revio and it's awesome. Not only does it integrate all the different social channels for us, it even uses AI to summarize the chat.
So if one of my reps come back to a chat, they haven't talked to somebody in a while, it lets them know where to start the conversation from based on what they've already said. Before we get back to the episode, if you actually want to know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work, go follow me on Instagram, Dan Martell, 2Ls and Martell on Instagram.
It's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time. I'd love to see you there.
Have an amazing day. Which brings us to idea number two, personal brand agency.
This business model also has gross margins between 40 and 50%. You've probably heard this said, but attention is the new oil.
The future of commerce is built off the backend of trust, of personal brands, of influencers. We've seen this.
All the top companies in the world are rushing to become media companies because they know that the real distribution or the real sales channel is the trust that an influencer has with their audience. So being the agency that helps people connect those two dots will make you a lot of money.
What's crazy is that I personally know dozens of people that make multiple seven figures, helping people expand, define, and grow their personal brands. Now here's what they focus on to make the most money for their agency.
The first one is pay for performance. You want to get paid for the results that you bring to these people.
If you're helping them take their followers from 8,000 to 80,000 or 800,000, you wanna get paid a retainer plus the upside in that growth, especially if you help them make more money. The second part is you wanna double down on winners.
See, the truth is, is that everybody might wanna be a personal brand, but not everybody has it. I've seen so many people try to create content and it falls flat.
They don't get the it factor. They're not willing to share their heart.
They're not sharing anything new. And if you are building an agency off those people, you're going to have to cut your losses as fast as possible.
The third part is you want to ask for referrals. The best agencies are grown off of VWOM, which stands for viral word of mouth.
And you want to ask them only after you got them a big win, if there's anybody else that they know and like that you might be able to help them with your agency to help grow their personal brand. Which brings us to idea number three, ghostwriting agency, which has gross margins between 50 and 60%.
There's a supply and demand problem with writers right now. Everybody wants to write a book, but no one wants to write it.
They need ghost writers. Same thing with content.
Right now, if you're somebody that can figure out somebody's voice and write in their voice to help them buy back their time, it is a beautiful agency to start. So here's the key things to not mess up if you're doing ghostwriting agency.
The first one is to get paid up front. When you start doing this agency, you need to get at least 50% up front.
If you've got multiple projects on the go, try to get lump sums of payment up front so that you can fund your growth. The second thing you need to do right is you have to get on stages where other people that want to write books are in those audiences.
So if you want to write entrepreneurial books or other types, you want to get in rooms of entrepreneurs. You want to get on podcasts of entrepreneurs.
You want to get in front of these people that have built-in audiences. I call it OPP, other people's platforms.
So try to speak in front of large groups of people, explaining your process for ghostwriting so that you can create demand for what you have to sell. So number three is get familiar amongst a niche audience.
So you want to be the go-to person in your agency for, let's say, marketing entrepreneurs or maybe sales entrepreneurs or maybe operationally focused entrepreneurs. You want to write the top books in that niche so that everybody that thinks about writing that book, when they go ask who wrote that book, they'll recommend you as a ghostwriting agency.
Before we get back to the episode, if you're enjoying it so far, could you go ahead and do me a huge favor and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify? Reviews help us get up in the rankings, which gives us credibility to reach out to bigger and bigger guests and we can bring them to you. It would mean so much.
Let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to idea number four, virtual assistant placement with gross margins between 50 and 60%.
When I wrote my book, Buy Back Your Time, tons of these agencies started popping up. It was almost like my book became their full-time salesperson.
And it's been great. I've actually had friends of mine that have started net new companies in the last two years that are already doing eight figures.
You starting off and helping people connect their pain of not having enough time with your ability to recruit and deliver on a great virtual assistant service is the key. And the cool part is it's already been done and it's a proven model.
So here's how you build that agency and not mess it up. Number one is get paid on delivery.
It's way easier to sell if you can say, I will only charge you the moment the person starts and starts creating value for you as a business. Number two, guarantee placement.
Most recruiters that help people connect, especially virtual assistant, offer a two-month guarantee minimum. And if the person doesn't work out within that timeframe, you find them somebody else at no extra fee.
And that creates a viral word of mouth that you need to grow that agency. Number three, send them a copy of my book, Buy Back Your Time.
Now, I know this is a bit of a plug, but let me tell you why. All of my friends use my book to promote their agency, especially to their marketing funnel.
So if they have somebody on the fence and they're like, yeah, I think I should hire somebody, but I don't even know what I'd give them. They send them my book as a gift to get that person focused on valuing their time and understanding what they would give up to get more time to do the thing that makes them the most money.
Which brings us to idea number five, virtual reality training agency, which has on average gross margins between 60 and 70%. Now, some of you guys are going to be like, what the heck is that? Here's what I know.
I watch my kids play VR every night. They play this game called Gorilla Tag.
They have their friends. It's this virtual community and it is the future.
They're using it right now for flight training, surgery training, high stakes environments. It's almost pixel perfect experience.
If you become an expert at this, you're at the beginning of a massive wave of retraining people through distant learning using virtual reality. What you need to do right is this.
First off, you have to sell enterprise packages. You wanna sell big things to big companies

so you make big profit.

If you try to sell to SMB, small, medium businesses,

there's a reason why they're small.

So try to sell big things

so they make big investments in your business.

Number two, offer ongoing support.

This is my favorite thing in any agency model

is to figure out how can I offer a subscription service

for ongoing revenue in my business? So what are they gonna need need long term? Are they going to need upgrades to the training to the modules? Are they going to need access to have the people that you've trained to answer questions with one of your certified support experts, whatever it is, offer an ongoing support fee to make it a reoccurring revenue business. Number three is finance the hardware.
If you're going to do virtual reality training, you might as well sell them the headsets you can buy them wholesale sell them at retail or even more because you got to manage all the configuration and the shipping and then it becomes another way to monetize before we get back to this episode if you prefer to watch your content then go find me on youtube i have this episode on youtube i'mell on YouTube. Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time.
It'll tell YouTube to tell you. You got a new episode, so you'll never miss anything.
Now let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to idea number six, gamified learning platform.
With gross margins between 60 and 70%. The internet has taken over.
Kids don't learn the same way anymore. Adults too.
Everything has to be gamified. Everything has to have some kind of little leveling up and reward so that it really keeps the engagement there.
We've seen it with some of these like online meetings and virtual trainings. If there's no way to incentivize somebody to come back and feel like they're winning by learning, then they're not going to stick.
And that is the future. So a few things to get this business model right.
Number one, sell before you build. The fun part is there's existing platforms like membership.io, where you can use their platform, sell it to somebody else, and then essentially white label that solution.
But you pre-charge before you configure or build or pay for any software. So you make sure the customer is excited and and ready to go and all the gamification is already built for you.
You just become the person that can figure it for that company. Number two is target enterprises.
The key I always think about is who would value this kind of platform. I think of any company that trains their employees that has high turnover where there's real need for a great experience for learning.
So think commission-based sales reps, like car dealership, insurance reps, retail, quick serve restaurants, anybody that has a lot of turnover amongst their employees and require training to get them proficient are gonna love this gamified platform. Number three is open to the public.
What's shifted in the market is the desire to try before you buy. This whole freemium concept.
You're seeing this over and over in all these online learning platforms where they're doing these free communities where people can come in, get exposed to a little bit of what you've got, and then pay a subscription to get access to the rest of it. You've seen companies like Udemy do this.
It is a massive way to get distribution because everybody's going to talk about your free thing that That's going to bring you a lot of people that will eventually pay for your membership, which brings us to idea number seven, AI automation agency with gross margins between 70 and 80%. When I speak on stage at Tony Robbins business mastery, I talk about the power of AI and how it's transforming businesses.
And everybody wants to ask is who can help me with this change? There is a massive appetite for agencies who are able to help small business owners to make the transition. A lot of people are scared around artificial intelligence.
And my philosophy is this, is AI is not gonna take your job, but somebody using AI will. In the industry, we call this a co-pilot and every role or function now has AI integrated into it.
There was a statistic I saw recently that said 93% of businesses in the US have not yet implemented AI into their business. It is a massive opportunity, but these are the things you have to get right to make it profitable for you.
Number one, consult on tools. See, teaching businesses how to use tools before building the automation is actually a massive opportunity.
They need to learn how ChatGPT works, integrate it into their habits, understanding what AI tools exist for their function, if it's design or finance or operations. Then once you teach them that, you can get paid for the automation part.
Number two is focus on cash. Automate the things that's going to make the business that you serve the most money first.
That is the easiest way to not only get a massive win for the owner, but also to keep them coming back to pay you for more. The more money you help them make, the more money they'll reinvest in your agency.
Number three is develop partnerships. My favorite way to get new customers is find people that already have a relationship with my perfect fit customer and then offer them advanced training they can offer their community that you deliver for free to get in front of them.
Then you might offer them some kind of commission or build an affiliate program to reward them for referring people your way. Which brings us to idea number eight, AI first SaaS business with gross margins between 80 and 90%.
This is the one I'm personally going all in on. I've already launched two companies in the last month and it's essentially focusing on AI first solutions to the world's biggest problems.
Why? I actually think SaaS is gonna die, which is crazy saying this because you've probably seen me talk about this for over 25 years. SaaS now stands for success as a service, not software as a service, because businesses want a button or an agent or a tool that just creates an outcome.
They don't need the software and the workflow and the data entry. They want to be able to say, keep being successful.
I don't want to have to manage a customer relationship management software. I just want to be able to ask the question about my customer base and it just answer it.
That is the future and it's why I'm investing so heavily there. Here's what I'm doing that you can use to be successful in this model.
First off, pick a boring industry. See, most people want to go to marketing technology tools because that's fun and sexy and everybody talks about it.
I go to boring. I go to legal.
I go to medical. I go to building manufacturing and approach it with an AI first solution because it's not competitive.
Number two is I pre-sell the service, meaning that before I build anything, I can prototype it. I can explain how it's going to work.
I can even show them a virtual demo and get people to buy before I build anything to fund the development. Number three is build AI agents.
Help your clients solve problems faster by implementing AI agents that monitor and take action on behalf of the customer before they ever ask. Examples of that are like purchasing agents, research agents, prospecting agents.
These AI agents will be able to be specialized, focused on doing one thing, and you'll have a dispatch agent monitoring and routing the specific things that needs to get done to the different agents.

That is the future. Thanks for listening to Martell Method.
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