Founders and operators from every business in our kits, what they did, and what they say you should do. Summarised from public sources; every story links its sources.
John Paul Mitchell Systems · Co-founder
John Paul DeJoria
Co-founded one of the world's best-known salon brands with a $700 loan.
DeJoria co-founded John Paul Mitchell Systems with hairdresser Paul Mitchell in 1980, starting with a small loan and selling door to door to salons. He has spoken openly about hard early years, including a period of homelessness. The company became one of the largest independent salon brands, and he later co-founded Patron Spirits.
Sell to salons in person and expect rejection: stay as enthusiastic at the hundredth door as at the first.
Make a product so good that people come back for it.
Treat the professionals who use your product as partners.
Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company · Founder
Madam C. J. Walker
Built a hair-care empire in the early 1900s and trained thousands of agents.
Born in 1867 to formerly enslaved parents, Walker created hair-care products for Black women, sold them door to door, then built a company, a factory and a training network of sales agents. She is widely recognised as one of the first American women to become a self-made millionaire.
Solve a problem you understand personally.
Train other people to sell and succeed: a network grows faster than one person.
Vidal Sassoon salons, academies and products · Founder
Vidal Sassoon
Turned precision cutting into a global salon, education and product brand.
A London hairdresser who became famous in the 1960s for geometric, wash-and-wear cuts, Sassoon built salons, training academies and a haircare line known worldwide.
Be known for a clear signature style.
Build education into the business so standards stay high.
Your reputation is the brand: every cut is marketing.
Built one of the largest men's haircut franchises in the US.
Logan founded Sport Clips in Texas in 1993 with a sports-themed, men-focused concept and grew it through franchising into well over a thousand locations across North America.
Pick a clear customer and design the whole experience for them.
Real barbers share how they went from zero clients to $10k months and full shops.
The course includes interviews and breakdowns from working barbers and shop owners: opening a shop in 12 months, building a clientele of 200 new clients in 30 days, and choosing between chair rent and commission.
Real mobile detailing businesses · Detailing business owners
Working detailers in the course
From $500 of equipment to multi-six-figure detailing companies.
The course includes detailers who started with $500 of equipment, business owners scaling to $300K a year, and training on pricing, hiring and Google ads.
Built a personal brand with daily online videos, then a global agency.
Vaynerchuk started Wine Library TV in 2006, reviewing wines on camera for his family's store. The show built his personal brand, which he used to launch VaynerMedia and other businesses.
Went from university dropout to agency founder and one of the biggest podcast hosts.
Bartlett co-founded the social media agency Social Chain, then built his personal brand through writing and The Diary of a CEO podcast, which became one of the most listened-to podcasts in the world.
Turned one TEDx talk into books, a podcast and a global brand.
Robbins' 2011 TEDx talk spread widely online. She followed it with The 5 Second Rule and other books and The Mel Robbins Podcast, turning practical advice into a large personal brand.
One simple idea, repeated well, can build a brand.
A junior doctor who built a productivity brand on YouTube.
Abdaal began posting study and productivity videos while training as a doctor, grew one of the largest productivity channels on YouTube, and published the book Feel-Good Productivity.
Teach what you're learning.
Build products around what your audience asks for.
Scaled a pressure washing company past $3 million a year.
In a February 2026 interview, Benjamin describes how he scaled Benjamins Power Washing to over $3 million in revenue and what it takes to aim for $10 million.
Turned cleaning tips on Instagram into best-selling books and a brand.
Hinchliffe built a huge UK following by sharing simple home-cleaning routines on Instagram, then published best-selling books and product collaborations.
Show the process, not only the result.
Consistency and personality build a loyal audience.
Profiled as a cleaning business owner making over $4,000 a day.
A day-in-the-life feature follows Mondragon running Queen Bee Cleaning Service and shows how owners run operations rather than cleaning every house themselves.
Built a marketplace for small jobs and errands, later acquired by IKEA.
Busque founded TaskRabbit (first called RunMyErrand) in Boston in 2008 after needing someone to pick up dog food. It grew into a marketplace for furniture assembly, mounting and small jobs, and IKEA acquired it in 2017.
Built one of the largest online marketplaces for pet sitting and dog walking.
Rover was founded in Seattle in 2011 to connect pet owners with sitters and walkers, grew across the US, UK and Europe, and went public before being taken private again in 2024. Its growth shows how big everyday pet care demand is.
Trust features (reviews, updates, guarantees) are the product.
Profiled earning around $100K a year walking dogs in New York City.
A video feature follows a New York dog walker through the day and shows how regular clients, routes and pricing add up to a six-figure income in a busy city.
Went from employed groomer to running her own grooming business.
In a Simon Squibb interview, Kellie shares how she moved from working for someone else to building her own dog grooming business, and what she learned along the way.
From personal trainer to a fitness app sold for around US$400 million.
An Australian personal trainer who grew a following with transformation posts and her Bikini Body Guide, Itsines co-founded the Sweat app with Tobi Pearce. Sweat was sold to iFIT in 2021 in a deal reported at about US$400 million (she later bought the business back).
Share real client results consistently.
Turn your coaching method into a program people can follow anywhere.
Built a UK fitness brand from short online workouts and 15-minute recipes.
Wicks grew The Body Coach through Instagram videos, online plans and best-selling Lean in 15 books, and became widely known for free daily 'PE with Joe' workouts on YouTube in 2020.
Make fitness simple and fun.
Give lots of value for free; people buy the full plan.
Opened her first cookie store at 20 and grew it into a national brand.
Fields opened her first cookie shop in Palo Alto, California in 1977. On a slow first day she walked the street giving free samples, and the business grew into hundreds of stores.
Grew a cookie shop founded in 2017 into one of the fastest-growing franchises in the US.
Crumbl started in Logan, Utah in 2017 with a rotating weekly menu and a strong social media presence, and grew through franchising to well over a thousand bakeries.
A rotating menu gives people a reason to come back every week.
McDonald's · Founder of the McDonald's Corporation
Ray Kroc
Turned one fast restaurant system into the world's biggest fast food chain.
A milkshake-machine salesman, Kroc visited the McDonald brothers' restaurant in San Bernardino in 1954, was impressed by its speed system, opened his first franchised McDonald's in 1955, and later bought out the brothers. McDonald's grew into a global chain, with real estate at the core of the model.
Started franchising his fried chicken in his sixties.
Sanders sold chicken from a roadside motel and restaurant in Kentucky, began franchising his recipe in 1952, and sold the company in 1964 for $2 million. KFC became one of the largest chicken chains in the world.
It is never too late to start.
A secret recipe and a strong personal brand travel well.
Started with a $1,000 loan and built one of the largest restaurant chains by locations.
DeLuca, then 17, opened a sandwich shop in Connecticut in 1965 with a $1,000 loan from family friend Peter Buck. Subway grew through low-cost franchising into tens of thousands of locations worldwide.
A narrow, flavour-first menu, small stores and a digital sales engine.
Founded in Texas in 1994 and franchised from 1997, Wingstop focused on wings and flavours, small-footprint stores and digital ordering (over 70% of sales by 2024), reaching about 2,563 locations at the end of fiscal 2024.
A narrow menu scales.
Digital ordering lifts speed and data.
Franchise royalties fund growth with low overhead.
Turned a $1,000 loan into one of New York's biggest real estate firms.
Corcoran started a small real estate company in New York in 1973 with a $1,000 loan. She built it into The Corcoran Group, known for smart marketing such as her own market report, and sold it in 2001 for a reported $66 million. She later became an investor on Shark Tank.
Create your own market report: data makes you the expert.
Went from actor to one of the best-known agents in the US by using media.
Serhant became a New York agent in 2008, gained national attention on Bravo's Million Dollar Listing New York, and in 2020 launched his own brokerage, SERHANT., built around content and media. He teaches that consistent video and follow-up create more deals than waiting for leads.
Built one of the largest real estate franchises by focusing on agent training and models.
Keller co-founded Keller Williams in Austin, Texas in 1983. He wrote 'The Millionaire Real Estate Agent', which set out the lead-generation, budget and team models many agents still use, and the company grew into one of the largest real estate franchises by agent count.
Turned air mattresses on their apartment floor into a global travel company.
In 2007 the two designers rented air mattresses in their San Francisco apartment to conference visitors who could not find hotel rooms. With Nathan Blecharczyk they founded Airbnb in 2008, kept going through early rejection (even selling novelty cereal boxes to fund the company), and focused obsessively on host and guest experience.
Start with a real problem you can test this weekend.
Short-term rental operator · Operator and educator
Sean Rakidzich
Built a large arbitrage-based rental business and teaches operators to treat it as hospitality.
Rakidzich built a large short-term rental business, largely through rental arbitrage, then saw parts of it break during market changes and kept going. His content focuses on operations, guest experience and unit economics rather than easy-money promises.
Built a 30+ unit portfolio in a single vacation town.
Muth focused on one vacation market instead of spreading out, which let him build local cleaning teams, relationships and brand recognition, and grow to more than 30 units in the same town.
One of the most successful investors ever, who tells most people to buy low-cost index funds.
Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway over decades of patient investing. In 2008 he made a ten-year bet that a low-cost S&P 500 index fund would beat a selection of hedge funds, and the index fund won. He has written that most people are best served by low-cost index funds.
Founded Vanguard and launched the first index fund for everyday investors.
Bogle founded Vanguard in 1975 and in 1976 launched the first index mutual fund for individual investors, which tracked the S&P 500 at a very low cost. Index investing became one of the most important ideas in personal finance.
Costs matter.
Own the whole market instead of searching for the needle in the haystack.
A gas station attendant and janitor who quietly built an estate of about $8 million.
Read lived modestly in Vermont, saved steadily and invested in dividend-paying shares for decades. When he died in 2014, he left millions to his local hospital and library, surprising everyone who knew him.
Started by tutoring his cousin remotely, then built a free global education platform.
In 2004 Khan began tutoring his cousin in maths over the internet. Other relatives asked for help, so he posted videos on YouTube, which grew into Khan Academy, a non-profit used by millions of learners.
One student can become thousands if your method is clear.
Created maths worksheets for his son, which grew into a worldwide learning-centre business.
A maths teacher in Japan, Kumon wrote daily worksheets for his son in the 1950s. The method spread to other children and became the Kumon franchise, with centres around the world.
A repeatable method is what makes tutoring scalable.
Short daily practice beats occasional long sessions.
Started a home care company from their home, inspired by caring for Paul's grandmother.
The Hogans founded Home Instead in Omaha, Nebraska in 1994 after seeing how much Paul's grandmother benefited from staying at home with family support. It grew into an international home care franchise.
Started a home healthcare business at 27 and built it into a multi-million-dollar company.
In a podcast interview, Gooch explains how he started a home healthcare business in his late twenties and grew it, including hiring, referral sources and systems.
Became the most-subscribed creator on YouTube by obsessing over ideas, packaging and retention.
Donaldson started uploading in 2012 and built the most-subscribed YouTube channel, then businesses like Feastables. He is known for reinvesting revenue into making better videos.
After being laid off in 2008, built an online business with transparent income reports.
Flynn started blogging to help people pass an architecture exam after losing his job, then built Smart Passive Income, publishing detailed income reports for years.
Grew his family wine business online, then built a global social media agency.
Vaynerchuk grew his family's wine store using early online video, then co-founded VaynerMedia with his brother AJ in 2009, becoming one of the best-known social-first agencies.
Built a design platform that made content creation easy for everyone.
Perkins co-founded Canva in 2013 after seeing how hard design software was for students; it became one of the most valuable private software companies in the world.
Make hard things simple.
Persistence through rejection (many investors said no early on).
A computer-generated influencer with brand deals with major fashion labels.
Created in 2016, Miquela showed brands would work with virtual characters, and started public debate about transparency, which is why disclosure matters.
Built an automation platform connecting thousands of apps, largely without heavy outside funding.
Zapier started in 2011 as a side project and grew into one of the most widely used automation tools, famous for being remote-first and capital efficient.
Started Spanx with $5,000 in savings and became a self-made billionaire.
Blakely invested about $5,000 of savings to create Spanx in 2000, wrote her own patent, and personally pitched department stores. Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire in 2012.
Started printing and sewing gym wear as a teenager; built a billion-pound brand.
Francis co-founded Gymshark in Birmingham, UK in 2012, grew it with fitness influencers on social media, and the company was valued at over GBP 1 billion in 2020.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore and built it into the largest online marketplace, with a relentless focus on customers and delivery.
Turned an invention into one of Shark Tank's biggest successes and a social-media favourite.
Krause invented the Scrub Daddy sponge, appeared on Shark Tank in 2012 with Lori Greiner, and the brand became known for playful short-form video content.
Built the marketplace where millions of small sellers sell handmade and custom goods.
Etsy launched in 2005 in Brooklyn as a marketplace for handmade and vintage items and became a public company and a home for many print-on-demand and custom-product sellers.
Became one of the most-followed creators on TikTok with silent, relatable videos, then worked with major brands.
Lame's wordless reaction videos made him one of TikTok's most-followed creators and led to brand partnerships, showing how simple, clear formats travel worldwide.
Started a college newsletter that grew to millions of readers and a major acquisition.
Morning Brew began at the University of Michigan in 2015; in 2020 Axel Springer bought a majority stake in a deal reported at about $75 million valuation.