These are the best businesses you can start in 2025. Warren Buffett says great businesses have high gross margins, so what is gross margin? Essentially if I sell a product for PKR 100, but it costs me PKR 30 to make, then my gross margin is PKR 70 or 70% see the best businesses are ones where you have the highest margin and then also sell for the highest PKR amount what you don't want to be is like a restaurant where the gross margins are only 45% you want to be on the upper end of 70 80 even 90% % gross margin and to do this you need to understand all the industries that's why I've spent a lot of time analysing all the best Industries and evaluating all the gross margins from lowest to highest that you can start today with minimal experience to make this year the best year of your life.
Product Business:
The first business is a product business. Typically, these companies have 50 or 60% gross margin. Now I've been involved in some incredible product companies like GKGD, which does biodegradable SMD Modules, which is a modern-day digital signage company or Al-Noor SMD Screens that, does a reshaping module to Display and I mean these are literally some of the best companies out there, but I've seen people lose their shirt Building Product companies because they don't understand how to get distribution how to get sales how to build a product efficiently and essentially they take all their savings put it into a product don't get any Revenue so if you want to make a product business work great these are the three things that you need to do right
1.Number one is you have to pre-sell. See, most product companies use Kickstarter other crowdfunding platforms so that they can validate demand for the product without losing money. Now, I know you've probably been burned by investing in some of these crowdfunding campaigns, but the best ones know how to do them, promote them, Market them, get the money and then use that actually to build the product the
2.The second thing is you have to do direct to Consumer, and the reason why is you got to skip the retailers because if you go through a wholesaler to a retailer by the time you get paid there's are significant cash flow issues, it's very hard to make a product business work that's why Amazon has been a big category for a lot of people that are getting into the product space.
3.The third thing is that you have to invest in the brand. This means making sure that you use premium products, meaning that you care about Word of Mouth, that you focus on reviews, and, and that you look for opportunities to get pressed to drive traffic to the business because that's what's going to create the flywheel to make a product business work.
I am involved in SMD Screens business, generating handsome margin from this business.
Agency:
The second business is an agency or sometimes a service business. The margins are between 60 and 70% I’ve learned over the years that the easiest companies are ones where you take a skill that you already have, maybe as an employee, and then offer that skill to other businesses and get paid to either do for those businesses what you currently do or teach them how to do it for themselves now I've seen a lot of people launch different types of agencies social media marketing agencies Etc and the ones that actually scale and make money not just have a low paying full-time sometimes duo double full-time job they focus on these four things.
1.Number one is they focus on a sharp pain in the market. If you think about it, you could start an AI company today where you go and you analyse businesses and all the inefficiencies and then introduce them the AI tools to solve those problems, and you would make a ton of money because businesses will pay for anybody that can show them how to save them or make their money using AI is a modern-day way of them getting leverage, and you can even negotiate where you get paid more based on how much money or time you save them.
2.Number two is productize Services. See, if you sell just work for time, then you're always going to get paid for your hour. What you want to do is get paid for an outcome, and to do that, you have to focus on one thing: if you're a designer focus on Logo designs if you're a programmer focus on the onboarding experience if you're a salesperson focus on the Discovery call teach people how to do one specific thing so that you can productize it and as you grow you can buy back your time by having somebody else support different aspects of that productize service.
3.Number three is focus on reoccurring Revenue. See too often, when we start, we just want to get paid to do the thing. The problem is that every month, you have to get paid to do the thing over and over and over again, so you start at zero at the beginning of every month what you want to do is sell a service an ongoing reoccurring Revenue Service for whatever that work is so that you come in you evaluate it you support them you keep doing more work and that way you can sign them up for 3 months 6 months 12 months of service and you start building the revenue Base.
4.Number four is you want to scale with systems. The whole philosophy is to build a business so you don't grow to hate the way we do that by replacing yourself using a system, a checklist for how you deliver on that agency work, and then that way, you can hire people to get them to do the job following your process that guarantees the results for the customer.
Coaching:
The third business is coaching and the margins are between 70 and 80% now this is also consulting or information online training courses that kind of business and I know this one incredibly well I run one of the largest coaching Organization for software CEOs I've been involved in creating multiple courses and trainings and seminars and all this stuff for some of the most prominent coaches that you know of online and even for me I hesitated launching this I mean I even built a whole technology company called clarity.fm because I was too scared to call myself a coach and I put it off I mean this platform we built I did over 1,300 Clarity calls over a 2-year period and never gave myself permission to call myself a coach and I want to tell you it's been one of the most rewarding things deciding to go all in on being a coach and really working with some of the best CEOs out there and I want to encourage you to consider it but if you're going to do it these are the three things that you have to do right or you're going to eventually end up hating being a coach.
1.Number one is to learn to sell your expertise. I mean, this one is a fascinating one, cut. I know people that are world-class in what they do. They're literally the fittest people I know, or they're incredible networkers, or they're so talented in their art, but they would never feel comfortable getting paid to teach somebody else to do the thing they've done which is crazy I mean at the end of the day you've become great at the thing you're doing and people have noticed I want to encourage you to allow other people to pay you for that advice because in doing so you're actually helping their often times the transformation happens at the transaction so them investing in themselves by hiring you to teach them how to become world-class at what you do is actually where a lot of the value is created.
2.Number two is strategy. See, most people think that I know this information, so I can't give it away. I'm going to tell you something controversial. please give all of it away, okay? It's called education-based marketing. See I believe that information wants to be free and then you get paid for the support of the implementation so you want to teach everything you know around the topic for free on social media at seminars get on stages speak share it all the best stuff and by doing so you're going to build an audience of people that want to learn more from you and they will pay you for the implementation.