The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Passive Income Expert: How To Make 10k Per Month In 90 Days!
08 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the brutal truth about passive income?
A lot of people are looking for passive income from side hustles. Yeah, it's the financial Ozempic. And it's more accessible than ever. Like 90% of the ideas I talk about can be launched with $500 or less. And there's enough time in the day to do these on the nights and weekends. So in these three suitcases in front of me, I have three different amounts of money.
Chapter 2: How can you turn $1,000 into $10,000 quickly?
And during this conversation, I'm going to pass you a box at random. And your job is to tell me what kind of business you would start with that amount of money. Sounds good. Let's do this.
Known as the king of side hustles, Chris Kerner has launched over 80 businesses, earning millions in the process. And now, the serial entrepreneur is going to teach us how to adopt a business mindset and launch simple, overlooked, but profitable ventures with little money.
Many of us struggle financially, and they see a side hustle as a solution to that. Like for me, growing up kind of poor, business allowed me to take hold of my life and make it what I wanted it to be. And it started when I was nine years old and wanting a red Schwinn bicycle. My friends had a bicycle, my neighbors had a bicycle, and my parents didn't have money for it.
But I lived across the street from a golf course, and these golf balls would fly in my yard. And I would go to my neighbor's yard and go across the street, dig through the ditches, and I'd pull out all these golf balls. And I started selling them. That was my first business. That taught me that business is approachable. And we all have ideas, but we usually don't do anything about it. Why?
I think number one, they're afraid of what people think. Number two is they don't have the tools or they're not connecting the tools with the ideas. If we can get over those, the world is our oyster at that point. I have $1,000. What side hustle do you start? The first thing that comes to mind is my favorite business idea of all right now. This is a zero employee business.
It's highly profitable and that would be... So how important is it for you to love the thing to be successful at it? Ignore passion, follow the profit until you can afford to follow your passion. Do they need a business partner? No. If you look at the stats on business failure rates with companies that have co-founders, it's significantly higher than companies that have solo founders.
And how does someone validate a business idea?
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Chapter 3: What are the key habits that keep you poor?
If I had to pick one tool, it's one that one in four humans use every day. That's everything you need right there. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us.
And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you.
I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
Chapter 4: How do you validate your business ideas effectively?
We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Chris, who are you and what is the mission that you're on? I am a father. I am a husband and I'm a serial entrepreneur. And I love talking about business and starting businesses and inspiring other people to do the same. Why?
Business has given me everything. Growing up kind of poor, it was my outlet. It was my way of just kind of taking hold of my life and making it what I wanted it to be. And I have immense gratitude for that. And I just love talking about it. It's the only thing I know. I can't talk to you about history or nutrition or anything, but when it comes to business, I just love it.
And I want other people to love it as well. How have you made your name in the world of business? Because I've heard your name a lot recently. People call you the king of side hustles. Where does this come from? I think I just published my life on the internet now. I'm always testing and launching and starting businesses, but only over the last couple of years have I started publishing that.
And I didn't try to be like the king of side hustles. That's not something that I've ever like intentionally tried to brand myself as. But I think people see what I do as a side hustle and they call it that. But I think that anything is scalable. Any side hustle could be a multi-million dollar business.
I mean, we live on a planet with 8 billion people and we're all connected and anything can be scaled. And you make a lot of content now. So you've probably... had a bit of a feedback loop in terms of understanding what it is that you say and do and create that's resonant with people and also why it's resonant like what is the crux of what people like my audiences are are looking for
As humans, we all want a silver bullet. We want a solution to our problems. And many of us struggle financially. And they see a side hustle as an outlet to that or as a solution to that. I think everyone has ideas. Most people are very hesitant to execute on those ideas. And so when they see someone like me freely executing on all the ideas, it –
Hopefully, it opens their mind and helps them look at their ideas in a different way or a more approachable way and maybe gives them confidence to do the same. In the boxes in front of me here, I have three different amounts of money. $500, I think I have $1,000 and $5,000. And during this conversation, I'm going to pass you a box at random.
And your job is to tell me what kind of business you would start with that amount of money. Because I know my audience, you know, many of them are interested in starting their own business one day. And I use specifically sort of low amounts of money just to make it as accessible to them as possible. So we will do that at some point. I'll pass you the boxes. You give me three business ideas.
You'd start with $500, $1,000 and $5,000. But I want to get a view on you and the businesses that you've started and the variety of success you've had. So can you give me an overview? Yeah. So I was nine years old living in Utah, and I lived across the street from a golf course. And these golf balls would fly in my yard. And I don't know what gave me the idea, but... I started selling them.
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Chapter 5: What is the brutal truth about passive income?
So what you're looking at today is the end result of 17 years of a lot of testing, like a very patient wife that was unquestioning and unwavering and extremely loyal, which I could not have done it without. And so there were a lot of periods of my life where I beat myself up over that lack of focus. I went and got my MBA because of my lack of focus.
I finished my undergrad because of my lack of focus. Getting a full-time job has never really been off the table until the last five or so years. So I've never been unwilling to get a job or to focus. And I probably did it the hard way, honestly. But I'm to the point now where I don't feel the need to focus at all on one thing.
Did you ever feel guilty because of the situation you put your family or your partner in? Yeah. Yeah.
Chapter 6: How can you validate your business ideas effectively?
More than once, yeah. More than many times. Give me an example. I spent 18 months working on a project. that had no cash flow along the way with the hope of a big payout. And we were making no income, right? And I was focused on this one thing. And that is kind of the downside of focus. If you focus on the wrong thing, it can really come back to bite you, right?
But to me, this was objectively the right thing. It was showing all the signals it was growing. We had like a few rental homes, we had some assets, and I was selling those things so my family could maintain their quality of life, right? So I felt guilty, but I was also insulating them from feeling the pinch that I was feeling in the office, right?
And then at the end of that experiment, it all went to zero. I was out money, I was out time, I was out everything, and I felt very guilty. That was one example. But thankfully, we didn't have to sell our house. We didn't have to do anything drastic. And what that looked like at home was dad was quiet more often than not. Dad was grumpy more often than not.
But dad wasn't really talking freely and openly about the things he was going through because he was trying to put on a brave face and insulate the family from that. Even when my wife was begging to know more, to get more out of me, if I talk about stressors, then it becomes more stressful to me oftentimes. So I just keep it in. I find the same. I think my partner understands this of me.
And I tried to explain to her that I don't like talking about the stress because in this environment, it's actually de-stressing me from not having to explain and conversate about it. So, which is a bit of a paradox because then they don't really understand. And if they don't understand, they might misunderstand. Misunderstandments might lead to arguments. The arguments create stress.
And then you're going to tell them in some sort of like argument what's going on.
Yeah, yeah. I've lived that for sure.
I don't know how to navigate that, but it's definitely true that me going through something in work and then having to come home and like go through it for another hour to someone else and stress them out potentially doesn't feel like the right approach. No, but I don't know what the right approach is because they have a right to know about it as well, right?
I think we just need an outlet, whether it's a friend that kind of understands or someone else that, you know, is in our space that we can just talk to about the situation. I think having no outlet is also bad, right?
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Chapter 7: What are the best strategies for team building and partnerships?
I got rejected tens of thousands of times over the course of two years. Being an introvert, staying an introvert, still an introvert, still bad at sales, still hating sales today at age 38, right? But that changed me as a man, as a person, right? That rewired my brain to just realize that every no is closer to a yes.
If my conversion rate is 0.1%, I got to talk to a thousand people and I will surely get a conversion. If I talk to a thousand and I don't get a conversion, then I'm going to get two conversions by the time I get to 2000, statistically speaking. So I just need to keep getting rejected. And that changed everything for me. I think it's super underrated to give kids a job in like cold sales.
It's what I did when I was 16 till 19. Sounds like it's what you did as a young man. Are your kids going to do that? Yeah, hopefully. And two of my kids are introverts, two are extroverted, but they are selling. Like they already have businesses, little side hustles here and there. But I am encouraging them to go on missions and to do selling because it's the fastest way to learn.
It's the fastest way to test. If I talk to 1,000 people, then I can have 1,000 different approaches. And if my conversion rate is 0.1%, I'm going to get that to 0.5% over time because I'm able to test and iterate and pivot based on all that feedback I get. What have you learned about team building and business partners through this process? What advice would you give to someone who sat there alone
listening to this right now, do they need a business partner? If they do, who, how, what? Oh, man. Usually people don't need a business partner. If you look at the stats on business failure rates with companies that have co-founders, it's significantly higher than companies that have solo founders. We see their survivorship bias examples, right? The Apples and the
A lot of companies we can look at that had two co-founders that won, but nobody talks about or writes about the 90, 60, 80% of companies that fail with co-founders. Think about it this way. When we get married, we'll spend years talking about our potential plans, like big goals, like where do we want to live? How many kids do we have? My wife and I wanted seven kids when we got married.
We settled on four, right? It changed over time. It took years to change. We realized kids are actually freaking hard, right? And so then we're like, where do we live? What kind of house do we want? We spend all this time, maybe while we're engaged, maybe while we're dating, maybe after we're married. But those are big decisions, right?
But when we choose a business partner, we go get avocado toast together and we're like 50-50. Cool. Sounds good. Let's do this. You know, I'll get the doc signed. It's like, who is that guy? You might have even known him your whole life, but who is he as a business partner or as a business person? I just, I feel like business partnerships are significantly harder than marriages even.
But we put 99% less thought into like the structure of things. And that's a giant failure that I've made over and over again. What do you wish someone had said to you in the situations where it didn't work out with business partners or really like across the board? Because I read that you'd had what, seven business partners?
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Chapter 8: What are the key takeaways for aspiring entrepreneurs?
When you said seller financing, what does that mean? That means the seller is holding the note. They are bearing the risk of you buying the park. But what's in it for them is, A, they can get the park back if you default. OK, so they're not actually giving you the park up front. They're letting you have it today on the basis that you'll pay them in the future with profits you make. Exactly.
So you're making monthly payments to them. Um, because oftentimes they're going to take that money that you give them and they're going to have to invest it in something else, something they don't understand. So your pitch to them is, Hey, you know, this park better than anyone, right? You know what I can do to fix it. You know what the deficiencies are.
If for some reason I'm not who I say I am, you just get it back. You take it back and you, where you started and you keep all the money that I paid you some so far. How much money have you made from doing this? I've made net profit probably $400,000 to $600,000. Revenue? I would say between $3 million and $4 million a year. With these RV parks? And mobile home parks as well, yeah.
How many of them? I've been involved with 35 or so over the last seven years. What a bad business. No, I mean, you're capitalizing on baby boomers retiring and on millennials traveling and on. Yeah, it's just it's a growing market. People are getting outside more. What are the macro things you think about at the moment when you're trying to decide on a new side hustle or a new business to start?
Are there like obvious macro things that are happening that we should all be thinking about? You just can't ignore AI. Like whatever you're doing, AI has to be part of it. So I like the framework of implementing new AI tools into old businesses. And I like the framework that 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every single day. And that will be the case for the next five to 10 years.
What's the opportunity there? To either buy the businesses or to implement AI into the businesses. Those are the two biggest opportunities I see. Those two. Get them to give you the business and you run it better in a more digital way. Yeah. And you pay them off for that business when you've made profit from it. If you don't make the profit, they get their business back. Yes.
Now I will say finding seller financing on a business is harder than on a piece of real estate, but it is possible. Of all the businesses you've started, which one has been most profitable? And was the easiest? Oh man. So like what is the winner? I would say either my RV parks business or my Texas snacks business, my e-commerce business.
And they weren't easy because they're easy businesses or industries. They're easy because I had matured enough to a point to find – good operators to run those businesses where I had little to no involvement in them. Does that make sense? Yeah. You found people to run them for you so that as a starter, they didn't die the minute you got bored. Exactly.
Whereas they carried on growing and evolving. Right. Whereas those are both quite hard industries. E-commerce is quite hard and real estate is as well. But I had good operators. What have you learned about finding good operators? Oh, man. It all comes down to trust. How much trust am I able to put in them? How much trust do I have them?
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