Rohan Gilkes has a reminder for you: local service businesses are the lifeblood of our economy. They’re also the easiest and most opportunistic entry point for most aspiring entrepreneurs. Think about it. What are you more likely to pull off: creating the next TikTok or getting one of your neighbors to pay you $60 to wash their car? Exactly. Rohan’s first multi-million dollar business was cleaning people’s homes and offices. Only, he didn’t do the cleaning.
“For me,” Rohan says, “I’ve been building random businesses for like the last 10 years. Before that, I was an accountant. Then I became obsessed with figuring out how to make money online. I tried affiliate marketing, I tried eBay. Anything that had a low startup cost. And I kept failing, but I was amassing this knowledge, these skills. So when the right opportunity came along, I was able to capitalize on it. Fast forward to today and I’ve gotten four different businesses to over $1 million per year in revenue.”
As I said earlier, a cleaning business, of all things, was Rohan’s first mega success. Back in the day, he had this lady cleaning his house on the weekends. She asked him if he could build her a website. He was like sure, but it’s not gonna do anything for ya unless you market it. So he made her a deal: I’ll do the website, I’ll make sure people actually find it. And when they do, we’ll charge ’em a little extra, you’ll do the cleaning, and I’ll keep that little bit extra for my efforts. Game on.
Rohan got his first new cleaning client that same day. By month seven, they were doing $40,000 per month. By the end of their second year, they’d done $1 million dollars. All online traffic. People paying with credit cards. “I wanted to make it look like what Uber would make it look like if they got into the cleaning business,” Rohan explains. “Today, we’ve done over $16 million, with a team of 60 people doing the cleaning. And so that was my first big win. And that led to everything else.”
“But yeah, it all started with local marketing,” Rohan adds. “And me seeing this opportunity where, most local businesses are either not online or, if they are, they don’t have a streamlined customer acquisition process. They don’t have online booking. They don’t like a very simple mobile app. They don’t have credit card payments. They don’t have the things that people get used to with ecommerce. And I felt like if I could introduce those things, plus a nice brand and some local marketing, then I could do really well.”
Rohan now has software he sells directly to local service-based businesses, as well as entrepreneurs, like him, who want to start their own local biz and outsource the work. If you’re in the latter group, you can check out 27 Day Arbitrage, where Rohan walks you through the entire process, A to Z. He has a step by step course and live daily coaching calls for 27 days straight. At the end, when you “graduate,” the catch—which is totally fair, by the way—is he’d like you to use his software to run your business.
Seems like it’s working for his students. For example, there was a guy, David, who wrote: “Let me first say this group is amazing. I know you’ve heard that before so I’ll get to the point. Six weeks ago, we launched a mobile detailing business using Rohan’s Launch27 platform. It has been amazing. In the first four weeks, we did $8k in revenue. In the total six weeks, we’ve done $14k. So we are growing!” Looks like the software costs as much as $299 per month to use.
