Boring Money

David Heacock
  • 5.0 (5)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Weekly

Boring Money is for the people quietly getting rich the unglamorous way. Hosted by David Heacock, founder and CEO of Filterbuy, this podcast covers boring businesses, acquisitions, cash flow, EBITDA, tax strategy, fixed income, and the real mechanics of compounding capital. Built for operators, investors, and business owners who care more about long-term wealth than hype, headlines, or status.

  1. 1d ago

    His $3M Business Playbook Will Make You Rich (Start Tomorrow)

    If you own a Boring Business doing at least 1 million dollars in revenue and want to take it to the next level, I wanna hear from you! Fill the application at https://boringmoneypodcast.com/ I’m David Heacock. My boring business makes about $23m per month. About the Guest: Michael Berry Americomm Cabling Solutions, LLC https://www.acscablingsolutions.com/ 00:00 Intro 00:36 Meet Mike in Houston 01:25 China Remote Work Detour 04:09 Home Life vs Business Chaos 05:09 What Americom Does 05:53 Landing Big Projects 06:20 Pipeline Business Reality 07:39 From Cable Tech to Cop 09:19 Dad’s Passing and Takeover 13:20 Industry Barriers and Bidding 17:48 Scaling to Millions Fast 22:24 More Sales Won’t Fix It 26:37 Automation Side Quest 29:57 Focus on Repeatable Systems 32:37 Defining Real Success 39:16 Sales Process Reality Check 41:50 Hire Sales Leadership 47:15 Fear of Letting Go 49:20 Start With Free Interviews 57:13 Recruiting Playbook Example 01:00:27 Build Repeatable Growth 01:01:15 Sales Process Reality Check 01:02:12 Industry Secrets And Data Centers 01:03:29 Find Mentors And Sales Help 01:05:54 Focus Beats Chasing Shiny Objects 01:11:11 Niche Advantage Against Big Firms 01:14:37 Asking For Help And Getting Clarity 01:17:38 How To Find Sales Leaders 01:21:15 Repeatable Pipeline Not More Work 01:31:05 Wrap Up And Next Steps Work with me~ https://filterbuyventures.com/ Subscribe to follow me on my mission to build the world’s leading indoor air quality company: 👉 https://shorturl.at/yYrb6 👈 No gimmicks, no courses or upsells, just an honest look at my journey to build a business towards $1B+ David Heacock (CEO) TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@davidfilterbuy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidfilterbuy/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidfilterbuy/ Filterbuy: https://www.tiktok.com/@filterbuyhttps://filterbuy.com/

  2. Oct 27

    He Bought His College Laundry Business for $30K. Now He's Building the Zillow for Franchises.

    Alex Smereczniak got his start at Wake Forest. A student laundry service that began as a class project was doing about $30,000 a school year, and when the founders graduated they wanted $30,000 for it. Alex had about $2,000. So he learned seller financing on the fly, brought in two partners, and grew it from $30,000 to $160,000 in revenue the first year by getting in front of parents at freshman orientation. He sold it for just under $300,000. After a year and a half at Ernst & Young, he started a laundry and dry cleaning pickup business in Charlotte with $10,000 and a friend who drove 20 hours straight from Minnesota to join him. Over eight years they raised $33 million in venture capital, got to just under $20 million in annual revenue, vertically integrated into their own laundromats and started franchising them. That's where he saw how franchises actually get sold. Today he runs Franzy, which he describes as Zillow for buying and selling franchise businesses. About 4,000 brands, with the fees, royalties and track record laid out in one place instead of a 200 page legal document. We spent a lot of this conversation on the risks, including one I've seen up close. We break down: How franchise brokers work: commissions he puts at around 60% of the franchise fee, no licensing in most states, and a menu of only the 20 to 40 brands that pay them Why emerging brands lean on the franchise fee to survive until royalties cover their costs, and why he looks for 30 to 50 open locations before buying The case for going down the risk curve if you are new to business, and why following what the banks will finance is a good filter What Subway and Wendy's show about franchisor and franchisee alignment Venture capital versus building a business you own, and why taking VC is a much bigger fork in the road than most founders think Franzy OS, the software it is building to pull a franchisee's 12 to 15 systems into one view, and what AI is changing about how small teams build software Franchising can be a real path to building wealth. It is not passive, and it is not a get rich quick scheme. You are buying a business. Talk to ten franchisees before you sign anything.

  3. Oct 20

    He Ran Trade Schools for Almost 20 Years. Then He Found a Way to Buy Them.

    Jim Bologa is a CPA. He spent about ten years at Price Waterhouse and twelve more as a CFO, COO and CEO at public and private equity backed companies. In 2007 a private equity contact called him about a trade school they had just bought in Connecticut. He said he'd come on as a consultant while he looked at other things. Every day at the school he learned something he could use to fix something in his own house. He never left. Porter and Chester Institute started in Hartford in 1946, training World War II veterans in mechanical drafting. Today it teaches electricians, HVAC techs, plumbers, welders, diesel and auto techs, practical nurses and respiratory therapists. Jim ran it, and YTI Career Institute in Pennsylvania, for close to two decades. Then he bought Porter and Chester. Here's how. The hard part was the regulation. When a school that takes federal student aid changes owners, the Department of Education can require a letter of credit of 25% of the prior year's Title IV receipts, posted at closing. For Porter and Chester that meant another $12 to $15 million of dead money on top of the purchase price. So in July 2024 Jim bought a small one first, the College of Court Reporting in Valparaiso, Indiana. Then he used it as the platform to buy Porter and Chester. In his words, David bought David, and then David bought Goliath. It took about five years. Other operators are still trying to figure out how he did it. Today it's 11 campuses, 350 to 400 employees and 2,000 to 3,000 students a year. Most programs run about a year and cost $25,000 to $35,000. We break down: How the letter of credit works, and why it is the real barrier to entry in this industry Why roughly 80% of tuition revenue comes from federal sources, and the graduation and job placement benchmarks the accreditor holds them to What a campus actually looks like: up to 60,000 square feet, a two-story stick house in the electrical lab, and "graduate on Friday, go to work on Monday" A 10-week welding program with a company working on nuclear subs: the people it sends pay nothing, and those who pass certification start at $60,000 to $65,000 Why birth rates after the financial crisis drive enrollment 18 years later, and why families worried about AI are looking at the trades The paralegal who was in the electrical program a couple of weeks after being displaced during COVID, at 35, still paying off college debt Getting paid up front every 10 weeks, and why that cash cycle matters His plan to double the footprint and the student count in five years, mostly through acquisitions at three to seven times, with seller financing Why he calls himself a steward of businesses that are 40, 60 and 80 years old My take: this is the path I'd tell an 18 year old to look at. Learn a trade in a year, go work for someone who built a business in it, and then decide if you want to build your own. Your worst case is you go back to work doing the trade you were trained for. That doesn't sound so bad. And it's the same lesson as Jim's own story. He didn't wake up one day and decide to buy a school. He spent almost 20 years inside the business until he could spot the opportunity.

  4. Oct 13

    How He Built an Eight-Figure Business Selling Toilet Paper

    Jake Berk is 31 and the president of Berk International, a second-and-third-generation family business in Boyertown, Pennsylvania that converts toilet paper, paper towels and dry wipes. His grandfather started it in the 1970s buying bales of reclaimed T-shirts; Jake's dad and three uncles cut them into 20-pound boxes of rags and rolled them up driveways on skateboards. They built that into a company, sold it in the late 90s, watched the buyer run it into the ground, took the machinery back and started over. Today it pays eight figures a year and ships to 15 countries. Jake's dad is still the CEO. Jake is the president who has effectively run sales for ten years. For a long time they loosely talked about where the business was going and never actually said it. Then a consultant sat them down with ten questions, had them write their answers separately, and read them aloud. They were not on the same page. That exercise is the reason this conversation could happen. We break down: Why "boring" businesses are having a renaissance, and why toilet paper is as safe as it gets Manufacturer vs. converter: parent rolls from Egypt, China, Vietnam, Turkey and Italy, 300 stock SKUs plus 150 private-label items Selling only through distributors: food service, jan/san, industrial, and why price alone never wins the account Freight on a low-margin commodity: the largest price increase they have ever pushed, delivered pricing, and why Jake refuses to add a fuel surcharge The "same page" exercise that finally got a father and son honest about a liquidity event Why "we want more sales" is the wrong goal, and the cash flow modeling to do before hiring another rep Building a target map by industry and region, and holding one person accountable to it Whether Berk should go direct to end users, and how we run Filterbuy's nine distribution points and same-day courier delivery Family business rules: don't overlap roles, name the decision maker, and say the expectations out loud Jake's advice to anyone who wants to start a manufacturing business: don't. Become a distributor first. I grew up in a distribution business and bought it in 2012, and we stocked toilet paper too. Every time it grew I had less cash, which is why I ended up in air filters getting paid upfront. So my take for Jake: more sales is the easy part. Before you hire another rep, model what five times the revenue does to receivables, inventory, purchasing, customer service, lead times and the credit line. Cash, not demand, is what stops a distributor from growing. Nobody actually wants more sales. They want more money in their pocket, and those are not the same thing.

  5. Oct 6

    It’s Boring, But It’s How You Make Millions Investing

    Jonathan Boyar runs Boyar Value Group, the firm his father Mark started in 1975 as a research service and grew into Boyar Asset Management in 1983. The idea has not changed in fifty years: ignore what Wall Street pays as a multiple of earnings and ask what an acquirer would pay for the whole business. If the stock trades at a big discount to that number, it is interesting. If not, you do not have to swing. Jonathan puts 70 to 80 percent of his own net worth into the same stocks he buys for clients, turns the portfolio over about 10 percent a year, and says most days he does nothing. The best example is Madison Square Garden. When the Knicks and Rangers were sitting inside one company at an enterprise value that made no sense next to what the teams were worth, Boyar wrote a public letter to James Dolan asking him to split them apart. The company did, the press picked it up, and the position outperformed. Patience got rewarded faster than they expected. We break down: Valuing a public company the way a buyer would, and why that gives you a margin of safety the multiple never will Why SpaceX at 20 times revenue is a pass, and what makes a boring business worth paying up for Running a concentrated, tax-efficient book for about 100 clients with 10 percent turnover and six investment professionals Value traps, and why the catalyst matters as much as the discount The research business: six publications a year, the summer "Fresh Looks", the "Forgotten 40" every December, and a $600-a-year newsletter The private equity roll-up wave in wealth management: crazy multiples, a bad fiduciary for the end client, and why Jonathan is not selling Advice for the plumber in Wichita with cash to invest: index funds if you do not know what you are doing, and buy the corrections Sports teams as an asset class, second-order effects of tax rules, and billionaires with egos AI as the great democratizer of information, and why Boyar still does not use it for analysis The private-market arbitrage, Watsco rolling up HVAC distributors, and why cash flow is what people actually care about My take: I left finance for air filters because I wanted something unlikely to change. Jonathan stayed in finance and built the same thing: a process that does not care what is fashionable, a client base that buys into it, and the patience to do nothing most days. Most owners I meet who sell end up afraid of losing what they have. A business you control, throwing off cash, is the opposite of that. That is boring money.

  6. Sep 29

    He Built 1.5M Followers With Zero Ad Spend. I Hired Him to Do It for Air Filters.

    Stanley Henry ran hotels for 12 years. Eleven jobs in twelve years, because he was the guy they sent in to fix the one that wasn't working. New Zealand, Australia, the UK, a stint in Japan. In his last year he was running a hotel in Melbourne that did more profit in one January than it had ever done in revenue in a January, and his boss still didn't think he should be on vacation. He turned to his wife and said it out loud: as long as I work for someone else, they're always going to want more. Six months later he was back in New Zealand with no network and no brand. He had five or six coffee meetings a day for six months, posted about it on LinkedIn the whole time, and had no idea what the business was going to be. Then COVID locked the country down and everyone he'd met asked him to do for them what he'd been doing for himself. First client May 11, 2020. Seven people a year later. Fifteen staff writing LinkedIn posts for brokers and insurance guys for three years. Then he hired a 22-year-old with 400,000 TikTok followers to figure out video, and The Attention Seeker went to 300,000 followers in three months, 700,000 in eighteen, then Instagram, YouTube, a podcast. Today it's about 1.5 million followers across platforms, built with no paid spend, which is the whole pitch: an organic agency that is itself one of the biggest brands on organic social. Clients came the same way his LinkedIn clients did. They watched, then they called. Eighteen months ago the agency was 40 people. Today it's 15 and does more revenue. He replaced eleven project managers with an AI he named Kevin, a context brain on a server in the office that digests every meeting, email and document every six hours and then puts calendar invites in the humans' calendars telling them what to shoot. The editors are still human, because AI makes average and the algorithm only rewards great. This one is a little different from the usual episode. Filterbuy hired Stanley's agency a few weeks ago. I've believed in organic social for a decade and spent real money failing at it, and my personal brand started two years ago because I decided I had to learn the game myself. So the second half of this conversation is the actual plan for how you make people under 50 care about an air filter company, and how a small boring business anywhere should start. We break down: Why a marketing agency that doesn't do its own marketing is the norm, and why doing it anyway was the entire business LinkedIn in 2026: AI slop made real stories more valuable, not less. His team now has journalists calling clients for what actually happened this week The One New Zealand telco rebrand that put them on the map, and Pizza Hut New Zealand going from 3,000 followers to 100,000 and beating Domino's and McDonald's on social in the one market where Pizza Hut is growing Why his perfect client is a boring grudge purchase: banks, telcos, energy, insurance, air filters. People are either indifferent or they hate you, and both are easy to move The 50/50 rule: the TikTok and Tracksuit study on brand versus performance spend, and why paid can't distribute bad content anymore no matter what you pay His playbook for a local pest control or plumbing company with no budget: hire one young content creator at $6,000 to $7,000 a month, five videos a day, six months, a weekly start-stop-continue, and dominate your zip code. Most people quit at two weeks. A month to land it is fast The Filterbuy strategy: take the filters out of the content entirely, build a social TV show called Filtered By, street interviews with unnecessary censorship, get the show loved for three months before anyone touches paid Nike has 300 channels. Why one series per audience beats one channel trying to talk to everyone, and why you build them one at a time What has changed on social in five years: nothing. Cheap tricks stopped working because everyone learned them. Good stories always won, and the winning edit right now is the simplest one Where I'd focus if I could pick one platform, where he would, and why we both land on YouTube being the hardest and the most valuable Why he's selling the agency: agencies cash flow but don't scale, so he used the cash to build the brand, and the brand launched an education product three months ago that's already doing a quarter million a month in New Zealand and Australia off a two-hour webinar a week The line I kept coming back to: you can't pay Facebook to distribute crap anymore. The platforms only show people what they'd choose to watch, so the question isn't how do I get my message in front of them. It's what would they want to watch, and how do I get my name next to it. That's the directive I gave my team, and it's why I hired someone who has done it for boring brands before. Stanley told my head of growth he'd put his neck on the line if the show didn't work. I wish every vendor felt that way. We'll find out in three months.

  7. Sep 22

    He Does $6M a Year Bottling Water. One Robot Almost Broke Him.

    Jay Peterson got out of Boston College in 1991 into no jobs, went home to Kankakee, Illinois, and sold industrial real estate for a broker who gave him the listing nobody wanted: a hundred acres next to a dynamite plant. Two years later some friends set him up as a Canteen distributor with one route truck and two vending machines. He and his wife Myra were the first two employees. They canceled their honeymoon to take on a Sears distribution center. That vending company got to about $10 million. He sold it in 2001, kept the water and coffee routes, sold those in 2005, and then a fax came across his desk. Nestle Waters had bought every independent water company in the country to compete with Coke and Pepsi, figured out they only wanted the dense markets, and was selling off the rest. Jay bought the Evansville, Indiana routes, with a Toyota plant and an Alcoa can plant on the customer list, for $225,000 on $1.1 million of revenue. That's Mountain Glacier. He's run it for 20 years. Today it's a $6 million co-packing plant putting out about 2 million five-gallon bottles a year. 40 truckloads a week, with a plant that can do 80. He went from 30,000 home-delivery customers down to 15 big ones. The sales are there. What's in the way is a robot. He bought it at a trade show, waited two years for it to be built in Poland, and got it dropped on his floor last June with a two-week install in the contract. It took seven months. The suction cups couldn't hold 20% of his bottles. The layout meant he couldn't go back to hand loading without cutting his throughput in half. He ran the plant around the clock from June to October, put about a million dollars of his own money in, and his father-in-law named the robot Philip Bottles. This year Philip is the employee of the month, every month. The hole from last year is still there. We break down: Why vending machines aren't the passive income YouTube says they are: you need a million dollars of revenue before you can afford a money room and a warehouse, and until then the husband fills machines at night and the wife does the books Route density, and why Nestle wanted a truck parked in front of a Manhattan tower all day but not Buffalo What's actually in the bottle: spring water at 200+ TDS, remineralized RO at 50 to 100, distilled at 3 or less, and how he blends a recipe to whatever a customer specs Where I pushed back on the robot. It always takes longer than they say, and you don't tear out the way you get product out the door until the new way is proven The freight company that came with the water business: 12 day cabs, 30 trailers, and a $700,000 SBA note, six months into unwinding it one truck at a time Why I told him to rip the Band-Aid off. I did it over 12 to 18 months and I should have done it in one auction. Trucks don't get more valuable, the insurance doesn't get cheaper, and the problem eats your attention the whole time Why he should not sign the three-to-five year freight contract J.B. Hunt is about to offer him. A rate per lane, a fuel surcharge, revisited every year. Anything more complicated than that and you're getting screwed somewhere Three SBA 7A notes, everything collateralized, and what a bad robot year does to your covenants Whether $600,000 or $2 million actually fixes anything, and why "capital constrained" is usually shorthand for something else The assignment I gave his son Jake, who just joined with an accounting background: a 13-week cash flow model, every dollar in and out, closed within a week of month end, done in 60 days, and nothing else on his desk until it is The line I kept coming back to: if you're upside down on half the business, doubling it might just make you upside down by double. Jay wants to go from 40 loads to 80. I don't know if that's a good idea, and neither does he, because nobody has the numbers yet. Once they do, the next move will be obvious to him, to his bank, and to anybody he'd ask for money. Until then everybody is guessing. Jay is 57. He's spent 33 years horse trading in and out of businesses, and what he wants now is one the Peterson family keeps for another 20. The water is fine. The plant is fine. Culligan wants it. What he has to get right is the boring part.

  8. Sep 15

    This Veteran's Boring Business Makes $11,000/Day

    Ian Dahlberg got out of the Coast Guard and was trying to figure out what he was doing next. He picked up a security guard license on a whim while going to college on the GI Bill, and it got him hired at the Waldorf Astoria in 2012 as a security manager trainee. He says he's got more stories from that one year than from six years in the military. Seven incident reports a day was the average. Then he did the thing I keep telling people to do. He went back to being a guard. Night shift, shipping container terminal, so he could learn the side of the business he'd been managing from above. He wrote the business plan for Dahlcore in the guard booth. He didn't know what a bill rate was. He couldn't read a P&L. Six more years inside the industry after that. Branch manager at Securitas, a mobile unit for Chase Bank, then Brooklyn: 300 people and 10,000 guard hours a week. He brought in seven figures of business and his salary went up $5,000. Two employers after that, data centers and then Chelsea Market, six days a week and twelve-hour days. He started Dahlcore in April 2018 by calling cemeteries, because he was looking for somewhere the big companies weren't. First year, $90,000. Second year, $670,000. Then COVID took him down to three clients and about $8,000 a week. This year he's projected a little over $4 million, on 7% margins. He also told me he bid roughly $100 million of RFPs this year and won none of them. We break down: Why cemeteries were the right first client for a company with no track record: weekends only, no staff on site, and nobody else was bothering to call them The Winter Lantern Festival, where he was hired for four guards and found out at the precinct meeting that he needed thirteen per shift, with two weeks to hire them and two employees on Staten Island to start from Why the moment he knew it was real wasn't the $19,000 deposit check, it was standing in the field looking at thirteen people wearing a logo he'd designed himself What 7% margins actually mean: $8,000 a week sounds like $400K a year until you work out that it leaves him $28,000 Why he deliberately carries the overhead of a $10 million company at $4 million, because that's how he was trained to run a branch at Securitas and he'd rather buy the capacity early The race to the bottom, and how it actually works: PE firms buying agencies state by state to qualify for national accounts, and a new facilities director who's told to cut 10% and goes shopping instead of picking up the phone Where I pushed him hardest. What do you offer that your competition can't? He's got real answers, and he still hadn't sold me by the end of it Retention, where we disagree. He says his is strong and the clients he lost lost their funding. My definition is simpler: is this revenue I can count on next year, yes or no, and the reason doesn't change the number The marketing agency he built to sell his own playbook to security companies outside New York, which now pays for the $135K a year he spends marketing Dahlcore Why hiring one salesperson and teaching them his method produced a $1.2 million contract in Q1, after years of sales being entirely him What transfers from Ian's story is the order he did it in. He used the military to get into something adjacent, worked inside the industry until he understood it, and only then went out on his own against the companies he used to work for. I don't think he makes it without that. What he's up against now is a different problem. He can have a $10 million business he runs himself, or a $10 million business that runs without him, and only one of those is worth anything to the family he wants to hand it to. He's closer to the first one. That's normal. It's also the whole job from here.

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About

Boring Money is for the people quietly getting rich the unglamorous way. Hosted by David Heacock, founder and CEO of Filterbuy, this podcast covers boring businesses, acquisitions, cash flow, EBITDA, tax strategy, fixed income, and the real mechanics of compounding capital. Built for operators, investors, and business owners who care more about long-term wealth than hype, headlines, or status.

Information

  • Creator
    David Heacock
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    30
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Boring Money
  • Show Website
    Boring Money

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