Business is Good with Chris Cooper

The final episode in the series. Over eight episodes, you built a product, a platform, and four marketing funnels. Now: how do you grow without chasing every new trend? The answer is the Simple Six — six metrics that drive every business: client headcount (HEAD), average revenue per client (ARM), length of engagement (LEG), return on investment (ROI), effective hourly rate (EHR), and net owner ben...

Paid ads are an accelerant, not a foundation — which is why this is Part VIII, not Part I. Most people start with ads, spend $500, get zero clients, and conclude that advertising doesn't work. It doesn't work when it's the first thing you do. With three funnels already built (social media, referrals, content), paid ads become a multiplier. This episode walks through the complete process on screen....

Every company is a media company now. If you don't publish content, you're invisible. Most people confuse social media with content. Social media is the amplifier — it pulls people toward your content. Your content (blogs, videos, podcasts) pulls people toward knowing, liking, and trusting you. Social media is a treadmill; content is an asset that compounds over time. This episode introduces the C...

Referrals are the most powerful marketing channel any service business will ever have. A referred client costs nothing to acquire, arrives pre-sold, and tends to stay longer. Yet most businesses are completely passive about referrals — waiting, hoping, and throwing out discount incentives nobody remembers. The $50-off referral card model works for software companies where signing up means clicking...

Your first marketing post works — but it works once. You need a strategy for showing up consistently, building trust, and moving people through the funnel. This episode shows you how to use AI to build 30 days of content in one sitting. The episode introduces three types of content: story posts that build trust, education posts that demonstrate expertise, and promotion posts that invite action. At...

You've identified the problem (Part I), defined your product (Part II), and built your collectors (Part III). Now it's time to get people into the funnel and make your first sale. This episode cuts through the marketing noise — the gurus, the lead generation agencies, the funnel wizards — and focuses on what one person can actually do today to sign their first client. It starts with a simple expla...

You've identified the problem you solve (Part I) and defined your first product (Part II). Before you can sell anything, you need to collect an audience. This episode walks through building your "collectors" — the places where potential customers find you, raise their hand, and give you permission to keep talking to them. We build the entire infrastructure live using AI. Five years ago, this setup...

In Part I, you identified the problem you solve. In Part II, you're defining your first actual product — your minimum viable offer. Most people starting businesses make one of two mistakes: they build everything before selling anything, or they try to sell everything to everyone. Both fail. The solution is to define something specific enough to sell, simple enough to deliver quickly, and focused e...

This is Part I of a new series on building a single-person business from scratch using AI. Whether you're starting from zero or auditing an existing business, this episode covers the most foundational question you'll answer. Most people starting businesses ask the wrong question. They ask "what am I good at?" or "what should I sell?" The right question is: what problem am I solving? You don't sell...

Every business is limited by its leadership. Good systems and operations are the floor, but the leader is always the ceiling. I've worked with over 3,000 entrepreneurs, and this pattern shows up everywhere: they can work hard, but they're limited by beliefs about money, mindset gaps, or self-doubt. When I tell them exactly what to do, they find reasons not to — "I need more evidence," "I'm too bus...

Most entrepreneurs are giving themselves the wrong advice. Not because they're lazy, and not because they haven't read enough business books — but because the business advice industry doesn't sort itself by phase. So they end up doing the right things at the wrong time: hiring a fractional COO when they need ten new clients, building complicated org charts when they still can't take a weekend off,...

Get your free worksheet here: https://businessisgood.com/the-six-mindset-myths-quietly-killing-your-business/ After more than fifteen years of publishing daily and mentoring over 3,000 entrepreneurs, Chris Cooper has watched the game change completely. The old constraints — lack of information, lack of tools, lack of access to markets — are mostly gone. What's left is internal. In this episode of...

Is AI your ally or your enemy? On this episode of Business is Good, Chris Cooper makes the case that the answer is entirely up to you. Chris opens with a story that didn't get nearly enough attention: Anthropic — the company behind the AI model Claude — recently developed a tool called Claude Mythos Preview that found thousands of security vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web br...

Most entrepreneurs know they should be creating more content. What stops them isn't motivation — it's time, and the feeling that each piece requires starting from scratch. In this episode, Chris Cooper sits down and shows his exact AI content workflow, live and in real time. Starting from a blank screen, he walks through how he uses five AI tools in sequence to go from zero to a fully published co...

Most Canadian entrepreneurs carry a quiet belief that a job would have been the safer choice. The data says otherwise. In this episode of Business Is Good, host Chris Cooper makes the case that owning a business in Canada right now is one of the most rational financial decisions a person can make. Not the bravest. The most rational. At 35, Chris seriously considered taking a job at a call center b...

This is the audio version of my video found here: https://youtu.be/n024f_WpNpQ Most entrepreneurs know they should be creating more content. What stops them isn't motivation — it's time, and the feeling that each piece requires starting from scratch. In this episode, Chris Cooper sits down and shows his exact AI content workflow, live and in real time. Starting from a blank screen, he walks throug...

fter World War II, villagers on a Pacific island built bamboo replicas of military airstrips — and waited for the planes to come back. They still wait today. Historians call it a "cargo cult": a community so committed to repeating the rituals of success that they completely lose sight of what actually caused that success in the first place. This episode is about what happens when brands do the sam...

Every election, politicians promise to create jobs. There's just one problem: governments can't create real, sustainable jobs. Not in a way that adds value to the economy. Not in a way that pays for itself. In this episode of BusinessIsGood, Chris Cooper breaks down the fundamental difference between governments that create the conditions for businesses to grow — and governments that try to substi...

Most companies reward their best people by promoting them out of what they're actually good at. Your top salesperson becomes a sales manager. Your best developer becomes a team lead. And suddenly you're paying them more to do a job they weren't trained for — while they generate fewer results doing the job they were hired for. There's a better way. And it starts with understanding the difference be...

Most small business owners are waiting for universities to produce the employees they need. The smart ones stopped waiting years ago — and started building their own training programs. In this episode, Chris Cooper looks at a quiet trend reshaping how companies find, develop, and keep talent: the rise of the company college. Rolex opened a tuition-free watchmaking school in Dallas, complete with a...

Canadian universities are in crisis — and not just because the government cut international student visas. Fourteen Ontario universities are running combined deficits of over $400 million. The University of Waterloo is staring down a $75 million shortfall. Laurentian already went bankrupt. And through all of it, the response from most institutions has been to ask the government for more money rath...

Anti-billionaire sentiment is at an all-time high in Canada — and it's costing us. In this direct response to the Paikin Podcast's call for higher taxes on the wealthy, Chris Cooper dismantles five of the most persistent myths about billionaires, delivers statistics most Canadians have never seen, and makes the case that wealth creators aren't the problem — they're the solution. Topics include: th...

After our last episode about teaching kids entrepreneurship, many parents realized they wanted to start something themselves. But most side hustle advice is terrible - scams, pyramid schemes, or ideas requiring massive followings. This episode cuts through the noise with six proven side hustles you can start this week with under $200 and 5-10 hours per week. **The Six Side Hustles:** **Virtual Ass...

Three parents texted me the same week. All asking: "What should I tell my kid about entrepreneurship?" One said: "My 16-year-old asked if she should start a business or get a job at Tim Hortons. I told her to focus on school. What should I have said?" Another: "My son wants to start a lawn care business but I'm worried he'll fail and get discouraged." And the third: "My daughter asked why she need...

Three friends graduated high school together. Same opportunities, same starting point. Fifteen years later, one makes $85,000 working overtime (exhausted), one makes $115,000 through specialization (better income, still trapped by time), and one makes $105,000 total with $30,000 coming from assets that earn while she sleeps. The difference isn't intelligence or work ethic. It's leverage. Most Cana...