How 4 Owners Turned a Fresh Start Into a Business Worth Backing

In partnership with Bizee

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Meet the winners.

On September 18, Codie went live in front of about 200,000 people to launch her new book, Own or Be Owned.

During the event, in partnership with Bizee, she gave away 4 Bizee Builder Grants of $25,000 each.

And while giving away business grants usually attracts people who like to use the word “disruptive” in their dating profile bios, you know we don’t march to Big Tech’s drum…

The 4 winners were hard-working service business owners who embody the Contrarian ethos to a T. A junk hauler in Shasta County, an electrician pouring epoxy floors in Fresno, a beignet guy in New York, and 2 brothers washing towels in Austin.

While we wish everyone who showed up could’ve won a grant, we’re excited to see how these 4 use their capital to grow. And hopefully, you can learn something from their stories.

And if you’re not sure where to start, Bizee built something for you.

It’s called Your Next 30 Days as a Business Owner, a FREE guide built on Codie’s exact playbook.

Weather you want to buy your first business, start something new, or grow your current business, this guide gives you your next steps.

Just fill in your worksheets, map your month: one action a week, with consistent check-ins to keep you on track.

Every owner you’ll read about today started somewhere less than ideal. A speed bag on a skateboard, a broken-down excavator, or towels in their mom’s carport. You don’t have to have it all together.

Just start where you are.

👉 Get your FREE 30-day guide HERE

Dave’s first pandemic business idea? A boxing speed bag mounted on a skateboard.

“Probably the worst fitness product invented in the 21st century,” he said.

Before his poorly planned wellness venture, Dave worked fine dining at The Standard Grill and spent about 5 years in East Coast sales for a snack brand. And when the rolling speed bag flopped, he needed money fast. So he built a coffee cart onto a bicycle and served Louisiana coffee to his neighbors in Williamsburg.

“Next thing I know, everybody’s asking for beignets.”

He learned to make them over the phone from a 30-year veteran of Café Du Monde. And while his first batch of beignets needed more than a little chicory coffee to wash ’em down, he eventually mastered the recipe.

Once his pastry game was on point, he set up at the farmers market every Saturday, come rain or shine, developing a cult following among the vendors and patrons. On the days the weather didn’t permit frying, he still gave out coffee for anyone who needed a bit of Creole caffeination.

It wasn’t all sunshine and fried dough, though. He nearly went under in 2022 before he was able to order a trailer from an overseas manufacturer so he could expand his operation.

Cut to today, and people know him as New York’s beignet guy.

His crew rolls in at 6 a.m., makes the dough from scratch and opens at 8. On a typical day they fry 500 to 600 beignets.

“New Yorkers are in your face,” he said. “‘Hey, this beignet is not hot. Why is it not perfect?’ So it had to be perfect.”

He must be pretty close to perfect, because he knows it’s time to grow.

And while he’s still deciding where to put the grant money, a Beignet Van and a bottled chicory cold brew top the list.

Anita grew up in Fresno in a family that doesn’t sit still.

Her mom and dad turned their 18-acre ranch into the Lotus Pond, a seasonal Lao market with food, music and karaoke. One sister works as a radiology tech and still finds time to run a boba shop and a nail salon.

Needless to say, business is in Anita’s blood.

Her mom and siblings came to the U.S. in the 1980s and settled in Fresno, where farm work was easy to find.

“Everyone makes fun of it in rap songs and movies,” Anita said. “But it’s a big ag town. We feed practically the whole world.”

She switched majors and jobs a few times before applying for an electrician apprenticeship and learning she LOVES the construction industry. But just like the rest of her family, she wanted something she could call her own, so Anita decided to start pouring epoxy floors.

She still works full time as an electrical field service tech, and her epoxy business runs alongside it. She even formed her LLC through Bizee!

Her first big job, a 3-car garage plus a studio, should’ve gone fast. But it took 2 weeks. Turns out, she needed a specific kind of grinder to do the work properly. That’s where the grant is going: a professional floor grinder and vacuum, plus materials and marketing. With new equipment coming, she’s already got her next 3 jobs lined up.

Next comes her electrical license, then a C-10 contractor license so she can add electrical work. She also wants to use some of the grant money to cover a few OSHA 10 certifications for high schoolers and women trying to break into the trades.

“It took me a year to get into the apprenticeship,” she said. “Having the hours, the knowledge and OSHA 10 can fill that gap.”

We love that she’s already paying it forward.

At 12 years old, Josiah cleaned the office where his mom worked in Weaverville, California. Later, he chopped wood for neighbors. And once, he crawled under a house to pull out a dead animal nobody else would touch.

That’s what we call entrepreneurial spirit!

“It was things that people didn’t like doing, and I would be the one,” he told us. “You gonna pay me? I’m in.”

That instinct carried him a long way.

In rural Mexico, he helped start a garbage route for towns with no service and hired 2 local men to run it. Back in Redding, he helped coordinate about 425 volunteers a week to keep city parks clean.

Later, he managed projects building biogas systems on dairy farms, but the travel kept him away from his family. So in 2025 he walked away.

He started over with a broken-down mini excavator he bought cheap and fixed up by watching YouTube videos. That excavator became Clean Slate, a licensed junk removal company that opened in March 2026.

The name comes from the second chance Josiah got at 16, when a neighbor saw a struggling youth and brought him onto his firefighting crew.

“When you clean up somebody’s house,” he said, “it’s like you’re giving them that same opportunity.”

Then he hit a ceiling.

California caps how much construction-related junk work you can take on without a license, so Josiah went and earned his general contractor license. Now he can handle bigger jobs, but he needs a runway to grow…

Which is where Bizee’s grant comes in. The money buys roll-off containers he can use to run several job sites at once and to bid on permitted construction work and city cleanup contracts.

What gets him most excited has nothing to do with junk. He’s working with county probation to put at-risk 16- to 20-year-olds on real job sites, and the containers give those kids a safe place to learn.

“If nothing changes, the same cycle is gonna happen,” he said. “That’s the point. To create an opportunity to do something different.”

Cole’s last business before laundry was a rhythm-cycling studio. He invested in 2019, before COVID wiped it out. Turns out sweating and face masks don’t mix…

“I thought about doing something less trendy and sexy,” he said, “and that’s when we got into laundry.”

In 2022, he and his brother worked part time at an infrared sauna studio and noticed something interesting. People who spend long periods of time in a heated box use a lot of towels. Like, WAY more than he imagined.

After some negotiating, Cole & Mike’s laundry business officially had its first client.

Most people would’ve bought equipment at this point, and they almost did. They even had commercial machines headed for their mom’s carport before cancelling the order at the last minute.

Instead, they decided to rent time at someone else’s laundromat for 18 months, with color-coded bags for every client. And while this worked for a while, they were slowly getting more business than they could handle.

When they got a movie theater account, it finally forced their hand. It needed service 7 days a week, Christmas included. So at the end of 2024, the brothers bought their own laundromat with an SBA loan.

Today M&C Linens runs 40 washers and 40 dryers with 8 full-time and 4 part-time employees.

The grant pays for bigger dryers and brings older machines back online for a new non-toxic duvet and comforter cleaning service.

They still take care of walk-ins, too. “If someone wants to come in and wash,” Cole said, “always, always, always let them wash.”

Read these stories back to back and you’ll see 2 patterns emerge…

The first is that each of these owners had to start over and keep going.

As a business owner, you’re going to fail at some point. That’s life. But the choice to keep going is what separates winners from losers.

The second is more about what you do with your success.

Josiah wants to put kids on job sites. Anita wants to pay for other women’s OSHA 10. Dave now has a full team frying up a storm. And Cole and Mike turned a pile of sweaty towels into 12 employees.

The best owners build the ladder behind them.

And that ladder’s first rung goes up the day you decide your idea is real enough to make official. If that day is today, Bizee can help you form your LLC and handle the filings that come after.

👉 Start your business with Bizee

There were a lot of deserving businesses that could’ve used the extra cash, but these 4 owners had something that helped them stand apart. A desire to build something bigger than themselves.

Because the thing that keeps you going isn’t the money.

It’s your why.

- Team Contrarian

P.S. When we asked Dave what the grant meant to him, he didn’t talk about the van it could buy.

“This grant has given me the confidence that, hey, even strangers believe in this business.”

A check can buy you a grinder or a trailer, but it can’t buy you purpose.

Want to join our groups of thousands of smart business builders and buyers?

Get access to our live expert calls (and so much more) when you join our Contrarian Academy or Growth Boardroom.