Speaker 1What I love about small rental business is you can start easily with very little capital and you have an asset that you can rent out again and again. You're not selling something and then you have to go source more goods. I started looking for boxes and found tote wrangle was a thing. Worst case, we have totes for the rest of our lives. Best case, the thing takes off and we need to go buy more totes. We immediately had to buy another 120 because we overbooked. And the rule is we only buy when we oversell.
Speaker 2What do you know about the rental business? Not real estate rentals, but renting other stuff, moving totes, podcast studios, RV rentals. Well, I met a guy from Fort Wayne, Indiana that does all kinds of different rental businesses. He's a multi-preneur. So I sent out a poll to my audience and said, what types of rental businesses do you want to learn about? You guys told me loud and clear. And so I found a guy that's running businesses in these spaces. The rental business is great because it's low overhead. You learn a lot of different skills while doing it. You can scale it. You can use platforms to grow it. Like RV Share, Outdoorsy, or you can use Facebook Marketplace to grow it, or you can push paid ads to your own website to grow it. Many ways to skin this cat. So please enjoy this rental business episode with David. All right. Tell me about tote rentals. Why is that an opportunity?
Speaker 1Okay. So as we grew the rental business, we decided we're going to buy a new house. So we need to move. So we put our house on the market. When we started packing the house to stage things, I started looking for boxes. I'm one of those that I don't want to get used boxes and go to grocery stores. And I'm like, I'm just... I'm too lazy. I don't like hodgepodge boxes. So I started looking at like wholesale boxes, loosely exploring, like, could I do a box selling business and found tote rental was a thing. So there's a company in Chicago that does it, which is near us. Indianapolis has one. It's really big out West, but Fort Wayne didn't have any providers that did it. So I was like, okay, well, how much is it? You know, I was doing the math in my head. I'm like, I could buy, you know, those yellow top, you know, industrial totes for seven bucks a pop. They were on sale. I could buy, you know, a hundred of those, 700 bucks, rent them out for $2 a piece. And I was just doing some basic math with ChatGBT too. And like, how viable would this be? The cogs are really low. And so I just threw up a website immediately. And this website, this is us. Yep. Totes on loan. Okay. So what we ended up doing instead of getting like the consumer grade totes at Home Depot is we found a, there was a random video on YouTube where a guy was like, I run a tote rental business and here are my suppliers. And he was like a real quick snap of like... Three wholesale suppliers of totes. So I paused the video, looked up the companies, found out they cost about 12 bucks a piece. Okay. But you have to buy them by the pallet. So it's like 120 totes to get the price break. 1500 bucks or so per pallet? Yeah. With shipping. And I also found out one of their warehouses is an hour from me and they always have about a thousand totes on stock at any one time. So I'm like, okay, let's buy a pallet of totes. Yeah. Worst case, we have totes for the rest of the year. Best case, we have totes for the rest of our lives for any time we ever move again.
Speaker 2Best case, the thing takes off and we need to go buy more totes. Yeah. It sounds like me at Buc-ee's. Like, worst case, I'll fill my pantry full of junk food for a year. Best case, I have a new business. I mean, a lot of awesome businesses start out with that kind of hypothesis, right?
Speaker 1Yeah. And let's just test it. And so it was admittedly a little slower to start. Like I didn't get immediate validation. We put up some Facebook marketplace posts. And I was doing this is when I was deep, deeper into your content and was like, sell it before you have it. So literally like, hey, we ran out totes. Hey, nano banana, make a bunch of images of me carrying, carrying this tote download product image, you know, picture of me, you know, looked, it was obviously AI and that kind of didn't do anything. So we took a more manual approach and started actually networking locally with realtors and moving companies. And that's when we actually got traction.
Speaker 2How did you get their attention? Because. Everyone wants a realtor's attention.
Speaker 1So there's a magazine in our town called Real Producers. I love low tech marketing tactics. Yeah. And so Real Producers, it's a very niche magazine that highlights and they're in every town. You probably have one in Dallas, Fort Worth area. They highlight the top producing real estate agents, and then they also run networking events. So monthly they'll have one or two events where you can show up as a vendor and just rub shoulders with, with realtors. So that's, we leaned into that. So the magazine gives you a printout of like, here's, you know, 50 realtors, here's the volume they did, here's the average home sale price, here's, you know what I mean, like awesome data that you can just snap a photo of and say, Hey, let's build a campaign around contacting these realtors. And then my wife would just reach out and say, Hey, let's do coffee. And she would go to a lot of networking events. One of the things our Real Producers manager of the, of the magazine for our area said was like, you guys got to have a subscription program. You need recurring. And he's like, and realtors love to give gifts and they love unique gifts. So we're like, okay, let's make a realtor gifting program. Now we have realtors signed up on a monthly basis that pay basically a subscription to gift moving boxes to their clients for closings.
Speaker 2So realtors are paying you on a monthly subscription so they can gift that subscription to their clients. Yep. As like a housewarming gift.
Speaker 1Yep. Here's 20 totes for your move. And then we, we have like a, a pouch on the side of the tote and we make a nice printout. This move is powered by so-and-so from Coldwell Banker or what, you know, whatever real estate firm. And we deliver the totes. The people move. We don't want to handle any of the moving or packing. Yeah. And then when they're done, we go pick them up.
Speaker 2Logistically, how does it work? So how much is a, a realtor paying you every month on average for something like this?
Speaker 1So we do two per month and five per month packages. So if they did two per month, we discount it heavily. So you'll see like we charge $99. If they charge for 20 totes, they pay 60 and we do two at a time. So they do 120 a month at the base, you know, tier, and then they can go up to like three or 500 a month, whatever it is for five rentals, five times six is, I can't math right now, 300. We had one realtor immediately that was like, well, I just want to pay for the whole year. We're like, okay, yeah, cool. So, and we had to build like a way to track that.
Speaker 2So I've, I've built software around this whole business. Okay. So if a realtor's paying for a hundred totes a month or whatever. What happens when they want to give some of those out? Like logistically, what do they do?
Speaker 1Yeah. So we built a claim portal. So they have their own agent login that they can go in and see how many credits they have. They can create the gift order in our system. The credits roll over if they don't use them. Yep. Okay. When the customer redeems it, I built an upsell mechanism. So the customer gets 20 totes free. Cause they probably need more. They might need more. So what, the way we did it was your realtor gave you a hundred dollar gift. So the realtor paid 60. You get a hundred to spend towards a bigger package. If you want more totes, basically is how it works.
Speaker 2So you open the magazine, you see the high producers, your wife reaches out to them via text. And what does she say?
Speaker 1She actually meets them in person at the events. Like we, they have a monthly event. We haven't actually done any cold outreach yet.
Speaker 2Interesting. So she sees who they are beforehand and then shows up in person at the event, hands out a business card. Here's who I am. Here's what we do. Let's have coffee. Let's talk about it. I want to show you more about what we do. Yeah, man. That's brilliant. Do you have any numbers on like what her success rate is or close rate is? Oh man. I wish, I wish we were that sophisticated. I have to think it's pretty high if you're doing it in person and they're high volume. Like it's not just a realtor. It's a realtor that is already paying for gifts. So you're just asking them to be a little more unique and pay for your gifts, right?
Speaker 1If they haven't subscribed, they, what we've seen so far is they will try us out first. So like, can I do this? Can I just buy one? It's a slow real estate time of year here too. So there's not a lot of closings happening right now. So they'll be like, let's try one. Right. And then it's like, then the light bulb clicks. Cause it's like customers rave about it. They're like, no, these totes were awesome. And the realtor loves it. We had one realtor say like, I love how hands off the gift was for me because you guys just took care of it. You delivered them. You picked them up. Like I didn't have to do anything. I just gave you the info and you took care of it. How is this going? Are you booked? Are you expanding the business? We started with those 120. We immediately had to buy another 120 because we overbooked. Wow. And so now we're up to almost 400 totes. That's amazing. And the rule is we only buy totes when we oversell. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully we don't oversell on a weekend because we can get the, I can get an order from the warehouse that I mentioned within 24 or 48 hours. Yeah. What do you love about the rental business? What do you hate? I love that we can. We can start small in rentals because my wife has always wanted to do property ownership and like, you know, go that route with being a landlord and renting out property, but that's a substantially larger investment and a lot of risk. What I love about small, small rental business is you can, you can start easily with very little capital and you have an asset that you can rent out again and again. It's not, you're not selling something and then you have to go source more, more goods and whatever. Um, I like that aspect of it where it's, and I like the, I guess, niche nature of doing several small rental businesses as opposed to being like Sunbelt rentals where we just rent everything. Right. Yep.
Speaker 2You could add anything to this. Like you could start renting tables and chairs to weddings, right. Or stuff like that.
Speaker 1Yeah. It's been interesting people, how they use the totes that we didn't foresee. They find uses for them. Like we had, um, a wedding planner call us and say, Hey, I've got a bride who they have the venue, we have to bring all the centerpieces in for the tables and but boxes won't work because they're you know for whatever reason but like yeah i mean it's a great use case we had another guy he moved 180 gallon fish tank because all of his coral and everything had to be like you know in water and his fish obviously so wow this is obviously don't work for that yeah i would think that like
Speaker 2your biggest quote unquote competition for this is just the fact that people don't know this is a thing that is possible right yeah mine doesn't go there if i'm moving yeah awareness marketing
Speaker 1is kind of the because nobody's searching for this the best search term i've kind of latched
Speaker 2on to is like moving boxes let me show you something i just went to google trends i typed in tote rental 2004 to today and look at that oh for those listening it's basically up until 2011 there was zero search volume and then there was a good bit in 2017 and then it is up into the right as of right now like the relative score is 100 out of 100 and some people misunderstand how google trends works this doesn't mean that like oh we've peaked it's going down now it's like no like if 10 more people search tote rental next week then it would next week would be at 100 and then this week would be at 90 right so this is exactly what you want to see in a google trends chart so it's amazing tidal wave is on your side i mean i think people are sick of throwing away amazon boxes it just doesn't feel
Speaker 1right you know yeah and we try to price it so you know you can buy box kits from like home depot for three four hundred bucks for you know they have like a four bedroom box kit and different sizes and things but you know you still have to get rid of those or and you still have to tape all the boxes and put them together we actually had a box open up on us when we moved last so it's just like we we were done with it we just don't want boxes anymore yeah so you started
Speaker 2with buying an ember pull behind rv for yourself for your own use yeah and you finance that through a bank and through your 401k and what is your monthly payment on that give or take it's about 400 a month okay four hundred dollar a month payment and then you came across this facebook group for people renting out rvs and their first bit of advice was don't rent your own so you went on the hunt for a second rv that could you you could use only for business and you found a jayco class c right jayco j flight travel trailer so it's another pull behind okay another pull behind yep and you paid about twenty thousand for that and you finance that one as well okay so what's your payment on the jayco your business so it's about 400 a month yeah okay it's about 600 a month for the ember okay and how long did you have the ember before you decided to start doing this as a business with the jayco so about a year and a half and then you started doing this as a business with you leaned on this facebook group for support on like how to and insurance and all that yep
Speaker 1there's different ways to run this business some people are very hands-off you know you're renting the bear the travel trailer and like it has a mattress we don't give you bedding we don't give you towels just bring your own everything and then there's people that are like no this is airbnb on wheels we like set you up with you know cookware and cutlery and all the linens you need towels toilet paper everything you basically need to go camping
Speaker 2yeah and that's what you did we're the latter yeah yeah smart remove the friction the confusion keep it simple as possible okay so you buy it what do you do next what are your first steps
Speaker 1after buying this thing so uh it was kind of the end of season um that's why we got a decent deal on it which in where i live camping season ends november 1st and so we bought it at the very end of september so the very first step was take pictures put it on the wall and put it on the on Outdoorsy and RV Share and RVEZ, all the marketplace sites, and just see if we get a rental, create Facebook marketplace posts, point people to those. We got one rental in the fall for Halloween weekend. That was our very first customer. And you're in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Speaker 2Yep. How long did it take you to get that first rental? It was within a couple of weeks. Okay. Are you able to share your screen and show us what the Jayco looks like?
Speaker 1Yeah. Let me pull up my website. Did you hire a photographer for the pictures or did you take them yourself? I took these myself with my iPhone. Are those the same pictures you have on the listing today? Yep. So this is from my website. So basically just your kind of every feature. And can you pull this with like a Ford F-150 or do you need something bigger? Yep. Yep. You can pull it with a regular pickup truck or a large SUV. I think this trailer weighs in at about... 4,800 pounds and about 500 pounds of tongue weight. What made you decide on this? So how long is this one? So this is a 26-foot bunkhouse. It was nine. Yep. And it was important for us to do the bunkhouse per recommendations of the group, because a lot of people were like, do people want teardrops? Do they want... Are there a lot of couples camping? And pretty much unanimously, everyone said the best sellers are bunkhouses. Okay.
Speaker 2Yep. Because you don't really pay a lot more for the bunkhouses, but you broaden your market, right? Much more people that might want to rent it. Okay. So that's why you ordered the bunkhouse. What made you decide on like a 20-something footer this year, this price range, et cetera? Did you do much research to land on that? I kind of missed a little bit of the story
Speaker 1in the beginning because before we went out and bought a camper, I actually went on Outdoorsy and found all the travel trailer listings in my... In my area and saw what they were charging. Because it's really important to know what your market can do in Florida or out in the mountains in Colorado, you can get 200 a night. But in the Midwest, Indiana, we don't have amazing national park destinations. You're camping in state parks and festivals and concerts and those sorts of things. So did market research on what listings were out there. And then I actually started messaging people that had listings and people that had multiple campers. Listed was like, hey, how are you doing? Like, what kind of sales are you doing? How, you know, it looks like your calendar is pretty booked up for the summer. Would you mind sharing with me what you're doing in revenue and whatnot? And the feedback I got from a couple owners was like, we reliably do about $5,000 every season per camper. Okay. In rent per camper per season. Okay. Yep. How many people were willing to talk to you about this? Two people. Well, there's the people on the Facebook, right? Once I found the group and there's lots of people in that group, but everyone that I reached out to about this on outdoorsy was, was open. So it was a couple, couple of people. I didn't go
Speaker 2super deep. It was just like, yeah. Whenever I'm doing research on like RV share outdoorsy or Airbnb, I like to run a search for the unit I'm curious about for like this immediate weekend. And then one for a year from now, that way you can see like, all right, there's three available this weekend and there's 30 available next year. Wow. Okay. It's 90%. Occupied right now. The market is 90% occupied and then you can change it. Like, all right, let's look at a class a RV this weekend and next year. All right. There's six this weekend and eight next year. It's like, well, that's not great. You know, nothing's taken. So did you do
Speaker 1any stuff like that? I didn't go super deep. I, I kind of went out on faith. It was just like, yeah, this will work. Yeah. So $5,000 and that would cover basically the payments. And then I better than that or at least you know optimistic me was like they're not even on you know facebook marketplace they're not even on rv share they're not like pushing ads these you know they're just putting it on one platform and it does that so yeah did you know you can build a six-figure
Speaker 2business with only a 10 000 person email list i just talked to the founder of beehive and he told me that there are people with 10 to 15 000 subscribers making more than newsletters that 10 times that size. Here's how. Well, this one design newsletter with around 15,000 subs doesn't just sell ads. They run two-week online cohorts four times a year that generate six figures. And on top of that, they're charging companies $20,000 to $30,000 to get in front of their audience. And that's on one small focus list. This is not about going viral anymore. It's about owning a niche and monetizing it correctly. And Beehive gives you exactly the tools to do just that, like surveys to understand exactly who your readers are, or a built-in recommendation network to grow automatically, paid subscriptions, digital products, sponsorship tools, and you keep 100% of the revenue. You don't need a massive audience to run a successful business. You need the right system. So move your email list over today and try out Beehive with 30% off for 30 days with code Chris. 30, because this might be the simplest, highest leverage business that you can build right now. Just go to Beehive.com slash Chris to learn more. That's B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com slash Chris. And when you say a season, you mean like March to October?
Speaker 1Yeah, our season, we really started booking like mid-June till the end of October. So November 1st is when the state parks all winterize here. So they shut off like the dump stations and that kind of stuff. So your season doesn't even start till June then?
Speaker 2Yeah. Wow. Okay. All right. Now, how long ago did you first start this?
Speaker 1Last summer was our first full summer. So it was the year before that. So it would have been 2024, end of 24.
Speaker 2End of 24. All right. So your first season was the beginning of 25. Yeah. Or the middle of 25. What did you end up doing in revenue that season? So we did about $7,000. Wow. Wow. Okay. And you went into it thinking 5,000 is base case. I think I can beat that. Okay. Yep. What were your payments across that same timeframe? Like total? Yeah. I guess 400 times 12. Yeah. 4,800. Yep. Okay. And then insurance. Yep. How much is insurance?
Speaker 1So insurance is about 30, I want to say $60 a month.
Speaker 2Oh, that's nothing. All right. So you're at 5,200 give or take, and then other random expenses. So you made a profit. Yeah. Effectively.
Speaker 1Slim, but yeah. Approved it. Approved out the concept that it would work for one unit at least.
Speaker 2Yeah. And that's your first season. That's like with very low, what's it called? You don't have any reviews yet. You don't have any track record. You don't have any repeat business yet. Whereas season two, this season, it should look a lot better, right?
Speaker 1Yeah. And in fact, we already have three bookings for July that are repeat customers. Right. All three of them? Yes. Wow. So our very first customer, the one I got that October Halloween, end of that first season, she booked again. So she was our last customer this year, or last year, I guess. And that was a big thing for us was we treat the platforms like they're a lead gen source because they, Outdoorsy's pouring a ton of money into ads. We can't outspend them. They're just everywhere, right? And they take a pretty large cut. They take about 25% of the rental fee. So, and they charge the customer for extra insurance and ancillary fees and all the things. So we built our own site to do our own bookings and the customer saves a ton of money and we make a lot more money because we charge the same nightly rate. We just don't pay the fees. So those repeat
Speaker 2customers are coming back direct. Yeah. So is that 7,000 before or after fees? That's after fees. Oh, nice. So closer to 10%. 10,000 gross. Yeah. Okay. So you're happy with that. And did you have any like stressful moments? Cause I, you know, I've been in this business and I'll never forget. It was spring break. We were at the beach. My RV was rented out. They took it to grain, the grand Canyon, all the way from Dallas. And I'm trying to relax on spring break. And they call me, you know, the grand Canyon gets very cold, even in March. It's very cold. And they said the heat, the heat went out. What do we do? And I'm like, I don't freaking know. Like I'm in Florida. You're in the green Canyon. Like I don't know what to do, man. I didn't know what to do. Like I kind of walked him through a few things and I hung up the phone and I felt bad. I wasn't a jerk to him. Like I felt bad for him, but I also didn't know what to do. Like I'll pay for your hotel. I'm sorry. And I hung up the phone and I looked at my wife in bed and I was like, we're selling that thing. Right. Cause it was like, Hey, it was a class C. And so there's so much stuff that can go wrong for those listening or watching like a classy is a, it's a motor home. It's a vehicle and a house. It's like the two things in the world that break the most together, except it's very rickety. Cause they have to be light, you know? Yeah. But I really feel like if, if this were a business, like just a business RV, and especially if you hit scale, like if you have a few units and you can outsource calls like that, it's a really, really good business. I've been on the record several times saying, I love this business, this industry, which is why we're talking today.
Speaker 1Yeah. The mentors in the group that I joined that Facebook group, some of those are, you know, they have 20 to 50 units. Like they scaled it. They have their own yard and they have staff that turns everything. And for us, it was about having good process and good training and doing very thorough walkthroughs with the customers. A lot of our rentals are actually deliveries because not everybody has an F-150 or a larger vehicle. So we have the benefit of removing that as a risk on a lot of the rentals because I'm the one driving it. So if they have an issue, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Especially from an insurance standpoint. So I can set it up, make sure everything's level, make sure everything's operational before I leave the campsite, which is, you know, game changing. And then occasionally we'll get a call that's like, Hey, we can't get the stove to light. And it's one of those, like, it's a weird, tricky, you know, you got to kind of like push and hold and I have to explain it. But other than that, everything's, you know, knock on wood has been smooth sailing.
Speaker 2Yeah. I know with, with our unit, we went out and used it ourselves first. And I got to know all the quirks of it. Cause they're all, a lot of them are the same and, but they all have something that's just a little bit different. And so after I really learned it just by living in it for a few days, I had my wife hold my phone and I just made an unlisted YouTube video and I just walked people through the unit. Here's the outside. Here's how you do this. You do this. Here's how you flush out the thing to do, do, do, do. And then anytime they book, it's like, watch these, like you must watch these. And if I could go back in time, I would use AI to make like a quiz. Right. And it's like, do not come pick up this unit until you've passed this quiz. You know, honestly, like I need to know that you know what you're doing for both of our safety. Yeah. And a lot of that is spelled
Speaker 1out in the, in the supplemental rental agreement that we got. And it's huge that it spells out all of those things in writing. And they do sign and agree that like, especially when it comes to dumping the tanks and things that go into the waste tanks, that's a big deal. That's where I
Speaker 2see a lot of horror stories in the community. Okay. So theoretically, if this season goes about as well, if not better, then you'll have this thing paid off in a few years, right? You'll own it right. And then your profit will be much, much higher. Do you want to scale this business? Are
Speaker 1you trying to buy more or what's the future look like? We, we want to, the, the issue we ran into was we live in a HOA on a cul-de-sac with no, no driveway space and no property with like roles, like don't have a camper at your house where there's 48 hours. So yeah. Yeah. We're like, it works. Now we need a new house. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of the journey we're on right now is like, do we scale this? Do we, for a while, some friends of ours had a little teardrop camper that we took on as like a consignment. So then we didn't have to buy it. We just split the nightly rate with them.
Speaker 2That's a whole industry in and of itself, right? Just renting out others RVs.
Speaker 1Yeah. So if we did scale it, that would probably have to be the way where it's like, we find people that have campers relatively close that live near us that we could go get it, prep it, the nightly rate, and then we're not out another $20,000.
Speaker 2Well, what's cool about this business is that even though this is your business unit and you have your own on any given night where it's not booked, you can take it out for free, quote unquote for free, right? Like those are just bonus nights. Did you guys take advantage of that at all? Or did you use your other RV for stuff like that?
Speaker 1This camper is solely business for us. Like we don't even, we don't use it at all. The closest thing we've done to using it ourselves was we took our neighbors camping cause they've always wanted to go and they don't have a, a camper. And we're like, well, just we'll take the rental.
Speaker 2Yeah. All right. So if you were to buy another one or when you buy another one, what type of unit? Pull behind, longer, shorter, class A, class B, class C?
Speaker 1We really liked the bunkhouse. It was huge for us to make sure whatever we got doesn't actually have any slide outs, which is a really popular thing that people love cause you have a ton of space inside, but that the number one failing part on an RV is a slide out motor. And it, it increases the risk of water, leaks as well. Water leaks, the motor fails. You can't get the slide out back in when you need to return it.
Speaker 2I also realized like a lot of potential renters don't even know what a slide out is. They don't know what it's called that they don't know what to look for. They don't know to ask for it. So you're paying out the butt for this feature that breaks that leaks and people don't even need it or want it or know that it exists. Right. They don't know what they're missing.
Speaker 1Yeah. And that's another thing. Um, we're always looking for things that are feature light. So like it has an AM FM Bluetooth radio, but that's about like, there's no TVs. There's no, like some people are like, do you provide wifi and dah, dah, dah for your, no, like, cause that's just another thing that can break and we have to support and get that phone call at 3am. So like the basics. Yeah. And like things are trending away from that anyway. Like
Speaker 2a lot of airlines aren't even selling TVs anymore cause people have their phones. Yeah. Okay. So love the business. Would you recommend it to others? I think I would, if you,
Speaker 1if you had some kind of cash to, to end and this end the ability to, to pull it, like you do need a truck or if you're, you know, unless you do a class C or like a sprinter van, you know, what do they call the class B class B. Yeah. If you have like a driving unit, you know, you could probably pull it off, but they're just super expensive. I mean, you get into class B's and they're like $80,000 to start with. Yeah. Yeah. So just for those listening or watching
Speaker 2class A is like a touring bus, right? Like Dave Matthews band, they're like, it's huge. It's massive. It's diesel. You can't park it. I would not recommend it. Those can be hundreds of thousands to even millions of dollars. There's a, there's a world where that's a good business. People do rent those, but like not for the faint of heart. Class B is like your decked out sprinter van, like the nomad lifestyle. If you go to like Moab, Utah or whatever, you're probably renting one of those for a ton. That's a whole industry in and of itself. It thrives out West, especially, um, not so much in like the Southeast. But anywhere there are mountains and those are like you said, those are really expensive, but they rent out for about the same amount as a class C. So when I did this, I did all my research and everything screamed at me, class C motor home, which that's, that's a motor home. That's kind of what, what you're used to seeing. You drive it. It's all one unit. It's nice. Cause the family can walk around. It's just all there. You don't have to separate your vehicle from it. You can even tow a vehicle if you want, but the trade-off is they usually have slide outs. They leak. There's a lot that can go wrong on that thing. Um, and they're not very safe, honestly. And my, my family saw all 50 states. Well, 48 in a class C in 48 days. And then we saw alaska and hawaii we flew there but um it was very reliable 13 000 miles but not super safe and then you have a pull behind like like what you have where you just attach it to the hitch and then you have like a gooseneck pull behind where you need like you need a gooseneck truck like you need what's it called like when it's on the bed of the truck yeah yeah fifth wheel fifth wheel and then you have what they call toy haulers which is like a pull behind but the back third of it is just a big open room to put like side by sides atvs motocross yeah et cetera did i miss any categories is that about it uh teardrops teardrops yeah like the rounded aerodynamic type
Speaker 1airstreams is that a teardrop no airstreams is they're technically just a travel trailer but just a really nice they're a unibody like aircraft grade thing they're they cost 130 000 dollars they're i would totally that's my retirement camper like when we get there someday that's yeah what i'll get but teardrops are great because there's like a couple can take it you know on a road trip sightseeing and just kind of camp along the way or you know what i mean they're just very small and you can pull them with anything they're they're super light yeah and then they have like pop-ups right pop-ups do they make those anymore yeah they do i would probably i was just actually talking the couple that we rented their teardrop they're they're selling it and they're because they had a baby and so they need something bigger and so we're advising them on what to buy and because we want to rent out their next camper and i'm like okay if you get a pop-up get like the the a-frame ones that are hard shell um and not like the canvas because dealing with the canvas is is kind of a nightmare if it rains it gets wet and when you bring it back you have to set it all back up and dry it out and it gets it can get moldy and there's just a ton of issues there yeah well let's move on to your podcast business podcast sure when did you launch that and why okay so we started a youtube channel called my dad's radio and um in the process of that bought a ton of gear for the studio mostly as a hobby project i'm a lifelong musician i had this idea let's create a collective of of like 30 40 people that come together randomly and we record and and we put out videos on youtube and i worked at sweetwater at the time so i i got a really good employee discount so it was a little bit addictive so i just had a bunch of gear i had the studio and so i just opened it up to bands people and i did a lot of stuff with them and i was like oh my god i want to be a part of that and i was like oh my god i want to be a part of that and i was like oh my god i want to be a part of that i would say that's definitely more of an inside hustle territory it does a on a bad month i'll do about two hundred dollars in revenue um but i've done up to like two grand in a month i produced an audiobook for an author um who didn't want to use ai he he was a autobiography he had written about his brother with intellectual and developmental disabilities and he it was from him and you know he wanted to read the book so that was an amazing experience for me and i've been doing a lot of good paying gig so so this is kind of like a passion project you're not trying to make millions
Speaker 2of bucks but you wanted to build this out for yourself anyway so why not monetize it now yep
Speaker 1do you you make money by renting it out per hour i'm trying to figure out what the market will take i'm in a unique town um fort wayne is home to sweetwater and i don't know if you're familiar with sweetwater but they are the largest retail music store in north america so they're directly competing with guitar center okay um so they sell you know the thing our microphones pro audio gear guitars lighting band and orchestra instruments billions of dollar company they employ a sales staff of around 500 people and i say that to say every sales engineer at sweetwater has a recording studio so there's like what 400 direct competitors to me yeah in my town yeah the worst place you could do this yeah and sweetwater itself has a world-class recording studio like on-campus recording studio and i've been doing a lot of this so the slant i'm trying to take is like i don't just do audio i i do video so i've had video production companies in the past i have a lot of the gear and the know-how so if you want to do like live recorded videos band demos for you know booking shows and those sorts of things that's kind of how i'm trying to position this space is like bring your band and we'll do a live recording on video for instagram and youtube and all those things yeah what about renting it out to
Speaker 2podcasters do you think that'd be viable
Speaker 1i think it would we would probably need to do some some decorating just to like make it i guess visually appealing space rather than like a music space right yeah um but i think that's definitely an option do i dare ask how much it costs to build out that studio oh gosh oh no let's say we're sitting at about thirty thousand dollars retail of gear in here i just built out my own studio upstairs and it was about the same yeah so i'm curious because i've heard i've heard you mention the studio upstairs now is that because you want to do more in like real life podcast style things move away from from virtual stuff yeah okay yeah i love those those videos where you are going on site with people and and in their business i think i haven't commented on one of your videos it's like i love this format when you did like the washer rental yeah yeah like this is awesome yeah thanks that was the
Speaker 2most viewed video ever that i posted david is there anything that we that we missed that maybe people could or should know before
Speaker 1getting into any of these businesses i think just you can start low tech you don't have to be fancy about this stuff do some research around what you think you can rent out see if there's other people doing it i mean i did a similar thing like i went on facebook marketplace even um and on a wide area in my region and saw that people were renting out totes and i even i did the same thing i did with rvs i reached out to those people and said hey i see you're renting out totes like how's it going and i've done the same thing with like i found a company called bin it there's an another company i think it's bins on the move out out your way um like blue bins he actually is a moving company as well don't be afraid to reach out to people that are already doing it because you'd be surprised how open and friendly people are and helpful to to help other entrepreneurs in the space and kind of give you a leg up on what you should think about or what you should do just like that facebook group i joined for the rv rentals like full circle same thing like what do i what am i what do i not know what what are the what are the risks what are the nightmare horror stories i'm going to deal with how can i avoid you know those
Speaker 2things that's beautiful thank you david this is awesome i love multi-preneurs such as myself uh if people want to learn more from you where can they find you so i'm on x at david stillson perfect well thanks for coming david all right thanks for having me all right what'd you think please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the kerner office
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