Speaker 1What is your revenue per month on average? $5,500 to $7,500.
Speaker 2Oh, that's beautiful.
Speaker 1And you still have a full-time job? Still have a full-time job. Yep. Very minimal work on my end.
Speaker 2How much total time do you spend on the business? Two to four hours. So you're making $200 plus an hour on this business.
Speaker 1It's pretty risk-free. There's not a whole lot that can go wrong. Can you get financing on these? Absolutely.
Speaker 2So in about five minutes, a guy named Nathan is going to walk through that door and he's flying here from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and he makes thousands of dollars a month in profit working five hours a week doing trailer rentals. 31 years old. He has a full-time job and two kids and his business is almost 100% automated. Very low risk to start. Low cost to start. You can find out if there's demand before you have to launch. There's just a lot to love about the trailer rental business. So I flew Nathan here so we could learn all about it. Let's go. All right. So how long do you have? The auction job?
Speaker 1Coming up on seven years now.
Speaker 2Okay.
Speaker 1Yep. And how long have you been doing the trailer rental business? 15 months now. Same age as my daughter. So we started that like two days after she was born.
Speaker 2Okay. What first gave you the idea to start Ghost?
Speaker 1I have an issue like most young men my age of scrolling Facebook Marketplace and saw a guy listing a trailer rental business for sale locally. On Facebook Marketplace? On Facebook. Yep. And I realized I'd rented in the past a boat from him randomly a couple of years before. So just reached out. He was selling 10 trailers and then his book of business for the last couple years as he was moving a couple hours west. Okay. That's when he just wanted to size down.
Speaker 2Now in a business like that, how much can you actually sell your book of business versus he's just selling the assets?
Speaker 1That's a great question. And I think it depends how much information you have on those customers and he didn't have any email address. It was just a home address and a landline or cell phone. So obviously immediately looking in, you realize it's fairly antiquated. Yeah. Um, he's selling his trailers with a, maybe a little bit of goodwill in there. So yeah, I eventually, I was the only one that was really serious about making an offer on it. So I kind of negotiated to just buy the trailers for what he was saying they were valued at, which was 35,000 trailers. Yeah.
Speaker 2They were older, used trailers, heavily used. Are we talking like dump trailers, flatbeds, box trailers?
Speaker 1A good mix of everything. That was his goal was to try and provide a little broad range of trailers. So there were five enclosed trailers, several open trailers, utility and equipment trailer. The only thing that out of that list you mentioned that wasn't in there was a dump trailer.
Speaker 2Okay. Okay. And this is Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1Yes. How many people live there? In the county, it's 500,000. Okay. No, exactly in the town, but it's a mid-sized town. It's nothing like Philly or here.
Speaker 2And how was he finding customers?
Speaker 1The old school way. Well, I mean, he had a, he did have a website, just a WordPress website with a lot of characters on it and backlinks. So he ranked in the area if you search for trailer rentals. But that was really how he was finding it. Just having people call him.
Speaker 2Google business profile? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Good reviews? Mixed. Okay.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2I mean, he's unsophisticated, it sounds like. He's not, he doesn't have like a CRM, customer relationship management software, or did he?
Speaker 1He, I mean, you might say he did, but it wasn't sophisticated in anything other than he could type in somebody's name and see if they were in there previously. There wasn't anything automated that you could hook up to reach. Okay.
Speaker 2So he had a website, Google business profile. Did he have a lot of reviews or a lot of pictures? He had a lot of reviews. He was doing it for probably 10 years in the area. What would you say his rating was when you bought it?
Speaker 1For, he had two businesses and he separated out the trailers into their own. So they were like a 4.2 star. And then the other rentals were a bit lower than that. Like boat rentals? Yeah, boat and some small equipment. Okay.
Speaker 2But he didn't want to sell that side of the business?
Speaker 1No. And he still kept, he's still doing the trailer rentals just on a smaller scale, two hours
Speaker 2away.
Speaker 3Okay.
Speaker 2Yep. Do you have guys? Do you guys have like a non-compete or anything, or is it just, he's so far away, you're not worried about it?
Speaker 1It was kind of a goodwill offering in the fact that there's no non-compete because he's still doing it. The way I structured the initial purchase, he was asking for $20,000 on top of the trailers for his customer list. And I made a deal with him that I'd just give him a referral fee for any, any previous renter that was on his list or that he referred through his current. Okay. Or through his updates. Or through his updated.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1Business. So that way he would still get a kickback if somebody from my area called him to rent a trailer. So I was giving him, or I still am giving him 35% of the first rental that anybody he refers.
Speaker 2Okay. So when you, so you ended up spending $35,000 on these?
Speaker 1Yep.
Speaker 2Okay. What was he doing in revenue? Like if he were to be able to value the revenues out of the business, how big was that?
Speaker 1They, those 10 trailers averaged over the last two years, about $28,000. A year. A year. Total. All, all 10 of them? Yep. All 10 of them combined. Okay.
Speaker 2Okay. And did he have like good books or was, was he filing taxes on that or?
Speaker 1I hope he was filing taxes.
Speaker 2He didn't ask.
Speaker 1Yeah. The books weren't good. The way I was able to feel comfortable going about that was fairly familiar with how much used items sell for on Marketplace between the auction and just, I've been flipping stuff on Facebook for a while. I figured that the $35,000 just for those trailers. Was the price that I could sell them all for individually if we started it and it flopped.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. And if you really wanted to, you could have pieced together 10 trailers, but this is better than that because what about the phone number? Where does the phone number go?
Speaker 1So he kept his phone number, kept his business name and everything. I just took a customer list from him. And so then he just set up a phone call forwarding service. Okay. To my number if somebody calls in.
Speaker 2So you took over the website, swapped out the phone number with yours or? He still has his website. So you put it in your own business name. Yeah. My own business name. New Google business profile.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Everything on that side was fresh for me. So are you getting anything? Like, do you have any shot of getting leads on day one if you don't do anything or do you kind of have to start from scratch? How do you mean start from scratch? Because like you're not getting calls because he keeps the phone number. Oh, sure. But is there, is he forwarding leads to you? Like, hey, can I rent a trailer? Not there anymore, but let me give you his name.
Speaker 1Yeah. So he is. He is forwarding from day one, which is how I got my first rental. And obviously immediately once we bought the trailers, then I was putting up a Google business profile. I interviewed a couple of different software companies to do the website and back end stuff to start getting SEO traction.
Speaker 2Okay. What did you name the business?
Speaker 1Lenco Trailer Rentals. Lenco. That's what they call it. Lancaster County. Okay. Yep. It's a pretty common, easy to know exactly what we do and where we're served.
Speaker 2Is it lancotrailorrentals.com?
Speaker 1It's lancotrailors.com.
Speaker 2Okay.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2What was his name for it? Crosskeys Rentals. Okay. All right. So are you having to pay him a referral fee when he sends leads your way?
Speaker 1Yep. Yeah. For the first time, somebody rents with me that comes from him, I give him a 35% kickback. Okay. And to date, over 15 months, I think there's been 20, right about 20 referrals. It's totaled 1200 bucks.
Speaker 2Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So it's not that much. No. On 28,000 a year that he was doing, it's got to be mostly proper, right? Because you buy the thing and it's your time. There's no gas. There's, I mean, wear and tear, minimal, I'm guessing. Yep. Insurance.
Speaker 1Yes.
Speaker 2He told me he wasn't even worrying about insurance. It sounds silly, but honestly, it's kind of not, I think. Like if you were to self-insure, because after six months or 12 or 24 months, what you would have paid in insurance would buy another trailer.
Speaker 1Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely right. And in Pennsylvania, the tow vehicles insurance policy has to cover liability for whatever it's pulling. It won't necessarily cover collision, but it has to cover the liability.
Speaker 2So you're saying the vehicle insurance in Pennsylvania has to cover whatever it's towing. That's for Pennsylvania. I don't know if that's every state. So they legally don't have to have insurance.
Speaker 1On the trailer? Yeah.
Speaker 2No. He didn't. Yep. Do you have insurance?
Speaker 1I do.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2How much does that run?
Speaker 1So for... For general liability for the business itself, and then insurance on the trailers, which there's 13 of them right now, it's 3,800 bucks a year. Okay. It's not bad. Yeah. Just under, right around 350 a trailer. Where was he keeping all these? He was keeping them on a property that he owned. It was only seven minutes up the road from my house. And then I ended up renting that old space from him. I guess that would be the other overhead is where to keep these things. Yep.
Speaker 2Yeah. Are you still renting? Are you still renting that space today?
Speaker 1I'm not. No. It wasn't a great setup. It was just a really long, skinny property. So every trailer had to be stacked up behind each other. So I had to also rent a little skid loader to move them all in between rentals. And I could set out a max of three trailers at a time to get picked up before I'd have to go over, pull other trailers out, back them in.
Speaker 2That got a lot faster.
Speaker 1Yeah. It was a great way to start and kind of experiment with the contactless side. where I was still coming to the yard seeing the trailers every now and then meeting a renter okay but since then i've found about a half acre gravel lot that i rent which is just a better setup for contactless
Speaker 2what were you paying him and then what are you paying now so i was paying him 400 bucks a month
Speaker 1okay which was pretty reasonable and now i'm paying 800 okay but it's much better configured yes it's just a flat square half acre gravel lot so there's plenty of access to park the trailers all on one side and then as people come in to pick up or drop off they have plenty of space
Speaker 2to turn around okay yeah so it's much better setup so 300 ish a month for insurance 800 for the lot no employees so we're at 1100 a month whether you rent anything out or not yep before we get to like your current numbers how do like the first three months go what are your action plans you hire a software company you get a website up you make the name then what so there are several different
Speaker 1trailer rental specific crm website builders out there so i interviewed each of them and found a company called rent flow solutions and they more or less handle everything from the website design seo and help to set up automations or they can make it as automated as as you're wanting the business to be okay um so i got with them and that was kind of how the google side started picking up okay because they helped create your google business profile so i i still created that
Speaker 2myself but once i had the domain their automations helped you start getting reviews and replying to
Speaker 1reviews yeah exactly they they did the whole website build for me all i had to do was send them the description and pictures of the trailers and they at least got it showing up on google so
Speaker 2that call started coming in okay do you remember what your first month's revenue was uh the first
Speaker 1month's revenue was 2300 bucks wow okay it's pretty good it covered the expenses which was
Speaker 2my only goal yeah i mean already you're on track to meet what he did the year before because he's doing 28 000 a year that's on track for 4 000 a month oh wow okay so what about your your second month aka your first full month the first full month was right about 4 000 wow so
Speaker 1you're beating him by 50 percent i mean if he's doing yeah 28k yeah so the one thing to consider in pennsylvania at least is it is a little bit more seasonal because okay okay so it's not looking the summer time are the months where it's usually a little bit better and then the open trailers stay pretty slow during the winter months because it's more just if you have good days people use them but if it's selling they don't want an open trailer okay
Speaker 2so how many of those leads that you first got were from him versus from your brand new website google business profile
Speaker 1i wish i had that exact i mean mostly you run roughly right yes 20 leads i want to say that first month we had about 20 rentals on the first total month okay and of those i would say three
Speaker 2to five max were from him oh wow okay so you're averaging like 200 bucks a rental yes yeah how
Speaker 1much per day per trailer on average a good ballpark is probably 90 bucks is the median that i rent for it's anywhere between 50 and 150 trailers and two days on average uh so it depends what kind of trailer they're running if they're running an enclosed trailer they'll average four and a half days if they're renting an open trailer it's one and a half days because they might just need to go pick up a riding one more yeah pretty simple quick move or their car broke down and they're just telling it to the shop okay just a single day couple hour rental yeah whereas a lot of times the enclosed trailers end up being moves or guys taking motorcycles out to sturgis things like that where they're on a trip yeah okay so
Speaker 2in these first few months you were doing everything yourself were you meeting people
Speaker 1on the lot how was that going the first several i met people there just did it manually in person and then i quickly started once the website and some of the automations had started started doing hide a key boxes on the trailers with a lock on them and then when somebody would show up they'd get pick up instructions with where where that key was hidden for their rental so they could come up and pick it up without having to meet me yeah the one downside that i learned pretty quickly of meeting people is like you found out today you're on their time yeah so if they're running late then you're stuck there at the yard for an hour yeah you didn't have to be yeah and you're just like yeah yeah you can walk around kick tires but you can only do that for so long yeah before
Speaker 2yeah twiddling your thumbs so phase one was you meeting people that are doing it manually yep phase two here's a lock box hey here's the code yep let me know if you have any questions what about phase three phase three was
Speaker 1beginning of this year when i got the new yard lease set up all the trailers have their own designated spot they all have locks on them with their own keys and then i've got a big sign kind of message board type thing with lock boxes on them for each trailer they're all numbered and when somebody books on the website or if they call me to book i'll process the card information over the phone then the automated system kicks in and they do the rental agreement right from their phone then it texts them 24 hours before their pickup time the pickup instructions with the lock box number in their trailer so they show up unlock the trailer hook up and go so it's completely automated completely yeah i mean i'll still field calls but that's that's the extent of what i'm doing just one-off questions
Speaker 2yep hey i can't find it is it this one or that one or yeah more it's just people calling in
Speaker 1trying to get a price or see if i have availability before they check the website okay yeah okay so
Speaker 2how much did it cost you to get phase three set up with like the lock boxes and the so then the
Speaker 1majority of the cost is uh 800 bucks to rent the lot okay the lock boxes they're 30 bucks a piece on amazon i spent 350 bucks on uh print shop to make like an official sign that looks good built a little wooden placard overhang board for it to sit on so a couple hundred bucks there each each lock is 65 bucks on the trailers okay and then i have cameras out there but fenced in it's not fenced in it's open but it's not road frontage so you wouldn't see it if your drum pass yeah a lot which is why it's cheaper obviously road frontage would probably bring in more rentals yeah but i just i hadn't found a place that's not easy to find a
Speaker 2gravel lot that's for rent that has good frontage right yeah and that's within my price range for
Speaker 1running out right trailers right you know as a side hustle right okay so four thousand first
Speaker 2full month was the rest of the summer kind of similar ish the next several months were and then
Speaker 1i think through october was good and then the winter months were a little slower they dropped down to the lowest was just over two thousand dollars could be worse they were between two and three thousand dollars kind of paid for itself but definitely a little bit slower yeah but that was also what i was expecting from what i had heard from him so my my only goal at the time was just to cover the 1200 bucks and fix expenses that i knew it was gonna have okay what about any like maintenance repairs flat tires so really with trailers which is the whole reason why i got into it it's there's no engines so there's typically also minimal hydraulics you know a dump trailer will have some hydraulics but it's all minimal so your real maintenance comes from tires and then bearings typically and suspension parts okay past that there's not a whole lot that can go wrong with the trailer unless it's user error obviously yeah do they have to take pictures before and after yeah so the um when they come pick up they're going to have to take pictures get the code they take before pictures it checks the trailer out of our system and then same thing when they're back take after pictures and then we have a i hold a security deposit on their card so then i can verify trailers in same condition it left in once they wrap up okay have you ever
Speaker 2have you ever had any claims like someone bumped into something or i've had damages to the trailers
Speaker 1for sure that's something you have to definitely disconnect yourself with with the trailers which i'm glad i bought the first ones used for that reason because they already had dents and scratches throughout but it's going to happen thankfully typically trailers are pretty sturdy and it's just part of it you know that they're going to get banged up a little bit and as long as it's not major it it's tough to put a trailer out of commission like that the enclosed trailers have a little bit more dents and dings because they're larger but that's what the security
Speaker 2deposit's for so when you do have incidents you just use the security deposit yep yeah always my
Speaker 1goal is to be fair to everybody involved and i always make sure to voice that to the renter i'm not looking to make any money on their damages but i'm also not looking to eat the cost myself
Speaker 2how how much is the deposit and are you always claiming that when you have a damage or do you
Speaker 1just lose sometimes so a good rule of thumb at least that i do for the deposit is two times the daily rate so if it's cheap little trailer that could be 100 bucks or up to 250 i'd you don't go past that and then the vast the vast majority of damages at least since i've been doing it are under that threshold yeah every now and then i had two breakdowns that were larger than that but they were both easy to work out with the renters okay they're cool about it apologetic or yeah i mean at the end of the day they kind of know yeah if if it's more than 250 bucks that's a big enough bump on the trailer that they know they so i'm sure there will be a day where i'll have to eat something but you haven't yet no wow nope so your maintenance costs have effectively
Speaker 2been zero so other than like sorry not maintenance your damages repairs are effectively zero they net even yeah but you are having to spend money to maintain them the bearings yes the tires yeah
Speaker 1how much have you spent on that so my first year that was for the first full year that was eight thousand okay spent on main maintenance and that was also a little higher than normal because i front loaded buying a bunch of extra parts and i work with a mobile mechanic in the area to have him do all the maintenance so that my goal with it was to be get it to where it's as hands-off for me
Speaker 2as possible yeah okay and then do you think that eight thousand a year is like you can expect that
Speaker 1or was that artificially high because they were all used i think i think that's a safe bet yeah going forward i have a couple more trailers now and as rentals increase the maintenance goes up because it's you can do it off of the mileage yeah of the trailers so you know bearings are every twelve thousand miles for example so the more they're getting rented out the more i'm gonna have yeah him in there replacing them how do you keep track of the miles so all the trailers i put a gps on all of them um yeah yeah it's a pretty simple gps it just pings twice a day so there's plenty of different gps's that guys use in the industry some of them ping every five minutes and guys like to sit there and see exactly where they're at but i just need a ballpark of where they're at to track mileage and then obviously that's a worst case scenario if a trailer would happen to get stolen yeah obviously that's the one of the ones that happens no it's not happened and i get that question a fair amount but i'd say it's kind of there's levels of insulation with it where when somebody books on the system they have to upload their driver's license and insurance to the rental agreement form so i already have that on there and they won't get a pickup instructions text with the code until that's done and they're paid okay then once they're on site there's obviously cameras there so their vehicle themselves are on camera yeah all the trailers are locked of course if somebody breaks in breaks one off they can take it but then you're hoping the gps is yeah so what do you pay every
Speaker 2month for like your website and all the software stuff so the website and software is right about 200 bucks a month okay so we're at 1100 for insurance and rent plus 200 for website 1300 what about like your cameras and your gps software
Speaker 1the cameras they're 50 bucks a month there's i have four on there 50 for all four yes okay yeah and the gps software the gps there and up front 150 to buy it and the batteries are good for four years oh okay so nothing ongoing nope all right and then
Speaker 28 000 a year ish for the maintenance which would be what 700 a month 800 right about there 500 times 12 600 like 650 a month it would take so we're like 2000 a month for overhead including
Speaker 1maintenance yep okay yeah right now it's right right between 2 to 2500 okay depending how how much the trailer is yeah okay and then what is your revenue per month on average so now the last month it fluctuates between 5500 to 7500 oh nice okay let's call it 6500 so you're netting 4 000 a
Speaker 2month give or take yep 48 000 a year that's beautiful and you still have a full-time job
Speaker 1still have a full-time job yep i'm i'll be at the yard for maybe two to three hours a week is typically what i should i spend on it right now how much total time do you spend on the business
Speaker 2like because you're not only working on it when you're at the yard right like if you were to add
Speaker 1a week five ten definitely less i think that's where it's closer to two to four hours the main thing that i am doing is just taking calls okay i'll get several a day and if i'm booking somebody on it it might be a 10 minute phone call but the system kind of takes over from there once i've marked them the only things i do i swing by on my way home from work usually two times a week just look over the trailers on there or if somebody drug a light connector something that's easy to quickly swap out i might spend 30 minutes okay
Speaker 2swap them something out while i'm there so five hours a week give or take two and a half to five okay so thousand bucks a week net profit on average it's lumpy thousand bucks a week four or five hours a week so you're making 200 plus an hour on this business after like don't get me wrong yeah set stuff up you have to negotiate with the guy you had to get a lot find a lot make the thing that covers the board to keep people out of the rain there's hours that went into it before but you got it to the point where it's somewhat passive and making you 250 bucks an
Speaker 1hour yep for your yeah a lot of the the time was front loaded just getting systems in place but once they are now it's it's very minimal work on my own how big could it get in lancaster county if you wanted to just go all out that's a good question and i go back and forth on what's the way to grow it without leaving my current job whether that's continuing to add more trailers which there's definitely room to do that and i think it's pretty easy as demand comes in for certain trailers i'll mark down on somebody anytime somebody calls and i don't have the trailer they're asking for i just will have a running list in my phone and then i'll look to add that next or i think honestly you could do a bunch of little transplant locations of 10 to 13 trailers keep the footprint small and just take the exact same repeatable system and put it 30 minutes away that's also something that happened yeah had your mobile mechanic go out there once a week or so yeah the mechanic already already travels so he could just spend a day there a day
Speaker 2in leicester what if you like could only have one trailer to offer what would it be probably
Speaker 1for my area it's going to depend where you're at geographically but a dump trailer okay it was a little bit slower to get started but once people know you have that okay that rents out by far the most on my lot as far as number of rentals but they're averaging one and a half days okay and it's seasonal so that's really heavy summertime junk removal stuff is that what they're using landscape concrete asphalt it's hydraulic right yep what do those cost uh that was 80 300 new wow okay and then i mean that allows you to do a lot of things you can do a lot of things you can do a lot of things you can do a lot of things you can do in the last 10 plus years yep yeah if you keep maintaining it it'll have no problem and what do you rent that one for 95 a day okay do you have
Speaker 2like a metric where it's like uh like 10 percent right like i spent nine grand on this i need to
Speaker 1rent it for your one percent 90 bucks a day you know yeah i i'll base it off of what the other larger companies in the area are doing but a decent rule of thumb is one and a half times the or one and a half percent of the purchase price yeah so if it's a four thousand dollar trailer 60 bucks you could probably do a little bit higher than that on the cheaper trailers but for a ten thousand dollar trailer at least for me that's pretty accurate okay which means in 75 days
Speaker 2of renting it out you get all your money done yep and it's and then you're a profit quote unquote
Speaker 1pure profit from that on out it is and you still you own the asset yeah that you could go and sell for 20 to max 40 percent less than you paid for it they really don't devalue very fast can you get financing on these absolutely yeah do you i took out a key lock for the initial really purchase yeah to bar it against
Speaker 2your house yep okay was that difficult no no it was it was something i yeah it was i think the
Speaker 1initial rate was two and a half percent for their first nine months yeah and then it jumped up to six and a half okay okay
Speaker 2that's how you bought the business so yep you didn't really have the cash or if you did you didn't want to use it so you could bar it against your house when you get these financed do you usually finance them through like the dealership you buy it from or through a bank or what so i
Speaker 1only used the key lock for the initial ones when i financed and then since then i've replaced all the old trailers that we had initially bought they've just been from the money and in the okay
Speaker 2from the business yeah yeah so you've replaced all of the original first 10
Speaker 1i have one little cheap trailer that's still original that's in good shape that i haven't
Speaker 2replaced but all the other nine okay yep so dump trailers you're in your area if you had to pick
Speaker 1one it would be that what about number two and three probably a car hauler kind of similar an open trailer so when it's bad weather in the winter it's not gonna move up north um but here it would move year round that would that's a very often rented trailer and then an enclosed trailer After that, preferably for me, yeah, like a 20. or 24 foot enclosed trailer those for whatever reason be great what are people using those for moving moving hauling you can haul cars in them if you want them enclosed yeah that's more or less yeah the extent of it but a lot of times they're on trips people will take them on vacations or motorcycle guys love to rent a big enclosed trailer and put three or four bikes in there for them and their friends to transport them to daytona or yeah south dakota and then they'll
Speaker 2drive them while they're out there okay have you um do you have issues with people backing it in like reparking it or pulling it out or is the type of person renting a trailer the type of person
Speaker 1that kind of knows how to pull a trailer typically they know how to pull a trailer but there's definitely people that don't in that instance i'm thankful now that our yard is big enough that you can turn it around and if worse comes to worse and somebody you know you're not going to be able to pull it out of the trailer you're going to have to pull it out of the trailer you're going to have to pull it out of the trailer you're going to have to pull it out of the trailer you're going to have to pull it out of the trailer you're going to have to pull it i had somebody call me saying like i can't do this there's no way yeah so in that instance i just had them pulled to the side yeah to where it's not yeah just drop it there i'll i'll get it next time i'm over there and as long as there's it's out of the way for people to turn around yeah or if i'm worried enough on the phone talking with them just feeling it out you can kind of tell if if somebody's asking for a big enclosed trailer and they're pulling it and you know saying they're going to pull it in a car um and they've never towed before that's kind of an easy one to weed out over the phone
Speaker 2are you do you want to grow more by buying more trailers or by renting out other things or trailers
Speaker 1in other cities that was going to be a question that i would ask you sure my initial thought was to do transplant locations since i already travel through a lot of northeast pa it would be easy for me to work them into my roots during the week to just check here and there and take the same systems that we're already doing just put it to another geographic location or obviously once you start in the rental game you can expand into equipment is a big sector and it's kind of endless as to the size that you could go or i experimented with a golf cart this summer with renting i know yeah interesting yep i know guys that do rvs or at least the pull behind campers so there's plenty to expand just a single location but those expansion opportunities if you're going past just the regular trailers how i have them set up right now all require typically time yeah there's more moving parts like they break more yep and those people for will often want them delivered yeah campers golf carts which is what i learned testing that out this summer they most 95 percent of the people that are inquiring about them just want them dropped off and at least right now that's not the game that i want to be in yeah but i would consider it for next year knowing that now to hire a younger guy to work several hours a week on the side for me yeah to run those pick those up what do people rent golf carts for from what i've seen it's usually between 100 to 200 bucks a day but what's the oh what's the use yeah events campgrounds
Speaker 2okay like you're you're an event organizer and you're coming to the area for an event
Speaker 1and you need a way to get around the event that or even just weddings things that are happening a lot of that's that industry is happening outside on farms nowadays so people will rent them for those type of types of events and then also a lot of inquiries come from people that are camping nearby in the area want a golf cart for the week while they're yeah in town okay yeah do you ever rent on facebook marketplace yeah so google makes up about 55 percent of where the leads come and then facebook for the last 15 months is about 14 okay well where's everything else just organic organic word of mouth referrals or repeat customers and then there's a couple specific trailer rental platforms that you can post your own trailers on you don't even have to have a business you can do it kind of with their rental agreements if you want to test it out if you have
Speaker 2something sitting around okay i mean i'd be curious to see what would happen if you posted a bunch of different things on facebook marketplace just to see what would happen see what the demand is like as if you already had it yep skid steer for rent 450 a day i've rented the skid steer on facebook marketplace i've rented the next video on facebook marketplace that's where i think to get them but like you gotta drop it off pick it up usually yeah and you gotta fill up with gas how many things can go wrong on that yeah and you need to at least give
Speaker 1the person running it a quick tutorial on how to use it yeah and at least for where i'm at right now that's not something that i wanted to do yeah during the day i would have to find an operator if i wanted to expand into that
Speaker 2yeah because it's like on one hand if you were to open multiple locations then you could say well that's a whole different business but on the other hand if you were to stay in that one location and put a boat on there or an rv i think that's more of a different business than just adding another location would be 100 because there how many other things can you rent out that don't have moving parts they're kind of hard to find there's not not many so if i were you based on all the facts you just told me you have such a system dial then i would just open a new law or just see what i could do to get more people to my current law what percentage of the space are you taking up there probably 50 so
Speaker 1there's still room there and i because i'm a habitual buyer and seller of things i've bought a bunch of trailers this summer and i'll i'll post them there or have them on the loft for rent for two three months just to test yeah and then sell it okay after so it could be if you filled it up
Speaker 2at your same occupancy your same volume it could be a hundred thousand dollars of profit from that one half acre lot yeah you could find a way to do that yeah for sure yeah if i were you i would get to that like as soon as possible and then find the next best city you know in your area and you probably didn't even do any like competitive research i'm guessing like when you bought this
Speaker 1like i looked around uh for sure and just saw what what anybody running trailers around the area was doing how many reviews they had what their kind of setup looked like and i was like oh my god i'm and nobody was doing contact lists and at least i'm obviously a little on the younger side still where i know everybody my age and younger would prefer that type of method grab and go it's on your own time so i just thought it was a missed opportunity yeah there um what i was wondering
Speaker 2is like do you have any bearing on in lancaster you know there's this many total trailers for rent in the market against this population versus a city how many trailers are there half hour down the road has this many trailers like do you know if the supply and demand of trailers in your market is high or low compared to other markets i don't have an idea there because you might learn that the average market has half as much competition or twice as much yeah so you might be like dude this is easy mode i'm gonna go an hour down the road and you're that's like average competition and you do half as well yeah or you might learn man i'm playing this on hard mode you go a half hour down the road and it's just it explodes because that's more of a normal market yeah i'd be curious to know that like you could just scrape every trailer into a place divided by the population and assume that like the demographics are similar so they might not be like if the one city has an average income of forty thousand the other one has eighty thousand it could be totally different so i would find sister cities of lancaster that have comparable population sizes and comparable demographics and then try to get a bearing for not just how many competitors but how many total trailers are there for rent in that area just by calling up looking at the website all right it looks like you know they have this many spots four gone right now yeah and get like a metric of like person per trailer and try to get like a baseline all right here's eight cities all in pennsylvania or pennsylvania ohio they're all in like sixty thousand average income and you know it's like four thousand residents per trailer wow this one's only this one's nine thousand residents for trailer i need to go there next it's a little out of the way but twice i'm twice as likely to have success there yeah yeah that makes sense yeah yeah that makes sense yeah that makes sense that's a good point yeah i mean you could do that research in an hour yeah okay so four thousand a month have you ever done any businesses before this or is like your first this your first
Speaker 1so this was the first like official llc we set up i've have a habit of not staying still so i mean i've flipped stuff for a while i managed an office location for a company for a period of time sold knives so how were you at that pretty good yeah i did it full-time for four years wow uh right legit through high school and then right after yeah so that's kind of working for yourself yeah but no no like running a
Speaker 2business yeah but i need technical what advice would you give to people that want to start this
Speaker 1business so it's pretty risk-free in the fact that you can go out and buy a used trailer for a cheap price if you look long enough and you can throw it up on facebook and even just these other rental software platforms out there that don't charge anything up front they just take a commission off of what are the names of those neighbors trailer rentals big rentals there's big loads that's what's top of mind so three websites there plus facebook marketplace you're saying you can test yeah test the market with all those without spending any money on a website on google yeah and they'll they'll send you their leads yeah um i mean this sounds
Speaker 2maybe sounds a little untraditional but if you really wanted to launch this without spending a couple grand on a trailer you could list a trailer for rent that you could rent right yeah like let's say there's a box trailer for 90 bucks a day you go to neighbor and all those three websites you you list a box trailer for 90 bucks a day you're not trying to make money right and just see how it goes go pick up that one drop it off like you're breaking even you're losing a little money but it's like you know what actually i don't like this at all i'm glad i didn't spend nine grand on a trailer or you know what this is kind of fun and if i own that trailer i'd actually be making 90 bucks and not just giving it right back to you know what i'm saying like yeah i just like
Speaker 1to think of ways that you can completely de-risk yeah i think definitely posting it on on facebook um is an easy way to just check some ballpark demand in your area one just post something get a stock image of a trailer and post just see how many people are reaching out to you on that and even just see take a look at what other people are doing because there's going to be other people posting their own trailers on facebook for rent it's fairly common but of it being fairly common not a lot of people i feel like take it very seriously yeah and just test it with one trailer on the side right haphazard for a couple months and then move on yeah okay do you boost your facebook marketplace listings i've done it just a little bit i mean total over the past 15 months spent 100 bucks so i i really don't anymore and it sounds like you don't need to no and i don't do any paid ads on google okay it's just all kind of organic okay any other tips if you want to take it seriously get out in your local community and just let people know yeah that you're renting trailers work with other businesses tell them you'll set them up on like a little business program where they get a 10 discount if they rent for anytime they rent for three days and you'll make their booking super easy they can just text you you know something simple like that if you just have a dump trailer reach out to the landscaping company somebody who might need to use that several times throughout the summer and typically once somebody rents from you once they're in the door they're going to use you again yeah so they're pretty likely to repeat beautiful where can people find you or your business so you can find me on twitter or x that's going to have to be linked in the show notes no it's fine we'll link it i don't know what it is offhand i put together a free just basic starter guide that you can go online and download at trailer rental dot guide okay put in your email and i'll send that to you i've just been compiling what i've been learning on the fly for the past 15 months but that's enough to get somebody to their first trailer and renting it or if you have a direct question you can email me nathan at lankotrailers.com
Speaker 2beautiful thank you nathan thank you hey guys if you're still listening to this it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your airpods out you're still mowing the lawn you're still driving what have you if you're still here with me i would really really love to hear from you love and appreciate a five-star review on spotify apple or wherever you get your podcast it would mean a lot if you want to go the extra mile share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business it would mean a ton hope you have the best day of your life today
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