A thousand bucks a month renting out plastic bins? What's up Nick Loper here? Welcome to The Side Hustle Show. It's the entrepreneurship podcast you can actually apply. We've got a fun case study for you today. Under the category of Buy and Something Once and Get and Pay for it, over and over again, a creative rental business for the last 10 years my guest has been renting out moving boxes. Relatively low startup cost, steady and maybe even increasing demand in just a few hours to week that it takes to run on the side.
From his day job, from howboxrental.com Gary Graywell. Welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Thanks Nick. Thanks for having me here today. You bet. Stick around in this one. How Gary came up with this random idea? How he gets customers? And how he handles the storage and delivery logistics for this physical inventory business. Now you know I love a fun rental side hustle, fun rental business. And boxes certainly aren't the only thing that you can rent out for a profit, which is why I put together a list of 25 other.
And conventional things that you can make money renting out. That is yours for free to download at the show notes for this episode at side hustle nation.com slash Gary or you can just follow the link in the episode description and I'll get you over there.
Gary, how'd you come up with this idea? This was a pretty random one. Basically like I was in college UCLA and I think it was move in day for fall quarter. There's just tons and tons of boxes. It was piles and piles and piles of boxes everywhere. And I was like, man, that's pretty unsightly. Like I've always been very sustainability focused. You know, I thought, well, there's got to be.
Something better than this. And so I just typed in in Google like rent moving boxes. And I found there was a company in Canada called Frog Box. And I thought that was such a cool idea. You just basically get boxes delivered to you. And then there these plastic crates basically with the lids attached. And then you pack them, you move. And somebody comes and takes them away. I was like, what a great idea. Why don't I start something like this? Because there's nothing like that where I could find it during that time.
Okay. So somebody was doing it in Canada Frog Box. And instead of being discouraged to what you know is was sometimes you might reaction like, I'll come up with this great business idea. Of course, Google it. And then somebody else is already doing that. Like, well, back to the drawing board. Like, no, no, well, maybe in this case, they're doing it in a separate area and say, okay, I could bring this idea to California.
Yeah, that's that's the thing is like these kinds of businesses. It's like, it's just like a coffee shop. Like if you go to this really cool shop or restaurant and there's nothing like that where you love you can duplicate it. You can make it your own. Now if it was like if I was selling these boxes and I was, I'm just going to sell these boxes. Well, I probably would be out of business because there's much larger companies doing that who can take on smaller margins and have greater exposure.
And it becomes a commodity type of thing. Yeah, yeah, it's very localized right like they're not going to deliver boxes to your door from Canada to California. And so this was something that you know my hometown in Sacramento, California. There is no company that does what we do. Even today, I don't know if any that's their primary line of business. Now it has caught on some movers are like offering this to their customers. But we are the primary offering here.
We don't want to highlight to even if there is somebody else doing it. There's room for more than one sushi restaurant in town. There's, you know, if you have a decent population, there's there's a little room for healthy competition and you can think about other ways to differentiate yourself aside from just the product.
But in this case, it was somewhat of a of a blue ocean. But then the next question is like, is there any demand for this? Like did, did moving customers know that this was an option? Is there a little like market education that has to happen? You know, Nick, even today after 10 years in business, I still get calls and emails like, why haven't I heard from you guys before? I didn't even know this existed.
Obviously, we could do a little bit of a better job, I guess, of publicity. And this just goes into the fact that, you know, it is a side gig. I contribute maybe three hours a week to it probably could do more. But we have a consistent stream of customers. And we're at this point, we have the biggest groups that come to us biggest clients is return clients and people finding us from referrals and Google.
So, unfortunately, our Google searches working well, they search rent moving boxes in Sacramento or any of the outlying suburbs, they're probably going to find us. We're on that first page. And we have relationships with a lot of interior designers and organizing companies out here. So that's kind of like our niche is if they're working with a client who wants to redo their kitchen or have an organizer whole house.
Well, they got to pack it up because they have to redo it. And they like to use our boxes because they're eco friendly, they're ergonomic, they're useful, and they can stay on site for a couple of weeks. So what was the first move here? So you Google rent moving boxes, you find this competitor in Canada for some level of validation. And then you just go to Home Depot and order up a bunch of those, like I'm picturing like the giant tupperware bin type of things.
Yeah, it's funny you say that because that's exactly the first thing that I did is I went to I think it was low and they have like these big black, you know, like people store their Christmas decorations in their garage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, our addicts filled with these things. Yeah, so it's like I thought that's what you should use. So then I know where else to buy them. I was just like, oh, I'm just going to start this business. Why not? I was 23 years old.
And so I bought like five and I was like, well, it's kind of a lot of money. I should do a different business. And then I kind of himdenhod for a couple of weeks on it. I returned them. And I googled like I think I reached out to a competitor in Texas. It's like, where do you guys get your boxes? And they're like, oh, there's this company in Florida and Nevada called reusable transport packaging.
They're one of the companies that sell. They're kind of like a Uline where they sell all kinds of various business products like a forklifts and dollies and trays and tape and all kinds of stuff. So these companies sell boxes like this in a bulk inventory. You can't just buy one or two. You can't buy 50, 100, 500 boxes. So when I saw that, I was like, okay, I'm going to go in with both feet and make the investment and see what happens.
And do you remember how much it was or how many boxes you got? Yeah, I initially ordered I think 50 and it was close to $2,000 would delivery. Yeah, you can't do this with just five. Like people got more than five boxes worth of stuff. Like it's got to be, you've got to have enough to hold a house or apartments worth of belongings.
Right. And I quickly found that out is that clients would consistently ask, especially after we got established after a couple of years, they would want a hundred boxes. And that's especially true for when we started to do office moves. So a lot of law firms or what not want to move offices, they want a hundred boxes.
And so that's when we had to start ordering more. And then the nice thing too is these boxes last over a hundred moves. Right. So we're not ordering new boxes every month or even every year. It's maybe every couple of years to refresh our inventory. Okay. So you're a couple grand into it. You got 50 boxes. Where do you put them? Like is there room in your garage for this stuff?
No, I wish there initially there was a first month was there. I then got a storage unit so that I could because you know sometimes people want to pick up the boxes. I don't want people coming to my house and picking up boxes. You know, sure.
And I think it was like $80 a month to rent a storage unit for my boxes. And then after that when we started to get a little busier, I actually had moved to Denver. And I said, okay, well, I don't want to start on the business, but I want to move to Denver for this job. So I reached out to a moving company. And this is one of the craziest things I've ever done. He's one of the sky. He owns a moving company out here. He's one of the top rated movers in Sacramento.
And I explained that he had referred some customers to me and I had reached out to him like, hey, tell your customers about our boxes. And as I have this crazy idea, you want to go into business together. Everyone that you bring to me and you take care of the delivery, all hand of the clients. And we'll share the revenue.
And I went into business with somebody I'd spoken on the phone, but I'd never actually met which I thought was a crazy thing anybody could do. But I did it. And we continue to grow. This solves your logistics problem of having to meet customers at the place, like maybe the moving company can keep them at their facility. They can handle that delivery since they're going to be moving those belongings anyways.
Yeah. And that's exactly what happened. They moved all the boxes to their warehouse area. And so that basically took care of rent and reduced our expenses. And so when they would have a move, they would just take our boxes with their moving truck, deliver them and then go do another move. And so it's very strategic kind of how they do it. But some customers do still pick them up.
Do you remember your first booking and how that person found you as a still trying to get on moving companies preferred vendor list? Or was it early Google rankings, talked to me about the first couple of bookings we're like, I'm slowly going to start to recoup this initial startup cost. Yeah. So it's funny enough. Our website initially was very clunky. I had one of our interns at the first job I was at.
I paid them 50 bucks to make our website. So there wasn't a way to book it like there is now. And so the first I actually started off marketing on Craigslist. So on Craigslist, there's a section where it says services offered, right? Or like, you know, you need some help with something. So I put on their rent moving boxes, right? Super super sketchy. But I said, well, it's free. There's no harm in this because I don't have to pay a search engine on to put up Facebook ads or anything like that.
You know, 10 years ago Craigslist was a different landscape that it is today. Right. So it was a different era of the internet. Yeah. It was, right? I mean, that's where you, I mean, I found a tennis partner on their roommates. I sold my car like it's not. It was used much more than I feel like then it is now. Yeah. And maybe today you could do a similar tactic on Facebook marketplace because that's where I went to look for moving boxes for our recent move. Right.
And people are giving them away. Like, okay, we'll go pick these up. So you're exactly right, right? Like people give stuff away. It's easier. It's more community feel you have a more trustworthy nest there. But back then I just had no inhibition. I was like, yeah, I'll just go on and I couldn't believe that we got an email from somebody that was like, yeah, I want to rent these. I want to try these out.
And it was a woman living in an apartment, like a senior apartment in a not so great part of town. And so I took this intern with me. We rented a truck from Home Depot, like those $19 per hour trucks because I don't know what else to do. And one of the boxes actually flew out on the freeway. So we learned that we need to close the lords and tie them down. Who would have thought they could fly out?
And so we grabbed that, got back on track, and we went to this woman and delivered the boxes and was like, yeah, so we'll be back in a week to pick them back up. Okay. And so she was just doing an in town move. Yeah. She was moving from a one bedroom apartment from the northern part of town to a one bedroom apartment on the southern to the southern part of town.
So it was just her and her cat. And she was a great fan. And we learned the one thing about the negative about this business, Nick, is that think about it. You're renting stuff out. What it's what means you get it back. Hopefully. So the things you have to look out for is, are you getting all your boxes back? Are they damaged? Yeah. Are they clean like they should be sometimes you'll find like pat hair, human hair, sprinkles, all kinds of stuff in the box after people have done moving.
And you have to make sure that it's clean and sanitized for the next customer. So not so luxurious part of this business. No, that makes sense. More with Gary in just a moment, including how he priced the rental service, the pitch for his partnership deal in other interesting ways he's connecting with customers right after this. Being an entrepreneur and being able to work remotely definitely has its perks.
I've recorded podcasts everywhere from Vietnam to Italy, drafted newsletters from Japan, hosted mastermind meetings from Spain and up in the middle of the night to get to US business hours and outlined courses in Mexico. The common thread of all of these trips though is Airbnb. We love being able to get exactly what we're looking for in a place to stay and have a more local experience than staying in some giant hotel chain.
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And what's interesting is a lot of them started with almost that exact strategy, running their place or even a spare room while they're at a town taking inspiration from that. You might have an Airbnb right under your nose. In fact, your home might be worth more than you think. You can find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host that's Airbnb.com slash host to find out how much your home is worth.
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Just go to indeed.com slash side hustle show right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com slash side hustle show terms and conditions apply need to hire. You need indeed. What does it cost to rent these things out? How do you figure out pricing? So that's where the competition really helps. Right? Is that you look at what other people are charging other cities.
And so there's companies now in Southern California, Bay Area, Texas, Arizona, even Colorado. And so you see what they're charging. And so what we did is basically just kind of test out the market. Right? So we wanted to have a higher margin to make up for the lower volume. And so we started to increase our prices. And we would still get people that would they wouldn't say there's maybe few people per year. They're like, you know, that's a lot of money.
$400 to rent boxes. I don't know if I want to do that. But most people really don't bat an eye because they see that if I'm paying movers, $2,000 or $3,000 to pack up and move my house, you know, I don't have to go because they're going to charge too to bring you boxes and tape them up and build them up and dispose of them and everything. And so we figured out pricing just from trial and error and also just looking at what the competition nationally was charging.
Okay. So on the pricing page at calboxernell.com, it looks like it's kind of a combination of how many do you need and how long do you need that? Right. So like 50 boxes for a week, it gives you plenty of time to pack everything up, move it across town. And you got to do local moves because if you move it to Seattle, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I need my boxes back.
So it's got to be in town moves. So your moving company partner can bring them back to headquarters or you can go pick them up and take them back to the storage unit. Yep, that's exactly right. And we do quite actually we've had a few people that moved. Sacrament has been a pot spot for people from the barrier to move to because it's much cheaper, especially after the pandemic.
So we actually had people that said, I want to rent your boxes and I'll drop them off to you once I move to the barrier, once I move to Sacramento. So if they move to Sacramento, they would drive here, pick up our boxes, go home, pack. And once they move here, we'd either pick them up or they drop them back off. I will say it's just a culture, I guess, people are big into sustainability in different parts of the country and want that zero waste. And there's that brand awareness out there.
There's a great company in the barrier called Zipgo. They do what we do. They rent out these boxes. And sometimes they're like, yeah, I wish we could like give our boxes to somebody and they move up there and then you take them and we someone will get them back. So there is a logistical issue, obviously, if you rent them out. So long distance moves are not our strong suit, but everything else is.
Got it. Okay. And then if somebody is sitting on these, maybe it's a corporate reload and they need to go into storage for a minute, I guess you're charging them every week so you're still making money on that inventory, but it kind of limits the booking request that come in to say, we'll shoot that inventory is tied up right now.
Yeah, we've had that we've had and especially it's the corporate moves and those those renovation projects is they're like, okay, we'll have it. We want to rent it for two weeks, two weeks turns into three weeks to four weeks. We've had a customer that rented it for almost two months. And yeah, it does tie up the inventory, but from what I see it as they're paying, we could have had a customer that week we could have not. And if we do, yeah, I do have to say, really sorry, we're booked up.
And that creates a wow, there's a there's a it's like kind of that wait list phenomena like, oh, I want to even more now. So maybe I mean, I've had people that honestly they've delayed their move date or delayed their escrow or closing their their lease on their apartment because like all wait till you're ready. I mean, that's like music to any business owners years, right? Yeah, is you have to turn away a customer, but you're creating that scarcity effect in an inadvertently, right?
But you're still creating it. And now they want to come back and like, they'll change themselves to work with you. Yeah, the inventory is making money. So it's fine. How many boxes do you have now? Close to a thousand. Oh my God. Okay. That's what I expected. Yeah, because like, I mean, most rentals are like a hundred to 200 boxes. And sometimes we have two or three at a time.
Okay. So you got plenty you got plenty of capacity. Yeah. And it's also a lot cheaper to order a lot at once so that you're not paying additional shipping and logistic fees. And also if some boxes break or whatever, like you have the rest of that. Yeah, it makes sense. I got to be able to fill fill that demand. Wow. Okay. So starting out marketing on Craigslist, you know, renting, renting the pickup truck from Hope Depot to deliver these things.
And then eventually it sounds like your move, you know, even though this is a hands-on local based business, you're moving several states away halfway across the country to Colorado. And yet the business is still able to operate thanks to this moving company partnership. Can you play that card with multiple different moving companies?
Like you sprinkle that inventory around to like to cast a wide net here. What's what's the play? You know, the funny thing is like when we were new and even even once we were like a couple years in the business, moving companies did not like us. And the reason is a lot of moving companies already want to sell boxes to their customers cardboard box. Yeah. Right. So in essence, if we were partnering with them, we're drawing their attention away. We're taking revenue from them.
The way I approached it with them was like, it's not, you know, obviously you can present the choice. But if they want to rent, obviously it's going to be financially lucrative to you because you're helping them get what they want, right? Giving your customers options is always a good idea. But that it wouldn't really be logistically possible because I mean, to coordinate with several different people, I mean, a one person can't can't do all that.
And I honestly think that our service radius is a pretty good amount. It's about 25 miles in Sacramento. And we still service outline area. We just charge additional for delivery. So we still are able to do that and Steve, my business partner is just an incredible human who is very flexible. He's on top of things and he's the only person I can really trust to do it.
What was the pitch was like, well, we'll split revenue 50 50 will. It sounds like because after a few of these my the entrepreneurial spidey sense has got to go off and be like, well, maybe I should just buy my own boxes. If I fly my share of revenue with this guy, I'll do it all the work. Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, and I thought of that too, but I said, do you want to buy the company from me?
He's like, yeah, you know, I want to get it. I want to get out of the moving business. And he's been saying this for a while. So he's like, no, I don't, I don't want to, you know, really do that. And he doesn't want, I guess he just really doesn't want the hassle of doing it. But to be honest, that's another thing somebody could have done. I think there was another company actually in Sacramento. There was two. One was called Ubox, I think. They went out of business.
And so it's just a matter of like people think it's a great. You know, they see it in concept. Oh, he's doing I can just do it's a simple concept, but there's an execution involved. And also I have very low overhead. So it's like once you buy the boxes and the arrangement that we have is that, you know, I pay hosting for the website. I pay for splitting the revenue, cleaning the boxes, delivery, all of that comes through only when we have a client.
But if I don't have a customer for a whole month or two months, I'm not paying anything. There's no expenses other than the website. There's no utilities, there's no rent, there's no employees, there's nothing. So we can withstand dry spells. Got it, got it. If you get a booking request that is independent of the moving company partner, to see still have to go and deliver those boxes.
Yeah, our delivery guy does everything, whether they come through that lead source, any lead source. So most of our leads are coming from Google referrals, previous customers and interior remodeling specialists. Okay. Yeah, there's when you start kind of listing these off, you know, I think of just, you know, all my leases up moving or my changed jobs. So I'm moving to a different area. But there's a lot of different occasions where you might need to pack up stuff.
I guess we did it last year with the kitchen remodel. I guess we got to move everything out. You know, at a site, oh gosh, there's a lot of stuff here. And so all these different occasions where people might be in the market for something like this and kind of looking for those strategic partnerships. I love the interior designer angle. That's one I never would have thought of. But that makes sense.
Yeah, and we kind of fell into it by accident. We had somebody reach out to us saying, oh, I didn't even know another one that was like, I don't know you guys existed. Why didn't I know about you before?
And she introduced us. There's apparently there's like meetups of interior designers. And there's like, there's like these conventions for like organizers, which I would never have imagined. And they have a lot of business. A lot of people have big homes and discussion income. And they want to hire these people to make their pantries, Instagram worthy. And you know, what happens is that then translates into their office needs work. This needs work. Their kids, new needs work. So whether they move remodel, get a design work done.
Get any renovations done. And we also do a lot of retail stores now, which just was from accident. There was a store that sold auto parts and their mom and pop stores showed auto parts and machinery. And they were getting their floors re done. So they had to pack up everything off of their shelves and store it for two weeks while the floor is got done. So they wanted our boxes because they thought the cardboard, everything's going to collapse. It's going to tear. It's not strong enough.
And you know, so there's just so much opportunity for using these boxes. That's not just for somebody moving from one house to another house. Yeah. And did they find you through the website? They did. Okay. Was there anything specific that you did to help it in terms of local SEO ranking? I honestly just googled like how to improve your search rankings. And I use Wix, which I guess wasn't very recommended, but it was cheap at the time and then a package deal.
And so I just, you know, would put keywords on our homepage and other pages and connect our socials, one business owner gave me a suggestion to you should allow people to directly have a booking request on your website rather than sending them email or calling. Yeah. Just put some, you know, form in there. How many boxes do you want when you want it all of that and send it to you and that's been heavily utilized as well.
So I'm really not sure what it is. I'm grateful for it. But you know, Wix too also has like an SEO checklist like did you do this? Did you do this? Do this? Do that? So I've been working on that. I haven't hired anybody to do any of our website or technical stuff. Maybe I should, but it's been working so far. So far so good. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yeah. 10 years ago, I would have been really hesitant to recommend Wix from an SEO standpoint.
Because a lot of their stuff was kind of dynamically loaded, hidden behind JavaScript in a lot of ways. Right. They haven't proved quite a bit. And if I virtue of being one of the few players in town, it sounds like, hey, look, you know, eventually you're going to trickle to the top of Google, just by virtue of word amount and, you know, the on page factors that you do have in place here where it says, you know, if you need moving boxes in Sacramento and you want to rent them here, we are.
Yeah. Some of it is luck. Some of it is just doing what you can to be proactive about making sure you have the right content on your website. Now, how about the interior design? Like it doesn't sound like you went to this conference. But it sounds like you were proactive about building those relationships too. Yeah. It was once this first woman had reached out to us. She was really nice. And she did like, and we didn't have Instagram until about two years ago. We just had a Facebook page.
Again, I've never done any advertising really. And she's like, you need to get Instagram so I can put you guys on my story. So we created an Instagram page. And she did. And that was great. She's like, look at these boxes. Look how great they are. They're so easy, eco friendly. And she did a little spin on the on the dolly and and her friends found they're like, wow, where are these? Who's the owner? Where do I find them? So that's the power of the community here is that it's it's just like they trust each other. They lean on each other, even though they're in competition. Right. They don't want somebody to be able to do that. And they're like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to be like, I'm going to
be doing something that their clients are think are really cool. And they don't offer it. Or they don't know anything about it. So we don't do a lot of moves with them, but we do a lot of like I said, organizing projects. All right. This is cow box rental on Instagram. We'll link that up. We'll go check it out. What kind of risks are associated with this business? I mean, it's I think it seems pretty straightforward. Like it's a it's a plastic box. But I don't know. You find any risk or liability here that people should be aware of? Yeah, it's a couple of things. I mean, one of the things that we did was I mean,
my first customer, we didn't have a rental agreement, right? So technically, she could have just like kept the boxes or destroyed them. And I would have no recourse. She's like, I don't have any boxes. What are you talking about? But fortunately, she didn't do that. So it was after that. I was like, you know what? We should probably have something more than email to make sure customers are on the hook for this. So I went to I think I went to the library and I looked up like, you know, those Nolo books and they have like how to write a contract. So I just Google like how to have a rental contract. And I would just put stuff in there that basically indemnified us for anything. If they were
in the boxes were dirty. If they were if they were late, how much we would charge them. If they got hurt or if there's a liquid in them, like we're not liable. So we basically made sure that the rental agreement had what are they renting from what dates? Are they renting it? When are they do? And also payment information. So in the beginning days, we only took credit card. We had, you know, Square. It was like if I was go meeting them, you would slide little thing on your smartphone. But now you can enter it manually. Yeah. And now we've gradually moved since Venmo does business now. We we primarily try to
do Venmo just keep all our transactions there. We also take PayPal because the thing is like when I send a rental agreement to a customer, we don't have any fancy docusy and or anything like that. They would have to enter in their credit card information onto the PDF and then send it back to me. And that's not very secure.
So most of the time if they're really persistent on doing credit card, which usually are if they're like a company because they want that. The points and all of that is we would do it over the phone. So I would take their information over the phone. And then once their rental is complete, then I discard the information.
Because one mistake I made was if somebody paid by credit card or whatever and then they didn't return the all of the boxes or they were damaged or something, I don't find out until somebody goes and cleans the boxes. So I would have to call them back and be like, we have to charge you this. And if they don't, if I don't have the information on file and I have as much leverage.
Okay. How did you find that cleaner person? Is this like a, a, a Airbnb short term rental type of cleaner? I take a pressure washer to these things or you to spray them out?
I used to do it most of the time. I mean, when I was, when I was here and then, you know, since I've been back, I've been doing it. But now in last few years, it's the same value. Those are deliveries. He's an employee of the moving company. And, you know, they have downtime. If they have one move or two moves a day, there may be done by three o'clock. And he'll spend an hour or two cleaning the boxes. And it's he doesn't charge much. And it, but it is work. Right. Because it's like you have to clean each box inside and out. Yeah.
And the one of the sticky things literally Nick is that people leave their labels on these boxes. So fortunately, they'll say like they'll put painters tape, which is great. Right. You can just tear it right off. But sometimes they'll put like, you know, like really adhesive stuff on these boxes. Like, and those are hard to take off. So we now provide dry erase markers for our customers. If they request them, they can just write it on the boxes. And then if they forget to do it, it'll just come off. I'll be clean them. Oh, interesting. So the dry erase will just scrub off.
Yeah, there's actually a pre made smooth section of plastic on the boxes on a side and on the top where they can put a labeling designed for that. Yeah, exactly. On the other risks, though, I would say that there, there is a concern that if a client, if a customer, you know, when you pick up your boxes, if you're not there doing it, you may not know because let's say you somebody returns their boxes. They're going to be in stacks of five, right. They're not going to have every box is out on its own because you're stackable. Yeah. So if they go back to the warehouse and let's say if you are cracked or there's something.
That I really dirty or have hairs or dirt or something, who knows what they moved, right. You have to go back to the customer and you have to make a decision because if you call them and say I'm going to have to charge you $100 for cleaning or whatever.
You're probably going to put a bad taste in the mouth. Well, I didn't do that. Or I don't remember that. And now they may not write you a good review. They may not come back as a customer. They may not refer you. So you have to really play that accordingly. So I try to just judge it based upon interaction with the customer. If it's one or two boxes that are dirty, I'm not going to charge them. But if it's a consistent amount, we're going to charge them.
And also if they damage the boxes, we have to charge them. And the thing about that that's difficult is if I'm not there, if my business partner's not there and the delivery guy misses it. And let's say that that box that's already damaged goes to a new inventory. Now that customer got something and I may have to charge them. So it's really making sure that we play our due diligence correctly to make sure that we're giving each customer clean, new, good shape inventory.
So we don't run into this. And we have a reminder on the rental agreement. When their rent is when their rental period is due, we also say, please make sure you wipe down the boxes and they're all empty and all the labels are removed. Most people listen to that. Some people don't, which is why we just clean boxes after each rental. Sure. Yeah. And you carry some sort of like general liability policy in case, I don't know, somebody cuts their hand open.
It doesn't seem like there's a huge level of liability there, but you never know. Yeah, you never know. And that's the thing is like, you know, I've toyed back and forth with bundling this with another LLC or, but yeah, you definitely want to have business liability insurance because you never know. Let's say somebody, you know, like you said, hurts their hand on the box or, you know, they feel like they were charged for cleaning when it wasn't really dirty.
So you just want to make sure you protect yourself in any case. I don't think this is a very high risk business at all. Now if we were like helping them back and I had employees, then that's a different concern. But this is just them getting boxes delivered to their doorstep. They're then in their possession. And then we pick them up.
Yeah, no, compared to some of the other rental business as we were renting out cars on tour or we did an episode on renting out mobility scooters, like, oh, you know, this thing had a bind of its own. It accelerated it. You drove me into a ditch. There's other things that, you know, would definitely check the box for having more liability than a plastic tub. Yeah, an an an object.
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You bet you collecting reviews. This is going to be Google Yelp Facebook any platforms that you prioritize and anything proactive that you do into collect those reviews from happy customers. Yeah, so I under my signature for our business email. I do have a link to both our Google page and also Yelp. So most of the time customers will leave it on their own, but I do make an effort.
I think my business partner told me about this app called nice job or something like that where it sends like a couple of texts to the customer. Hey, how was your experience writer review? So I just have like a template that I just text to the customers through our phone app. We use Google voice. And so I would just ask them like how was your experience? Like I would call them and say hey, if it was good, like would you mind leaving us a view?
Most people are happy to do that. Some people are just like you did great. I'll refer you. I don't leave reviews. And then some people that didn't have a good experience just don't answer me. They're just like, I'm not going to leave you a bad review, but I'm not going to talk about this anymore.
Like I just want to be done with it, which is fine. Like right. It's everybody's right, but we're really fortunate in the people that have done left reviews. I mean, we have a five star rating on Yelp and Google. A clean five star rating, which is it's really I'm proud of that because after 12 years of business, right? You might have a disgruntled customer. It was like, oh, they overcharged me.
They're boxes are a bad quality. They relate on their delivery or you know, these boxes aren't that great anyways or whatever, right? But fortunately, like it's been pretty clean. Yeah, it's like a lot of large numbers is bound to happen after you serve enough clients. Somebody's bound to be unhappy. But that's great. I like this proactive follow up to say, hey, how was your thing?
And if you were giving me positive, would you mind just typing that same thing into the review platform of your choice? That'd be great. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned it just takes a few hours a week to run. Where does your time go in the business these days? Yeah, honestly, Nick is just a matter of answering requests by email and phone. So I'll get a phone call, get a voicemail, get an email. And they'll be like, they'll have some questions.
When can you get the boxes? How many boxes do I need? How big are the boxes? Et cetera. And then I help them kind of create a rental game and I'll do the scheduling. So I'll connect with my business partner. And then he gets a rental agreement. He contacts the customer when they're able to deliver. And that's basically it. And then during the deliveries, I have a I have a spreadsheet of, you know, who's renting what during what time?
What do they do? So we make sure we get them back on time. And that's really about it. I also spend a couple of hours a week creating those relationships in the industry. So if we've worked with people in the past, like, what are you seeing today? You know, would you like to do a custom promo code together? Do you want to do?
You want to collaborate on a social media post? You know, we'll have like specials like Spooktober, like this month, we're giving a free extra week of rental for anybody who rents with us. So we always just try to do something creative and just try to connect with people. And those who are centers of influence to make sure that they are aware of us still that we are still around. And then we can work together.
Got it. I was going to ask about the spreadsheet for inventory management because with a thousand boxes and people at different parts of town, you know, with different numbers of boxes, like, let's start to become a little bit of a logistical challenge. But it is just to just spreadsheet, you kind of have an idea of which, you know, how many are with which customer at what time and when they're supposed to come back?
Yeah, that's exactly right. It's just a matter of where are these boxes? What do they do? And that's what we go based off. So if I get a rental request and I see that there's boxes doing a week, but they want them this weekend, I'm like, well, they're not, we can deliver them as soon as this time. So I can see like which box are coming back when to make sure because if a customer wants like a hundred boxes, that's a lot harder to do if we're booked than if they want 50 boxes.
But usually at most of the time with the level boxes we have now, I mean, we're not a crazy, you know, million dollar company, right? So we usually have the ability to do that. We're just the neighborhood box rental company here. Is there a target revenue number or fulfillment metric like how many are being utilized in any given time? Like, are there key metrics such a tracking for this business?
You know, it's just, did we do better than last year, right? That's what it is for me. I mean, I mean, I should be more. And I know there's been people on this podcast and show that are really like running lucrative businesses, but for me, this is not something that I can really scale nationally, right? Because it's very localized and also a lot of people do it in other cities. And for me, I'm just happy doing like, this is a, this is an experiment to me to be honest.
Like, I was 23. I was like, what risks do I have? I want to say that I started a business. And I want to combine it with my passion for sustainability and zero waste. So I started it. And this now, I mean, it pays for basically all of my fun money. You know, I don't have to worry about a man. I can't join my friends out to eat or go on this trip or buy a new paddle board or whatever I want to do.
Yeah, it pays for all of that. It's a side hustle. That's exactly what it is. And my hope is that it continues to grow. So more people use it and save, save cardboard boxes and that, you know, maybe we can do something else. But I mean, we were recently in like a local magazine. And there was a feature on us on Good Day Sacramento. So, you know, we try to speak to good community partners and make sure that we continue to do well.
We do need proactive PR outreach for that. Are they somehow found you? They're like, hey, this is a cool story. I actually researched. There was a segment I saw on another local business. I was like, oh, they do that. That's a really cool segment. They do. I mean, it's not a very, it's not obviously a national audience like today. So anything, but, you know, I reached out. I saw that there's a lady got an email that did this and I reached out to her and we went back and forth a few times.
So, you know, hopefully we have a chance to do something. I think a lot of local side hustles have this, you know, PR play in their playbook because especially if it's something that's a little bit, a little bit creative, a little bit different. Like, you know, renting out moving boxes. And they're like, oh, that's unique. Oh, you could turn that into a business. And they're, you know, these publications like to feature, you know, local people and feel good stories.
And they're kind of looking for angles like this, especially. Oh, there's a sustainability play or there's, there's some angle here that can weave into the story that they already want to tell. Yeah. Oh, look, you know, local business man, you know, does good or local side hustles. It's kind of, you know, how can you tap into what they're already looking to talk about?
Yeah, 100%. Like, we have a really good community magazine. It's called style magazine. It's great. It's free. It's always got like cool little stories and tips from experts. But it's really great that it brings business owners, small business owners in the community to give advice or like they'll pro like they always have like business profiles.
Why did you get into this business? You know, what made you get into this business? Why did you live here? Blah blah blah. And so you really get to meet the business owners behind your local coffee shop, your local auto mechanic or whatever it might be. So it really kind of ties that together with their business. And to your point gives a unique angle on people with that expertise.
How they can help the community. Yeah. And if nothing else, hopefully a backlink, hopefully some social proof, you know, as seen on, you know, good day Sacramento or something. Yeah, exactly. So you may look, you know, this is local. We don't do cross country moves. Is there a geographic expansion? Is there a, you know, product skew expansion? Like where do you, you know, aside from just we're going to ride the rising tide of interest and awareness in sustainable moving box ranch.
Like there's a new category. Is this something that you know, more and more people become aware of it for moving or for storage? Like you're going to be a beneficiary of that. Is there anything else to like pour some gas on the fire or say we're good with what we get.
You know, obviously there always is, right? We can always get more inventory rent and bigger space. Have a bigger space, get more clients. But for this particular business, I don't, I don't anticipate us 10xing or becoming like a, you know, French icing different units or do anything like that.
I mean, we have a really good name and our clients and community loves us and hope that as the population continues to grow. There's tons of more houses out here that we can continue to serve them. And there's, there's a more renting boxes. I'll be happy when renting boxes is more normal than buying cardboard boxes. Right. That means that we were able to prove our concept. I don't know if or when that'll happen. Yeah.
But if people are like, Oh, I got a rent boxes from a move and they're like, Oh, yeah, where do you want your boxes from? And that's like an actual normal conversation that happens. Then I'll be like, Okay, we succeeded because we were the only ones, at least the first ones here to bring rentable moving boxes to the Sacramento area. And now it's normal. Now it's something that everybody does. And that'll be mean success.
Very good. Well, I imagine you keep shipping away toward that goal. And I'm excited to see where you take it. It's been over a decade in the business. And sounds like it's set up to be sustainable without a lot of time investment required to keep it growing. So very cool. Gary. Thanks so much for stopping by your author of financial fives. This is the top 325 ways to save earn and thrive to retire before 65. You can find that at financial fives.com.
The box rental business is calbox rental.com. If you want to check that out, check out what that wicks site looks like. Calbox rental.com. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation. The number one tip is just try to start something, right? Do something that's going to move the needle. That's all the best thing I can do because we can plan and research and talk to people.
But I can tell you that unless I just told myself that I'm just going to go to home deep and buy these boxes and you see that receipt and you see the box in the back your car and sitting in your garage. You're like, okay, I need to do something, right? And it's something to start that wheel of turning, right? Buy that domain name, you know, reach out to somebody, whatever you need to do create, pay somebody a hundred bucks to give you a really cool logo and slogan.
Whatever it means that whatever your ideas just try something and start. Yeah, some kind of a forced action, you'll find that momentum breeds this momentum and there's some law of entrepreneurial physics where an entrepreneur in motion tends to stay in motion. It's just that, you know, that zero to one to get that motivation to go do that first thing. And here we are 10, 12 years later, it's become a really cool side hustle that you built a couple takeaways for me before we wrap up.
Number one is obviously this focus on partnerships and relationships, partnerships on the delivery and logistics side. And then on the relationship side, think about that strategic partner of who are your target customers already doing business with. How can you make them? And they're not a competitor with their an ally or potential referral source for you. We talked about them as, you know, lead fountains instead of, you know, onesy-to-z lead trickles.
It's like, who might need this service again and again and again? I really like the focus there. And then the second thing is like, what else could I, could I run out? Like thinking about something that checks the spots like pretty durable asset. Sure, some of them are going to break, but the cost of each individual one is not a ton and something that could really have a long lifespan, long shelf life.
I think that's really just an interesting one and something that like you mentioned is going to be more and more people become aware of it. So you've put yourself in a good position to capture some of that demand. And just like side hustle nation has captured a rising tide of interest in side hustle over the last decade. So I'm trying to see what gold rush can you sell shovels into almost and, you know, the same sustainability zero waste as like a broader umbrella.
Maybe one of those to look into. So like we talked about, not the only thing that you can rent out for a profit. So make sure to grab your free listener bonus for this week. That's my list of 25 other unconventional rental ideas. You may be able to borrow some of Gary's playbook for on the marketing and partnership side.
You can grab that for free at the show notes for this episode at side hustle nation.com slash Gary G a R Y orders follow the link in the episode description in your podcast player app. It'll get you right over there. Other rental episodes for consideration if you like this model. We talked about the mobility scooter guy love this episode is doing like three grand a month with a fleet of six or seven mobility scooters in LA.
That is episode five 64 with Lenny Tim fascinating episode, you know, relatively low startup cost relatively quick to break even and then it's then it's gravy. And then four 28, you know, one of the episodes I refer people to most often these. This is Steve Nathraemia with his portable hot tub rental business and not really that portable, but like portable compared to a, you know, a fixed, you know, hot tub that's not going anywhere.
Deliberating these things and it is pickup truck and I think he had like 25 or 30 of them really, really cool creative episode on the side from his teaching jobs. So 428 on the hot tub five 64 with Lenny on the mobility scooters. But big thanks to Gary for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in if you're finding value in the show. The greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Hey, check this out. Maybe we should do this in our area. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on.