Stop Buying Things. Start Buying Assets that Pay for Themselves⏐Ep. #281

David Stillson (0:00)

What I love about small rental business is you can start easily with very little capital and you have an asset that you can rent out again and again. You're not selling something and then you have to go source more goods. I started looking for boxes and found tote rental was a thing. Worst case, we have totes for the rest of our lives. Best case, the thing takes off and we need to go buy more totes. We immediately had to buy another 120 because we overbooked and the rule is we only buy when we oversell.

Chris Koerner (0:31)

What do you know about the rental business? Not real estate rentals, but renting other stuff. Moving totes, podcast studios, RV rentals. Well, I met a guy from Fort Wayne, Indiana that does all kinds of different rental businesses. He's a multi-preneur. So I sent out a poll to my audience and said, what types of rental businesses do you want to learn about? You guys told me loud and clear. And so I found a guy that's running businesses in these spaces. The rental business is great because it's low overhead. You learn a lot of different skills while doing it. You can scale it. You can use platforms to grow it, like RVshare, Outdoorsy. Or you can use Facebook Marketplace to grow it. Or you can push paid ads to your own website to grow it. Many ways to skin this cat. So please enjoy this rental business episode with David. Tell me about Tote Rentals. Why is that an opportunity?

David Stillson (1:15)

Okay, so we decided we're going to buy a new house. So we need to move. So we put our house on the market. When we started packing the house to stage things, I started looking for boxes. I'm one of those that I don't want to get used boxes and go to grocery stores, and I'm just too lazy. I don't like the hotchpotch boxes. So I started looking at wholesale boxes, loosely exploring like could I do a box selling business, and found Tote rental was a thing. So there's a company in Chicago that does it, which is near us. Indianapolis has one. It's really big out west. But Fort Wayne didn't have any providers that did it. So I was like, okay, well, how much is it? I was doing the math in my head. I'm like, I could buy those yellow top industrial totes for seven bucks a pop. They were on sale. I could buy a hundred of those. Seven hundred bucks, rent them out for two dollars a piece. And I was just doing some basic math with chat GBT too. And like, how viable would this be? The cogs are really low. And so I just threw up a website immediately. And this website, this is us. Yep, totesonline. So what we ended up doing instead of getting like the consumer grade totes at Home Depot is we found us, there was a random video on YouTube where a guy was like, I run a tote rental business and here are my suppliers. And he was like a real quick snap of like three wholesale suppliers of totes. So I paused the video, looked up the companies, found out they cost about 12 bucks a piece, but you have to buy them by the palette. So it's like 120 totes to get the price break.

Chris Koerner (2:46)

Like 1500 bucks or so per pallet.

David Stillson (2:48)

Yeah, with shipping. And I also found out one of their warehouses is an hour from me. And they always have about a thousand totes on stock at any one time. So I'm like, okay, let's buy a pallet of totes. Worst case, we have totes for the rest of our lives for any time we ever move again. Best case, the thing takes off and we need to go buy more totes.

Chris Koerner (3:09)

Yeah. It sounds like me at Bucky's, like worst case, I'll fill my pantry full of junk food. For a year. Best case, I have a new business. I mean, a lot of awesome businesses start out with that kind of hypothesis, right?

David Stillson (3:22)

Yeah. And let's just test it. And so it was admittedly a little slower to start. Like I didn't get immediate validation. We put up some Facebook Marketplace posts before we even had the totes. I was doing the, this is when I was deeper into your content, was like, sell it before you have it. So literally like, hey, we ran out totes.

Hey, NanoBanana, make a bunch of images of me carrying this tote, download product image, now picture of me, you know, it looked, it was obviously AI. And that kind of didn't do anything. So we took a more manual approach and started actually networking locally with realtors and moving companies. And that's when we actually got traction.