How to Start A Photo Booth Rental Business with Josh Pather: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:01John Lee Dumas:Light that spark fire nation, JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how to start a photo booth rental business. And to draw these vibe bombs, I brought Josh Pather into EO Fire Studios. Josh has made millions renting photo booths and now teaches thousands of people how to start photo booth rental businesses at his company, Photo Booth International. And today we talk about how to be ready to take action immediately when an opportunity arises, how opportunities still exist even if you're satisfied with your work, consider a side hustle and owe so much more.

0:39John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Josh and our sponsors. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial, plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, are you ready to build something special in the next 50 days? Check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something, short and strategic step-by-step videos by me, JLD.

1:18John Lee Dumas:On day 50, you'll have a valuable asset. And the best part is it's completely free. Visit eofire.com slash YouTube and start day one today. Josh, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, John, thank you for having me up here. What's up, guys? This is Josh Pather. And something that a lot of people disagree with that I think has been a major success trait for me is speed. So just doing things fast, removing time out of the equation. A lot of people are like, Josh, you're moving too fast. You need to have patience and patience is a virtue.

2:05And, you know, just take a chill pill. But every time I found like, hey, if we see a good deal, you got to move on it. You know that good deals don't last forever. You know, there's opportunities come and you got to be prepared to take action when it comes. And I think a lot of us are groomed to be patient, you know, because our parents taught us this or we learned it from someone else. And I think a lot of people still disagree with me. And speed has been one of the biggest things. You know, doing things fast, you know, sometimes it works out. If it doesn't work out, at least you learned that it didn't work out quick, and then you can pivot and go into something else.

2:42John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, it's no longer the case to the level that it was years and years ago, but Mark Zuckerberg is famous for saying, move fast, break things. Because he knew that was the only way that Facebook was going to get ahead and stay ahead and look what they've accomplished. So we have a lot to talk about. This is a very unique conversation. This is a very niche conversation. We're talking about how to start a photo booth rental business. I want to get really into the nitty gritty of this stuff. You're going to learn some things, Fire Nation. So I want to go back, Josh, to your aha moment. How the heck did you have the idea to get involved in the photo booth rental business?

3:19So I was working a corporate job. I felt safe, had my 401k, employee stock purchase plan, health insurance, going there, clock in and clock out. and life was good. I was like, let me start a side hustle. So I started DJing weddings. And while I was DJing weddings, there's so much of preparation that has to go into it. You have to meet with the bride and groom. You got to do the first dance, the father-daughter dance, the mother-son dance, the entrance dance. And while I was working these weddings, I saw someone come up with a photo booth there. And I was like, that seems interesting. And it was new at the time, about 10 years ago and the selfie song had just came out so I started looking into it I noticed that hey there's a big opportunity here it looks like I can make more money doing less work you know being at the same event so about November 2012 ended up building my first photo booth I went to Home Depot with like 500 bucks got some wood some paint and let's put a little box together put in a touchscreen screen in their camera and a computer that we had laying around and bought some software online and put the photo boot together and started posting ads on Craigslist that's that's all we had back then so that started picking up I started getting some bookings and started growing and then I walked into work one day and they were like hey we're moving your job overseas And you can either take an entry-level position or you can take a severance package.

5:01So I used that as a sign. I was like, hey, let me just give this thing a shot. So July of 2013, I ended up taking the severance package the last time that I worked for someone. And we put all the energy and focus onto the photo booth rental business. Did over six figures the first year and doubled every year after that. and now I'm in the business of teaching people how to get started with their own photo booth rental business and avoid all the mistakes that I made.

5:32John Lee Dumas:Well, let's talk dollars and cents. I want to know how much somebody can make with a photo booth rental business. I mean, I know you were over six figures your first year and you kept doubling that, but let's talk real numbers. Let's talk gross profit. Let's talk net profit. How much are you actually keeping after that initial six figures with expenses that come into play, et cetera? and really get into details there. So on average, you can rent out a photo booth for around$200 to about$500 an hour, depending on the city. So obviously, if you're in Oklahoma versus New York City, the budget's a little bit different.

6:09The market is a little bit different. So that's an hourly rate. Here, I'm in Dallas, Texas. you can expect to make anywhere between$500 to$700,$800 for a three-hour event. So as far as expenses goes, you got your travel expenses going to and from the event. And then after the initial cost of the photo booth, the cost of the prints are about$0.15 a print. So about all in, your margin is about 40 % on there. so it's really profitable if you're working your events yourself and then obviously you can start growing your company and hire out you know individuals to go and run the photo booth for you and then you know scale your business in that way so fire nation you're looking at about a 40

6:59John Lee Dumas:percent profit margin so at that point you want to be scaling upwards and onwards for each photo booth you have that's how you're going to actually grow that overall revenue number and i want to talk about the meat and potatoes now. We just talked about dollars and cents. Let's talk meat. Let's talk potatoes. What's actually involved in having a photo booth rental business? Once you purchase a photo booth from us, or you can go the hard route and try to piece it together, which was a terrible idea. I like to always say you're always paying time or you're paying money, right? You can take the time to go figure it out.

7:33There's a lot of the smart people, or you can buy a turnkey package with a proven system. So once you purchase your photo booth, setting up your online presence, your website, Facebook ads, and then going out to networking with the venues. So you can reach out to other venues. You can reach out to photographers, DJs, let them know, hey, I have this photo booth offering that I'm doing. If you have any brides or any events coming up and you want to add the service on, please, you know, we can refer business. So once you get that, you send a contract to your customer, then day off the event, go to the event.

8:16You usually arrive about an hour and a half, two hours early, get everything set up, make sure that it's, you know, it's running smoothly, do a test picture. And then, you know, that's about the hardest part. After the event starts, you know, people are coming through, they take a picture, They can text, email their photo to themselves. You can get you some food. I always try to make it a point to give me a slice of wedding cake every time I go to events. And then wrap up at the end of the night. And then you're out of there. So it's a pretty simple business. You can be running the weekends part-time.

8:50And I like to do my business on the weekends and then travel during the week.

8:54John Lee Dumas:Where are some of your favorite places you travel because of this now kind of newfound freedom? them? Oh, Switzerland, Greece, London, been to Asia, around Asia. But traveling during the week, I mean, it's less crowded, it's cheaper. Yeah, totally. I love doing the off-peak season, off-peak day, off-peak time, travel of any kind, any way, shape, or form. But I want to talk startup costs. I want to talk how to grow and scale the business. I want to get into these conversations and more Fire Nation when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom.

9:38John Lee Dumas:That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform. Website builder and hosting, funnel and landing pages, email marketing, automation and workflows, calendar booking, payments and subscriptions, even course and membership hosting. Everything works together seamlessly. Plus, award-winning 24-7 support so you are never stuck. And when you go through my link at highlevelfire.com, you unlock my full bonus stack, a 30-day free trial of High Level with full access, a private 15-minute coaching call with me, weekly live office hours with me, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something execution roadmap, and more.

10:18John Lee Dumas:Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com. and start building your something today. Fire Nation, are you ready to create something special in just 50 days? If you just thought yes, then check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something. Every video is short, clear, and built to move you forward one intentional step at a time. Clarity, offer, validation, systems, momentum. By day 50, you are not working on something. You have built something, something to be proud of. And this is completely free on my YouTube channel right now. If you're done letting weeks just drift on by, visit eofire.com slash YouTube.

11:04John Lee Dumas:That's eofire.com slash YouTube and press play on day one. 50 days will pass in the blink of an eye. The only question is whether you'll still be thinking or finally building something special. Josh, we're back. And as I kind of teased before the break, startup costs. What can Fire Nation expect? How much does a photo booth cost? So a photo booth, we have an entry-level package, which is a Chloe photo booth, which I actually designed myself during COVID. And that one starts off at$5 ,000. And we have the Mirror 4 photo booth, which is on the high end. That one is$12 ,000. So you can expect to spend anywhere around that.

11:47Obviously, with the Mirror 4, it's a more substantial photo booth. It has a different camera than the Chloe booth. so you can make more money with that one. Obviously, starting off, maybe not everybody has that amount of funds to invest. You can start off with the Chloe, get started with that. We have a ton of people that have major success with that and come back and invest into a second and a third photo booth.

12:09John Lee Dumas:What exactly does come with the Chloe, so the entry level? What other accessories? Is it the all-in-one package? Yeah, it is the all-in-one package. You get the Chloe, you get the printer, you get access to our PBI global app so we're going to give you contracts we're going to give you a CRM, we're going to give you a website we're going to show you our sample price list we're going to give you Facebook ads training you're going to get access to our Facebook community so you do get a lot of ongoing support. Every single thing that you'll need to run this business, we offer that as part of our package at no additional cost.

12:44John Lee Dumas:Once we get rolling we've got a couple of Chloe's, maybe we've even gone to the higher package and we're ready to really grow. We're ready to really scale. What does that look like? And maybe share some personal stories of you doing that, or even maybe some of your clients of how they've kind of taken one or two, but then really kind of figured things out and grown big. We grew our company in 2015. We did about 850 events in one year. And so we had a staff of 25 people we have 15 photo boots we started getting approached by these companies to do trade shows so you would imagine a company would spend ten thousand twenty thousand dollars on a ten by ten space at a trade show right and their goal is to attract people into their booth to to get leads right so we've we were hired by Poo-Pourri to bring one of our photo boots there they had a model that was attracting people to come into the booth people will take a photo with the model, punch in their email address, get their phone number, and they were collecting anywhere between like 3 ,000 and 5 ,000 emails a day.

13:52People were just coming through all day. So, corporate events is a great way to scale your business. So, instead of making$500,$700,$1 ,000 per event, you can now charge$10 ,000,$15 ,000 a day to be there with these corporations and then really start scaling your business. So that's one avenue to do that. We did another Target grand opening. We did nine stores on one Saturday. They remodeled the stores. That deal was about$20 ,000. So getting into the corporate, getting into the sports, getting into football, NBA, and There's some customers we have in Hollywood that do movie premieres. It's really getting creative and putting yourself out there and separating it.

14:42But it's how far you want to take it. I would recommend picking a market and then sticking to that and then going heavily invest into that and provide your services specifically tailored to that audience.

14:56John Lee Dumas:You sell photo booths at your company, Photo Booths International. Why would Fire Nation want to buy a photo booth from you specifically? Many reasons. One of the reasons is that I started the company 10 years ago, renting photo booths. A lot of people, they wake up and they see an opportunity and they start doing it. We actually did the rental business first ourselves. We made six figures our first year. By year three, we made over a million dollars renting photo booths. And so we bring all of that years of experience in with our package. As I mentioned before, you'll get every single thing that you'll need from setting up an LLC to CRM, website, business contract, sales training, ongoing support.

15:42And our PBI family is our Facebook community that we have. It's like the Fire Nation community. They're supportive. They're there to help you along the way and watch each other grow. And it's a it's a really good group of people that just want to do better for themselves It's it's for people who you know may have tried other businesses and not work out You know I like to say it's not really a business of skill It's a demand based business if you look at events, you know you got weddings birthday parties quinceaneras, bat mitzvahs grand openings graduations, I mean the list goes on so it is a massive demand for entertainment at these events and you're just filling that need.

16:23John Lee Dumas:I love that. And Fire Nation, when you have the person like Josh with the experience, the knowledge, the expertise, I mean, you at least want to check out what they have going on if you're going to be going down this path or at least learning more about this path. So Josh, take a step back because we've talked about a lot of different things today. What is the one key takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation walks away with from everything we chatted about? If you're unhappy with what you're doing, there's a lot of opportunity out there. Consider starting a side hustle, you know, and consider doing a photo booth business.

16:58It's an easy endeavor that you can do. I've seen some of our customers where they're actually getting their kids involved. They take their kids to the event. Oh, fun. And, you know, it's like they spend family time together and they're teaching their kids about, you know, about business and about how to interact with people and about you know those things that the school system can't teach us or don't teach us and so I think there's a lot of benefits to it you know I was in a position where I thought I had a safe job and I was gonna stay there and just have a side hustle rest of my life and you know how I ended up where I'm at today and why I'm so passionate about doing that is because I needed that mentor in my life that I never had and I want to be that to other people and give them an opportunity to you know change their financial you know outcome.

17:52John Lee Dumas:Josh how can Fire Nation connect with you connect with your company learn more about everything Photo Booth International? So they can find us online you can go to photoboothint.com that's photobooth I as in India and for Nancy T as in Tom that's our website if you want to take a look at our photo boots. We do have a free webinar training. You can get that at pbiforever.com. That's P as in P, B as in ball, I as in India, forever.com. So we have like a webinar kind of going in a little bit more depth about the opportunity that there is. And then on Instagram, at photobootint, and my personal Instagram is at nextleveljp.

18:37John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with JP and JLD today. So keep up that heat. Head over to eofire.com, type Josh in the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with links to everything that Josh just mentioned, a whole summation of a conversation today, all that jazz. And Josh, thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side. All right. Thank you very much. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Josh.

19:09John Lee Dumas:In Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 3 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place.

19:50John Lee Dumas:And when you sign up at HighLevelFire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, are you ready to build something special in the next 50 days? Check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something, short and strategic step-by-step videos by me, JLD. On day 50, you'll have a valuable asset, and the best part is it's completely free. Visit eofire.com slash YouTube and start day one today. Thank you.