564: $3k a Month Renting Out Mobility Scooters Part-Time

0:01Three grand a month renting out scooters part time. what's up what's up nick holover here welcome to the side hustle show it's the business podcast you can actually apply i love me a good rental business buy something once get paid for it over and over again it's a cool model and my guest today has a really creative approach to it in the mobility scooter niche building it to three grand a month in his spare time from la mobility scooter rentals.com. And there's an exact match domain. Lenny Tim, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thank you so much, Nick. Very happy to be here. You bet. So Lenny's a serial side hustler, serial entrepreneur involved in the e-com space, involved in the YouTube space.

0:45You can check out his channel over there. It's the Struggling Entrepreneur. We'll link it up in the show notes. But stick around in this episode to learn how Lenny discovered his niche, how he found his first customers, and how he's grown and expanded his fleet of scooters and the operations surrounding that. If you like this model, I've got a listener-only bonus for you this week. It's my list of 25 other unconventional rental ideas. These are other products people are renting out for a profit. You can download that for free at the show notes for this episode at sidehustlenation.com slash Lenny, or just follow the show notes link in the episode description.

1:17Lenny, I want to start with the kind of demand validation phase, because you went about it in an interesting way. It wasn't like, hey, I've got these things sitting in my garage. Let's see if anybody would rent them. It was like, no, let's see if anybody wants to rent these things first and then go out and find the actual inventory for it. Can you talk me through that process a little bit? When I came up with the idea, it was back in 2019. My first thing was to just build a website just to see if there's a demand. I want to see if there's a demand for these scooter rentals. I didn't go out to buy any equipment.

1:50I didn't do anything like that. So that's pretty much how I started just to build out a really nice website, just to see if I'm getting customers, if people are going to call, if people are going to make any requests before I actually go out and buy anything or commit to the business. Okay, so you put this thing up, send it out into the abyss of the internet. Does anything start to come back or at what point do you start to get inquiries for them? I started getting requests pretty quickly within a few months, maybe within six months, people started calling. I started getting emails for requests.

2:22And I think that I just didn't have that much competition. And I think I built a pretty good website. So I looked at my competitors and I just tried to do better. And I think I just ranked. I ranked pretty quickly. And yeah, it started taking off fairly fast. Did you do anything specifically on the SEO front to build backlinks, to build the Google business profile, to do anything other than just having the exact what somebody might be searching for in the URL and then in the content on the site itself? Well, first of all, the name, LA Mobility Scooter Run. So I tried to get a domain that's going to match search pretty good.

3:05I didn't really do anything special. I don't know much about SEO. I just built a website. I did as much back-end SEO as I could. whatever they asked me to fill out I filled it all in you know mobility scooter rentals mobility scooters all that kind of stuff put some good pictures put up as much info as I could I'm pretty sure I you know opened up a google my business page right away and I may have did the Yelp as well at the same time but that's pretty much it that's everything that's all I did from the beginning I may have gotten into to be honest into some fiver gigs I'm gonna be honest here I think I tried to maybe get some backlinks from there.

3:46I don't know if it works. I hear mostly bad things about it. And I don't know if it made things better or worse, but I probably did a little bit of that. And that's pretty much it. What'd you build the site in? GoDaddy. So it was GoDaddy website builder. And they had that SEO optimization thing. So I just kind of followed that. And for me, it was very easy to use, like super intuitive. Okay. So I like this idea of, well, I'm going to put it out there and see what kind of reaction it gets. And then kind of crickets for a few months. Like I'm going to follow all the best practices and totally with you on the Fiverr backlink, like definitely tread carefully over there because you wouldn't want a bunch of people pointing, you know, low quality or spam links back to your site.

4:31Even if they, you know, me a thousand backlinks for five dollars like you know if it sounds too good to be true it probably is but it didn't seem necessarily to hurt you in this case but uh so a few months go by and you start to get phone calls like people are filling out the contact form it's primarily for like travelers and tourists coming to la and say hi i need this while i'm in town for the week that's kind of the target customer base so i would say yeah i would say it's mostly travelers tourists that come in and they want to get a scooter for whatever they're doing. Because most of my rentals are two hotels.

5:06I would say, yeah, that would be the majority of people that are just traveling, coming in. Maybe they're a little older, they're sightseeing, stuff like that. But there's also a lot of other customers, a lot of industry people. There's movie productions, they rent scooters. What else is there? There's just all sorts of things, I think, honestly. So the hotels will have a guest coming in and then they'll, the guest will request the thing and they're like, well, we don't have that. Let's see if anybody nearby would rent us one and then they reach out to you. Yeah, usually the guest would, you know, reach out to me beforehand.

5:41They would book it. And they're like, we're coming into the hotel on so-and-so date. We'd like a scooter. Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. So not the hotel isn't necessarily the customer. That's kind of where you're delivering it. Exactly. I'm just delivering it to the hotel. Sometimes they probably ask the hotel to call because sometimes hotels do call. but usually it's for a customer. But otherwise the customer, the person calls themselves and books it. Gotcha. And there were a few other people doing this when he started in 2019, building out the site. So there was some level of demand validation already out there.

6:14Some other people are doing this as a business, but what, I mean, what a random niche. And I think it's a great example of just the things like, okay, it's kind of a high ticket item. It's really big and bulky to try and travel with. So it checks a lot of boxes from that standpoint. But just, did you have a family member who needed one? Like, just, I'm curious what your research process was like. Yeah, I'd love to tell the story, actually. Well, the way I came across this, you know, this business, in 2019, me and a friend of mine, he was getting into another equipment rental business. And I think he was just starting out.

6:48And he's like, hey, let's try to find some other stuff, some other equipment that we can, you know, do another business, maybe another business. and I'm a very big researcher. I love finding new things and like seeing what's out there. And, uh, I came up with a big list and one of them was mobility scooters. I thought, wow, this is cool. You know, um, probably not very common, you know, not a lot of people think about it. So I'm like, maybe there's not much competition, you know, I put it on the list. I thought you can get pretty good rental rate out of it. It wasn't like very low money there, like pretty good money.

7:21Um, not difficult to manage. They're not huge. They're not tiny. They're not very expensive. So the investment is fairly low. So I thought it was a great idea, something to definitely look into. And we kind of discussed it. And then actually before this, I think why maybe it came to my mind, my girlfriend's mom actually came into town. And this was probably even a couple of years before I came up with the idea. She rented a scooter. But at that time, I didn't think anything of it. But I think when I was thinking of ideas, I remembered, hey, she rented a scooter when she came into town. We were going places.

7:58I was putting it in the back of the car. And maybe that's why I thought of it. So that's how I came up with the idea. And me and my friend were just talking about it. And I'm like, let me just start a website. I think it's a pretty good idea. I knew exactly how I was going to do it. It was just very simple for me. It was very obvious. There weren't a lot of variables there. I'm like, I can build this website in like an hour. Very easy to understand the scope and the business. And I just went ahead and built the website and to try to see if there's demand. Do you remember from that initial potential niche list, any other products you considered going into?

8:37Construction equipment was a big one. For example, I think scissor lifts, maybe forklifts, right? Things like that. Maybe party equipment, tables and chairs, just specific niche stuff like that. Yeah. Our friends rented a nacho cheese fountain for their wedding. I was like, well, this is a random one-off type of thing. But yeah, the party supply niche, we had a guy on the show years ago who was doing inflatables for kids' birthday parties and stuff. We had another guest Steve Nadramia who was doing portable hot tub rentals like one of the most creative businesses that I came across I thought that was really cool there was a company I think baby quip is called like it was specifically in the baby strollers and pack and plays and other stuff that parents might need when they're traveling maybe even car seats I mean there's probably some liability around that but there's you know a few different niches especially catering to travelers like what is a pain what's going to be a pain to bring with you that you might want to get at your destination.

9:39And even in like the sporting niche, like, well, if I want to, you know, rent a bike while I'm there, or I want to rent skis while I'm there, he's kind of going and then forklifts would be just thinking about the storage logistics on that. I mean, like United Rentals is huge. And I remember having to go and rent like this giant 40 foot ladder to get up to the third story of some house we were painting in college. And they put it on my truck with a forklift. And I'm like, that's cool. But how are we going to get it off when we get to the job site. And it's like this massive fiberglass thing. It weighed a ton.

10:12But yeah, lots of different niches there. And then going into the website building process, you have no scooter at this point, but now you're starting to get people messaging you about renting it when they come into town. Exactly. You know, I just had the website. I was getting requests and I was waiting until I felt comfortable until there was enough demand for me to jump into the business. I'm like, I'll do it if there's good consistent demand. Once I get there, once I get those kinds of requests, I'll go, I'll get some scooters and I'll start doing it. Did you have a metric in mind? Well, if I get five requests a month, then I'm doing it or something like that.

10:48Probably more than that. Yeah. I definitely had something in mind where I would want to make decent money and I, it would probably have to be several requests a day. I think that's where, Yeah, an average. That's probably what I was looking for at the time where it's worth it because I wanted it to be worth it for me. You know what I mean? Based on like the certain things that you mentioned earlier, like certain equipment, some of it is a low price. And I'm like, is it really worth it to, you know, go out there and, you know, deliver something for thirty dollars a day type of thing. so I was I wanted it to be where it was worth you know the daily rate was good and I was going to get several consistent like rentals all the time so and you would just tell these people sorry we're we're booked up or we don't have availability right now exactly yeah it's it's very simple you just say I'm sorry we you know we're we're booked on that date or we don't service your area or we don't have the equipment that you need and that's that's all you have to do.

11:49Yeah, this is I mean, my you got my gears turning on, you know, spinning up some pretty quick local websites around, you know, any number of different niches just to see, okay, what is going to stick and what starts to get inquiries and then going out and start to fulfill those needs. So a couple questions. Well, let's let's tackle the pricing question first is like, how do you figure out how much to charge for this thing? Okay, so I looked at my competitors, and they have usually it's a daily rate and then a weekly rate and then a monthly rate. So that's typically how they do it. I just looked at what they were charging and I think I probably started, I listed those prices and I kind of estimated that that's what I was going to charge, but it wasn't that much.

12:33I was like, man, this is not that, it's not that enticing. So long story short, I basically charge, I would say the highest prices out of my competition. Yeah, because you've got the, I mean, you've got the brand. You are the LA MobilityScooterRentals.com guy. You know, it's like, hey, you know, I'm going to command a premium price for that. What does that look like today in terms of the daily, weekly, monthly price? Sure. So daily, I typically estimate it's basically$75 a day. And I always add a delivery pickup fee. So I only do delivery and pickup where I bring it to them and I go pick it up from them.

13:10They don't come to me or anything like that. I don't have a storefront. I just do it straight up. out of my car. Right. And it's$75 a day. And I charge at least$75 on top of that, no matter what, that's basically delivery. And that's when it's pretty close, pretty local, maybe within five miles. And then I'll bump it up to 150 for delivery and pick up if it's maybe like over 10 miles somewhere on there. So, but I generally, I don't do one day rentals. I try to keep it like a three-day minimum um so it would be three days would be what 225 plus uh 75 bucks if it's a local delivery and that's a three-day rental what is it 300 bucks usually i try to go into a week which is four days to seven days four days to a week is basically the same price it's 249 plus a delivery pickup fee so it'll be 249 plus 75 or if it's a little farther from me I'll bump it up to 150 and all that is negotiable you know what I mean like if I feel like it's a good customer or it's very easy for me or sometimes they ask for a discount I can always work with them but that's my base price and it's a 500 for the month plus every pickup yeah gotcha well how much do these things cost and so you finally say okay look I've got an I've got a critical mass of demand asking me to rent these things I'm finally going to go out and buy one what do they what do Yeah.

14:35So a brand new scooter, the ones that I'm using and I'm using Pride. So they're really good brand, very good scooters. I would recommend that them a brand new one is about 1500 bucks right now. A little less, a little more. But I actually bought mine used and I look for about 500 bucks. I go on Facebook Marketplace or any other local marketplace and I'm looking to get it for about 500 bucks. So as you can see, I pretty much got my money back within one, two, three rentals. Yeah, I'm thinking if it's$250 a week plus$75 delivery, a couple weeks later, I'm in the black on this unit. How many do you have at this point?

15:18Right now, I only have seven. You say only? I mean, that's a pretty serious fleet. Yeah, it's not bad. I have seven right now, and I make it work. I could definitely have a lot more, but I just, I don't, I keep it completely a side, um, side business, you know? Yeah. So they're pretty bulky. So you have a storage unit or keep them in the garage. It's got to take up like a decent chunk of space. Yeah. I actually have, luckily, uh, I live in a, in an apartment building and we actually have storage units that we can use. So in the parking area, I can rent out a storage unit and they're like five by five.

15:53So luckily I have it right there. It's like right next to my parking spot. And I keep, I have two storage units and I keep my scooters there and I could shove five of them in one. And then I have a couple in the other. And does it fit in the back of an SUV or how do you deliver them? So we have an SUV. That's the car that we started with. And I can put two, I actually got three in there one time, but I don't recommend it. I don't, it's, I have to disassemble the scooters and kind and like shove them in there. But two is fine. I could put two in the back. And then my other car, I just throw one in the trunk.

16:27And that's how I do it. I just put in the trunk of my car and I just deliver it that way. Yeah, that's the other consideration here. I remember our bounce house rental guest was, well, I started out with my Civic or my Accord, basically had to get this little trailer attachment thing because it was a 400 pound inflatable. And it was something to consider. And Steve, the hot tub guy, I was like, yeah, you know, just kind of stick it in the back of the truck. And that's, you know, how he had to make it work. But, you know, a bigger vehicle would be required to deliver some of this bigger, bigger items.

17:01But that's really cool. Like this, this ROI pencils out a lot faster than a traditional rental house. It's like, yeah, I can break even on my entire purchase costs within just a couple of rentals and I'm off to the races. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call? It's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one business phone system built for 2025, not 1995. In fact, it's rated the top choice for customer satisfaction with over 3 ,000 reviews on G2.

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20:03I have the scooter, boom, they book it and, you know, I have them sign a rental agreement, just, you know, has a bunch of information like their responsibilities, mine and a little bit of that, like, you know, liability language and they sign the rental agreement and that's pretty much it. The time comes, you know, I grab the scooter, throw it in my trunk. I drive it over. Usually it's a hotel. I leave it with front desk. I'll put a little tag, uh, with the, with the guest's name, with the customer's name on it. Okay. Just in case. And I just drop it off with front desk. They always take it. They put it like where they put the luggage and that's it.

20:40I just drop it there. And let's say a week later. Uh, and I tell the customer, I'm like, Hey, just drop it off with them when you're done. and a week later I go pick it up. It's pretty simple. People call me, they email me, I book the rental, rental agreement, payment request. And the rental agreement is like an online checkbox or DocuSign or something? It's a PDF. I send them a PDF that they can sign. So they just put their name, billing address, and a signature basically, and they send it back to me. Okay, and how are you processing the payments? so i was doing it through paypal honestly for a little while uh when i started that was finding my first rental i'm like i had to do it quickly and i actually did my personal paypal account but i use a square now okay i just create an invoice and i send them a payment request and i charge up front and that's it okay so that's done kind of in advance of delivering the thing like the both agreement and then the payment i guess it's similar to you know rental car i'm going to reserve the rental car and okay yeah yeah i charge them up front and what's cool about this we talked about people doing the touro business too it's like i gotta go somebody wants to rent my car they're coming into the airport so i go take the car to the airport and now i gotta take an uber home because i left i gave them my car at the airport it's like no i could still take my car home because i just dropped off the scooter instead so that's a little bit more attractive to me or like fewer, fewer moving parts in that sense.

22:08So that's cool. On the liability insurance side of things, I guess, you know, dealing with people with mobility issues, like if the scooter breaks down, I don't know how common that would be, but like, is, is that a factor here? So that was definitely my, my thought getting into this business. So that's, I'm, I guess, naturally anxious person. And that's exactly what I think about sometimes. So there are pros and cons with every business, every piece of equipment. I do think about, I worry about them giving me a call in the middle of the night. Hey, my scooter broke down or something's wrong. Come and fix it.

22:47Come and take care of it. But luckily that's, that's just mostly in my, in my mind. That doesn't usually happen. I mean, it's happened once or twice where the battery was kind of faulty and the scooter wasn't running that well, but I was able to, you know, take care of it. Nobody was upset. Nobody was stuck anywhere. They gave me a call. I brought him a new scooter. I swapped it out. Yeah. I mean, luckily there's really not that much, not that much issue that, that goes on. These are really good scooters. There's not that much that can go wrong. Like I said, I definitely was thinking about these things like, Hey, what if something goes wrong, right?

23:24These people are out riding in the middle of, you know, who knows where. Yeah, they're going, they're going down a Hollywood Boulevard or they're going to do the walk of fame or something. What if it fails in the middle of the thing, you know, but a lot of times people, they don't really necessarily go far. They go with family, they go in a car, they go with somebody else and they go, you know, maybe they don't necessarily, you know, venture out on their own, like really far or anything like that. So usually I think every, it works out. There's really no, haven't really had any, any issues like that.

23:55I have thought about the liability of the of the business and there's always that question you know these are maybe older people right they might have mobility issues and you're renting them a mobility scooter um but again you know it's like you overthink it um there's mobility scooter rental companies that have existed forever uh and they're doing just fine and that's kind of how i look at it all these businesses that you think well what about the liability because you always want to think about that, but there's a ton of companies that have been doing it forever. So they're okay. I've always been surprised how inexpensive a general liability policy would be, or I don't know if it would be like a product liability policy in this case, but something like that, is that something that you carry for the business?

24:39I have, yeah, business insurance is general liability, but I don't have anything beyond that. I have a, like I said, a rental agreement. And And again, I know that that doesn't necessarily mean much legally, but it lets the customer know that this is serious. At least they take responsibility also for the scooter. Okay, but a general liability policy, that makes sense. Protect yourself, put that rental agreement up front. Just treat it seriously. Make it look legit, because it is legit. I was going to ask, so most people are finding you through Googling LA Mobility Scooter Rental, and you're like, hey, it pops up there.

25:16Did you do anything specific with the Google business listing or with Yelp, either posting updates there or soliciting reviews or adding images or like the whole world of local SEO is it's quite fascinating, like all of the different little tweaks and levers that you can pull. Yeah, no, I'm definitely fascinated with SEO and I'm always looking for ways to improve things. But the Google My Business page, I think that's probably the main thing. And I filled out as much as I could. I put up some pictures, some great descriptions, filled out, you know, everything that I could on the profile. And yes, I definitely did solicit some reviews from, you know, my first customers, some friends, family.

25:56And I think that's important. I definitely, you know, focused on that. And I think that definitely helped get my business out there. So that's I think that's very important. Yelp. I just I wouldn't say that's a big factor for me, but it's still there. and I still get some requests for there, but I'm not focused that much on it. I would say Google my business and just, uh, I was able to, to rank. I want to say hopefully, cause I did a pretty good website. The current competitors, they're a little bit, um, old school and they don't have, they did not invest so much in their online presence. So the websites are a little bit, um, older.

26:35I don't think they're as optimized. So I think with me building a pretty nice, um, new modern website, I was able to just outrank them pretty easily. Yeah, it's a good looking site. And this is kind of echoes what Nick Huber has said, like, well, who do you want to compete with? Do you want to compete against the, you know, brick and mortar, you know, blue collar service based businesses that are operating with websites that look like they're 20 years old? Or do you want to compete against Silicon Valley engineers who are using AI to produce this stuff? Like, I'm going to go for the lower competition business model every time.

27:07and same thing, Johnny Robinson was doing the window washing business in college and had built it to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. It's like super go-getter. And what he mentioned was, you know, once you have that online presence nailed down, so much of the branding happens online. It's your website, it's your reviews, it's your photos that as long as you show up and provide a good service, people are already impressed with you. Like they felt that they were making a savvy decision because they went with the company that looked good uh you know on their digital presence and that's kind of the box that you're you're checking here so that makes uh makes a lot of sense as you have like different tabs about your scooters you have the you know the explore la tab just some content that says you know it's about the scooters but it's also like about la like trying to cross pollinate like this is what we are this is where we do it like trying to just say, you know, here it is.