579: Ice Vending: $2500/Month in (almost) Passive Profits

25:05Yeah, it just couldn't make it fast enough for the demand. It's unusual for our machines to sell out completely because they do produce about 2 ,500 pounds of ice per day. So you're looking at about 250 available bags to be sold. To run a machine completely dry is unusual. But the nice thing is it's constantly replenishing. So every about 15 minutes, it just made another couple more bags of ice ready for sale. We would get some phone calls and just have to tell folks, hang out for a few more minutes on the beach or maybe grab another cocktail from the pool bar and you'll hear the ice drop. You can hear it clear as day.

25:42And as soon as it does, you're first in line. And folks were kind of okay with that. And they said, hey, well, we need ice and we don't want to go anywhere. Well, of course not. You don't want to go anywhere on the 4th of July. You want to enjoy your time with your family, your friends, or whatever you're doing. They kept them very busy for those timeframes. And really all summer, the machines have stayed very busy. So a day of 150 to 200 bags of ice being sold is not uncommon during our summer months, our busy, busy season. You're at$2.50,$3 a bag? Yeah, we sell them for$3 a bag for a 10-pound bag of ice.

26:16Gosh, Florida prices are so cheap. And it's funny because we went to a lot of research in our pricing and you go to a gas station, they're selling seven pounds for like$3.19 or$3.49. They're getting$3.50 for a seven pound bag. We can take them to market. That's not a problem. We're just going to advertise three bucks for 10 pounds. And it's funny because you're only talking about roughly 50 cents, but it's amazing how much it resonates with people that they want to save that 50 cents and get three more pounds of ice. And it's like, that's why we exist is to make that connection for you. There you go.

26:52And what happens during the winter? Are the beaches empty? Are people still coming by? And now you're like, well, shoot, I'm not even going to make my$300 rent placement for the luxury of having it in this spot. We do have a little bit of a winter. We call it a Florida winter. So for us, it's probably about in the 50s. We're freezing to death. The people that live here, we're all bundled up and we try not to go outside because it's 52 degrees. But we do still see a large number of tourists coming to the area, a lot of them coming from Canada or the upper Midwest, for two or three months at a time.

27:25And they're here, and to them, a 50-degree day is beautiful. I mean, they're wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Yeah, they're walking the beach. They're asking if they can get in the pools. We're freezing to death, and they're enjoying it. We do see a reduction in sales in the wintertime just based on the amount of people in the area. But because the machine also sells water, we see a very marked increase in water sales. Folks that aren't from the area maybe are not used to the water we have or are very, very health conscious, especially in kind of today's day and age. So they can go to the machine with their own container and for 50 cents get a gallon of purified filtered water that's gone through five filters.

28:11It's gone through a UV bulb. As clean as it can get, again, it's right on site. They're not having to give their money to a big box store and they're not having to leave. So we see a lot of water sales in those winter months as folks come to the area. And I've even had some folks from Canada tell me their water where they're at is great. They love it. They drink it out of the tap. They come to Florida and they just don't like the water. It's got extra chlorine in it. It tastes like the ocean, yeah. Yeah, it's hard water. They just don't want it. So they're going to spend money and they plan for it.

28:45A lot of them bring down their own five-gallon jugs with them on their trip, knowing that's what they're going to use. So for us, it made sense just to say, well, hey, go to our machine and you can fill that entire jug up for$2.50 and you don't ever have to leave. And they go, oh, yeah, this is great. We do see, and oddly enough, and I'd have never guessed it, but it makes complete sense. It's around the holidays, we actually see a very big bump in ice sales. And talking to folks, we've realized that, especially for Thanksgiving, being such a food holiday, people's refrigerators are filled with food.

29:22They don't have any place for the sodas or the juice for the kids, the cocktails and beverages for the adults. So they're putting them in coolers and just icing down the coolers and setting them out on their patio or in the living room. and that's where they're using to keep the drinks cool because they've got the turkey, the ham, whatever's in the fridge. They just don't have space for all the drinks. We kind of never thought of it and then saw it. Now it makes sense. Why didn't we think of that ahead of time? Our second year, we did quite a bit of advertising around those holidays for ICE and we'll do it again as we get closer this year because it's just one of those things.

29:56We never made the connection until it happened, but it's a good example of the market driving the business. Yeah, I was going to ask on the marketing side if the location would just speak for itself or it sounds like you're doing a little bit of proactive effort to let people know that, hey, these exist and it's a good value and come on in and buy stuff from us. Yeah, I think absolutely. Even if you've got one of the greatest spots that you could ever find, I think you still got to do some marketing and advertising. We did some wind feathers, some of those signs. We did some real estate signs kind of around the machines.

30:30Obviously, we did some flyers just kind of around the properties. And then some of the biggest traction we've seen was just digital marketing. The social media platforms, we've been able to use those quite a bit to actually target specific areas that we really want to go after for ice sales. And then everybody in the world uses Google for everything. So getting onto Google's listing service really paid a lot of dividends. And the fact that people will Google everything. Oh, interesting. So you could create a Google, whatever they call it these days, Google my business profile for the machine itself, like at this location.

31:08Yeah, that's kind of what we did. We went onto the Google Maps site and put our location, our address in, had it linked to our website or just even a brief profile of the address, the phone number, those things. And as folks are looking for anything, we all just Google. The nice part now is you get on there and you Google ice near me and we have multiple locations showing up that are attached to a map. And you just click the little map function. It tells you how to get there. And that's a free service. We don't pay for advertising on Google. We don't pay per click because the little bit I've looked into it, it can get very expensive trying to do sponsored ads through Google.

31:48And we just found that the map listing service really gave us kind of a lot of bang for no buck. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. Whereas you wouldn't search for like Snickers bar near me, like if you're looking for a traditional vending machine or a snap vending machine. But for ice, that totally works. We get calls quite a bit from folks that literally just say, well, I just Googled you. I typed in ice near me and you came up. We've even gotten calls for things that are not in our traditional business model. Delivering ice, maybe for a party or a birthday party. Bulk ice for fishing vessels.

32:24Stuff that we never intended to do. It wasn't in the original plan. But people sought us out and said, can you do this? And we kind of think about it for a minute and go, yeah. I'm not sure how yet, but we'll figure it out. And yeah, we can deliver you ice. A lot of the business is creatively solving some of these opportunities that we didn't even know were coming down the road. But being able to say yes to them. And it's just like, yeah, we'll figure something out, but we can make that happen. For sure. You mentioned I got to go and restock the bags from time to time. What's a week in the life look like in terms of the hours that you're putting into it?

33:05You got to go and take the money out if people are paying in cash. But what's going into it time-wise? The time investment is really on the front end. It's finding the location. It's getting the machine installed and set up. It's learning the machine. That's where your biggest time commitments are going to come in. Then it really starts to dwindle as you kind of hone and streamline your processes. So for me personally now, I check on all of our machines multiple times a week because they're all relatively close to where I'm working or living. I'm at a machine for maybe 10 minutes, if that. And that's for checking to make sure there's plenty of bags available, making sure there's change in the machine.

33:41Obviously, the fun part, getting my money out of the machine that I can take to the bank. General cleaning, maybe 10 minutes per machine. So for pretty minimal time investment, once you're familiar with the operation and how it works. And now actually there are machines that are available through Everest that you can choose not to do the cash option. You can simply have the credit and debit option. So now you've removed the cash completely, which would speed that process up even further. Now you're just doing kind of a general clean and you're making sure it's got bags, but you're cashless. Yeah, which maybe would cut down on potential crime, vandalism, people trying to get cash out of the machine.

34:23Have you had anything like that come up? Knock on wood. We've been fortunate. We've not had to deal with any vandalism. The machines are fairly robustly built. They're designed to keep honest people honest. I always like to say if somebody is really intent on getting in there, it'll take them a hot minute, but they could get in there. So we've been fortunate not to have to deal with that quite yet. All of our locations do have security cameras either pointed at the machine or in the area. So I think that helps quite a bit. Yeah. So it sounds like super time leveraged, but still a little bit of hands on on a weekly basis.

34:56And I remember talking with Hannah Ingram a few months ago with her car wash business was similar. where buying this asset that's going to spin off this cash flow, but somebody's got to go clean out these bays. You know, somebody's got to go be on hand. It's not a ton of time. It was a half an hour a day in her case, but still required her to be there. And so the question is, well, what happens if you need to travel yourself or if you're incapacitated in some way, or you just want to take a week off, like there's some time required or like what happens if you're not able to do that? My family and I really enjoy traveling.

35:28We try to travel almost as much as we can. So we plan our machine maintenance sort of with our vacation or our travel schedule. So a day or two before we're leaving out of town, we'll be at the machine making sure the bags are fully stocked, all the change is stocked, everything is good as we can make it so that we can leave. I do have a few folks, some friends that are around that I'll give the keys to the machine and say, if something terrible happens, I'll call you. You can go check on it. But for the most part, they don't ever need to go. The one nice thing about the Everest machines in particular is they've got the ability to be remotely managed.

36:06You can do it from your phone, an iPad, a laptop, a desktop computer. You can actually log into your ice machine and see what the sales are for the day. If there's any error codes or alert codes on the machine, you can check diagnostics, health. That would get addicting, I imagine. Just hitting refresh on the app. How many did we sell today? It really can be. And at some point you've got to be like, all right, I'm going to put this away now. I need to stop looking at it. It almost becomes like the stock market ticker. Yeah, you're just like, oh my goodness. And you got to just like, you know what, let it be.

36:39It's nice having that functionality because you aren't beholden to the machine as much. So if you do want to travel, you've got the ability to do that. One of the things we really like that has really come in handy is actually from that remote system, I can choose to dispense water or ice from my phone to the customer. And we've had to do it from time to time. Somebody calls and maybe just cannot figure out the machine or just something goofy is going on where it's not working. And our goal is customer satisfaction. It makes it really nice for me to be able to tell them, hold on one second, let me get this on my phone, get your cooler or your bag or your jug ready, whichever you're doing.

37:21And I'm going to hit this button from here and it's going to give you your ice. Wow. They're amazed. They're like, you can do that? And I'm going, yes, thankfully I can. That way we're keeping customers happy because they're still getting a product. And I think more times than not, it tends to be them, again, kind of not reading the directions, not following through with it. Right. And oh, by the way, can you leave me a five-star Google review? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And our kind of point of view, it stands for customer service, is we'll happily get you that bag of ice or that gallon of water to keep you happy versus have you be frustrated.

37:56I would rather you be happy and me give you a bag of ice than get your$3, but have you leave ticked off and then go on Google and, oh, this space machine, blah, blah, blah. And it's like the technology is there to be able to assist the customer. And that's really what makes it easy. I'm bad about when we do travel, especially when we fly. As soon as we get to an airport or connection airport, oh, yeah, I'm pulling my phone out or an iPad out. I'm looking to see my girlfriend just kind of like, really now? I'm like, I can't help it. Yeah. How much do we make while we're on this flight? Yeah. Yeah.

38:28It's like, how much is this helping pay for this vacation? That's great. That's great. I would totally be the same way there. Steve, what's surprised you the most over the last year and a half, two years of doing this? Honestly, the growth, when we got into it, we did two machines with the intent of just placing two machines and just seeing how it went. It was never looked at as to become a full-time business or that could grow into a full-time business. It was just kind of a, hey, let's just throw these out there, see what happens. We think they'll do okay. And the demand really started to take off.

39:02and then we started kind of getting phone calls from other properties, other landowners that had seen the machines or heard about the machines and now they were interested in maybe having us place one at their location and that kind of surprised me because it really sort of took on a life of its own and grew organically. We didn't send out direct mailing, we didn't do a ton of flyers. We weren't casting a real wide net. And it still is the word spread of what it was. People started calling us. And now we're in a very fortunate position, at least for the current moment. We're not actively looking for sites.

39:41We're simply answering the phone of sites that are now calling us and seeing if we can make a deal or an arrangement to put a machine there. Yeah, gosh, that's a nice spot to be in. Yeah, and it was something I never really envisioned would have happened, probably through my own kind of naivety. I just thought it was ice. 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.

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42:14Just go to Indeed.com slash SideHustleShow right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash SideHustleShow. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Indeed is all you need. Is it similar condo complexes or what type of venues are reaching out? Multiple condo complexes. Actually, our latest installation is going into an RV park and campground. and that particular location knew somebody who knew somebody who owned at one of these condo complexes and somehow they were talking about ice and the person was like hey there's this really cool ice machine down on the pool deck you should come check it out they went over and looked at it so this is cool got the phone number and called and said we're interested in this what can we do then we just set a meeting and and went and were able to thankfully connect the dots and now we've installed a machine for them.

43:07And like I said, that's our fourth location now. Yeah. And the metrics that you're looking at are how many potential customers are passing through this campground or RV park on a weekly, monthly basis. Exactly. How do you get a sense of like, I don't know if this is the right spot or like, yes, sign me up. We kind of look, especially when we get into condos, we look at overall number of units. So how many, we call them doors. So how many front doors are in the complex? And then how many bedrooms? Is it a complex where it's maybe all one-bedroom condos? Or is it a complex that has two bedrooms, three bedrooms, four bedrooms?

43:43Yeah, people are bringing big families down, yeah. Exactly. So one of our complexes is relatively small in the number of front doors, but is almost predominantly three-bedroom units. And people coming on vacation, typically it's mom, dad, it's maybe two kids, and then the kids bring a friend. And so now you've got six, maybe eight people into a condo and you take that times 200 and something units. Now you've got a couple thousand people on property at any given time, all that need ice because they all want to go to the beach. They all want to go to the pool. Nobody likes drinking a warm can of soda or a warm beer.

44:20So, you know, they're going to be buying ice. So that's kind of how we measure it. When we went into the campground, we looked at number of sites that were available for RVs or for campsites. And that particular location is fairly large. It can hold almost, I would say has 300 RV sites and then has the ability to expand into regular campsites. If somebody was just kind of putting up a tent or something, a little more primitive camping, as we call it, compared to some of the RVs that I've seen over there. Holy cow. But yeah, we kind of just look at that and see how many people can be here. And is it somewhere that they're going to need ice?

44:58Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There's a fair amount of research that kind of needs to go into it, whether you're going into locations sort of similar to ours, or if you're trying to find a roadside location, maybe then you're looking at traffic counts, ingress and egress of vehicles. How easy is it for somebody to get to the machine, buy their ice, and then get back onto the highway or the road? So there's quite a few things to sort of think about when you look at your locations that we sort of learned the hard way. All right. It's interesting that after just a couple installs, you kind of started to build this reputation as the ice guy and other people start calling you like, hey, what do you think about putting one in over here?

45:39I just think that's really interesting. We found that over and over again, like service businesses, it doesn't take a lot to get that word of mouth kind of spinning in your favor. So I think that was encouraging to hear. So Steve, you got four of these now. You got the construction business during the day. Where do you want to take this thing? Our goal is to kind of continue to grow the ice company and the ice business. We see the demand there is constant. It's not going anywhere. We're starting to look more and more into the construction industry. Obviously, a lot of blue-collar workers and trade workers, they buy ice every day.

46:13These guys and girls that are going out and working on job sites, they buy a bag of ice almost every day when they're getting their drinks together or trying to keep their lunch cold. So we're kind of looking more into some of those areas, working with some development companies to get into some of the areas where there's just mass building going on. So we're kind of looking at those. We're always taking on sort of new ideas. Where can we put a machine? What market can we tap into that maybe is underserviced a little bit? So our goal is to kind of creatively keep growing the ice business. It is considerably easier to run the ice business than it is a construction company.

46:50So I like the idea of doing more and more ice and less and less construction. I'm not as young as I once was. So carrying stacks of lumber isn't as easy as it was in my younger days. My body certainly reminds me of that after a good week of work. And it's like, it's a lot easier to do ice. I can see it scaling up. Okay, now I only have to do four days a week. And now I only have to do three days a week. You kind of like can stair step your way up there as the empire of machines and locations grows. I think that can be encouraging. We've talked to a lot of other business owners. We even talked to some convenience store owners simply to ask them, are they happy with their current ICE provider?

47:29Some of them say, yeah, they're fine. They deliver our ICE. We sell the ICE. Everything works. But we've got a few that say, no, we're not happy because they cannot keep us in ICE or they keep changing the price or their customer service is terrible. So we gain that information by nothing more than just going in and asking a question. And some of those are now leading into some contract talks to maybe put a machine at some of these locations and replace their traditional ice service just because they can't be serviced. And then they're disappointing their customers. If they don't have ice to sell, they're losing revenue.

48:03And some of the long-established ice companies, I think, got very comfortable in a product that they know is going to sell. The competition really wasn't out there. There's not a lot of people doing ice. And I think a lot of them got kind of lazy, for lack of a better term, and just said, well, we're the only game in town. And now, especially with the Everest machines and the self-sustainability of them, it's kind of turning over the apple cart a little bit. And I think we're going to start seeing more and more small businesses get into it, more kind of owner-operators coming around, getting into it, folks that are hungry not only to make money but to provide a product and a service.

48:43as much as I want to say it's easy to grow. I mean, it does take a lot of work. It takes a lot of effort. But if you answer your phone and you show up when you say you're going to and do what you say you're going to, it kind of sells itself. I'm amazed how many phone calls I get a week of people say, well, oh my God, you answered the phone. Well, yeah, you made it ring. As long as I'm not terribly involved in something, yeah, chances are I will answer my phone. And that's led to a lot of conversations with folks about potential machines. It surprises me that there's a lot of kind of successes in business.

49:20But one of the first fundamentals is, yeah, just answer your phone. That opens more doors than kind of we've ever would have guessed. The conversation you mentioned with just asking the question, are you happy with your current ICE provider? And you kind of probing there. that appeals to me more so than committing to buy the machine and then be like, all right, now I got to go find a location. Like, oh, if I could have that penciled in before places, like I feel a lot better about that. But this has been awesome. I'm taking a ton of notes. Very inspiring story. Excited to see where you take it.

49:53Beachside Ice, you can check Steve out over there. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. This does not have to be vending related. This just is whatever entrepreneurial wisdom that you'd like to impart. Run your business the way you would want to do business with. Where are you going to spend your heart and money and you want a company you can build a relationship with, have a rapport with, feel comfortable with? And if you're the consumer doing that, well, now your job as the business owner is to build that business the same way. And it's amazing how the dividends come back three, four, five times in fold from doing something very simple.

50:29So I always encourage folks. Do what you say and say what you do and you'll be okay. Things will happen for you without you really having to go to extraneous efforts. Sometimes it's just that simple. It still amazes me every day that it works. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. Just have a couple notes or takeaways that I wanted to highlight. The first was on location, doing your homework, as far as where is that thirsty crowd going to be? Where am I going to find consistent demand and how can I put my product or service, even if it's not ice vending, how can I put my product or service in front of those people?

51:06And I think that was a really good way to illustrate that. Oh, how many doors does this place have? How many people are coming through this campground on a daily, weekly basis? Makes a lot of sense. Getting the business some visibility on Google for free. I love that. And then the relationships, taking care of your customers. Hey, the phone number's on there. Call me. I'm going to pick it up. Oh, I can dispense this stuff remotely. How cool is that? and the relationships with the property owners, property managers as well, making sure everybody is upfront and happy with that situation. So super inspiring.

51:37I don't know if the seasonality is gonna work for me up in the Northwest, but definitely got my gears turning because there's a beach near us that is just wall-to-wall people in the summer and it's a state park. So it's like, oh, I wonder what it would be like selling into local government situation, but like, oh, that would be perfect for it because I don't think there's anything there right now. And you know, those people are just baking in the sun. So definitely got my gears turning. If you're new to the show, awesome. Thank you so much for spending a little time with us today. If you're serious about making extra money, I have spent the last 10 years interviewing incredible side hustle entrepreneurs like Steve to deconstruct how they started, how they grew their businesses in limited hours.

52:15I would love to build you a personalized playlist of the side hustle show episodes that are going to be most relevant and impactful for you to get yours. all you got to do is go to hustle.show, answer a few short multiple choice questions, and you'll get that custom curated playlist that you can add to your device. You can learn what works and you can go forth and make some more money. Once again, that's at hustle.show. Big thanks to Steve for sharing his insight. Thanks to HelloFresh and Ladder for sponsoring this week. As always, you can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.

52:50Thanks for supporting the advertisers that support the show really does make a difference. That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. 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.