How to Start a Billboard Business: $30k a Month Part-Time (Greatest Hits)

24:13And then I can still build duplexes, multifamily townhomes, or a commercial building on this prop half. I still have two acres that aren't encumbered by the billboards. Gotcha. Have you ever gone down the route? I'm picturing where we used to live in California, right off of highway 580, like the main thorough fair from the Central Valley into the San Francisco Bay area. And a couple of billboards just look like these farmers, it's like cow pasture. And they kind of just plant them at the very edge of their property. And I don't know, maybe they own and operate it, or they have subbed that out to some billboard company or some billboard owner like that, where it's like, no, no, no, I don't want to buy your whole farm.

24:49I don't need that responsibility. I don't need that expense, but I would like to, can I sublease this little tiny segment of it? How does that part work. Have you ever gone down that path? Oh, absolutely. So you can own your land outright, or you can lease. And so I do have leases on property. So on the way to our airport here locally, we have a highway that's a one way in, one way out to the airport for about half our area. I have two billboards on that highway as people go in and out. I actually just leased that because it didn't make sense to buy that one at the time. So I leased that from him for an amount that would be determined based on what that individual billboard would generate.

25:24Normally, it's around 10 to 20 % of the revenue that you think that sign will generate on a yearly basis that you pay them. Okay. So rather than a fixed cost, it's kind of almost on a performance basis. I'll give you a cut of what I'm making from the sign. And you can do it either way. I think some of this is just whatever everybody's comfortable, right? You have two parties negotiating and you try to make sure it's fair. I always want to, I live here, I work here, I play here. I'm not going anywhere from my local market. So I'm not here to hose anybody. The person, the farmer in the example, I actually call him farmer in our town and I love him.

25:54So I like give him Christmas presents. I take care of him. I really like this guy. So I build relationships with some of these people. And so I want to make sure I take care of him. So for him, this is, he's getting a great amount of money to put up a billboard on a piece of this land that he wouldn't have otherwise used. And it's a win-win deal. Yeah, that makes sense. And so maybe my journey starts with looking up the local regulations. Like, is it even feasible to put in a new thing? Or do I have to go with the grandfathered in ones that already exist? And how do I go about looking up the landowners, trying to figure out how to acquire those?

26:24Because if you're going, if you're paying retail prices, it sounds like this would be quite expensive because you've had offers to come and buy up your inventory. Yeah? Yes. So that's the great, like I mentioned, you have buyers always out there. If you want, you own these assets, the buyers are always out there. So the big, we call the big boys, the Lamars and the out fronts of them. They will come in and make offers and they'll do it anywhere from seven to 12 times your forward revenue that you're bringing in on those that are bringing in revenue wise. So they're worth a lot. So if you're going to somebody that knows what they have, they're willing to sell, but they're going to want a little bit of a multiple on that.

26:57The great news is it cash flows. It will make money if they're underperforming, then great. If you know you've seen billboards that aren't performing well and somebody just had them or they're going through a bad time. Right now, maybe one of those great times. There's a lot of commercial property in distress in the markets. So a lot of commercial owners. So if you have somebody that owned a commercial building that may have had billboards on it, maybe they owned independently. This may be a great time to go talk to them because they may be distressed with their actual piece of commercial property, needing cash to cover something else.

27:25Maybe an opportunity if you see one that's not one of the big ones to go in and do that and buy it. I want to pause on that. cash flow plus equity piece, because you're saying, okay, well, these things sell for a seven to 12 X multiple. And that's not on monthly earnings. That's on annual earnings, right? That's correct. On annual earnings. So yeah, so you're building a business, right? So this is what's great. You know, if you've read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, he said, you want to be a business owner or an investor. And this gets you into both of those. So you're not just self-employed with a job. What I love about it is I have systems in place.

27:56So I actually don't touch any of my own stuff hardly. I have an accountant doing the bookkeeping. I have an installer doing all the work. I have people taking care of the creative, a print company doing the print or the digital. What then you have is an asset that you can sell that doesn't require me, Chris Brown, to be in the picture to be able to sell it. They could replace me really easily with somebody and go in and operate it. So then it sells as a business and the multiple of that business. So that's a great thing that you're building. You have the real estate play if you want it. If you own the real estate, you still own the real estate and you can sell it with or without the real estate that you actually own.

28:30You can sell it with just the boards, keep the real estate. You can give yourself a lease back to yourself on that. So there's options with that. Then you can just sell the billboards themselves to one of the bigger companies as they acquire for that up to 10, 12 times revenue as you're looking at it. Yeah. I'm still trying to come up with the cohesive side hustle theory around this, but it's this, yes, I'm working for near-term cashflow, but I'm also, I have ownership. I have equity in whatever I'm building such that I have the optionality to exit down the road if I so choose. And in this example, you're sitting on a multi million dollar asset.

29:02I don't need to sell it because it's just been enough passive cash flow every month. It's like this really cool place to be on that front. It's the same as a commercial building or a multifamily home or even a business, right? If you own any other business, then you have it and you can sell the asset off if you've built it correctly where it doesn't require you to run it. Yeah. Let's talk about the finding advertiser side of things. So I've got now I've got this new three acre property. I've got two new posts going up with eight faces, eight pieces of inventory there. Is this just a lot of smiling and dialing, trying to find who wants this inventory?

29:34Is it like plastering a big phone number, like your ad here, call me kind of thing? It can be a mixture of both. I think it just depends. So the first thing I definitely do is put a number on the signs, right? It's a six foot tall by 10 foot wide phone number that says advertise here, call this number or email, whichever one you want to do, because people will drive by those signs, see them, and by default, they're going to call or be interested in if they have a business or they want to run it. What's interesting about billboards, and I think I shared this with you on the pre-call, is a lot of people advertise for their business, but a lot of people love to see themselves up on signs.

30:07So they like to see themselves in advertisements. So they'll want to drive by a place because they drive by it, regardless if it was the right thing for them to do necessarily for their business. They love to see themselves up on signs. So they may advertise and be somebody that would call to get that. But it's a great way to do it is to put your number up there. That's the first way I would do it. Second, I would look around the local area. What's the next nearest business that makes sense? Or who do you know? So I would go look at the ones that are around there and start to call or to ask. Most of the time, if you have a great new location, a lot of times you don't have to make any calls at all.

30:41They'll just come to you and you're filling emails or calls from others as they start to fill up. Now maybe in year two, three, four, as they come open a little bit, then you may have to have a little bit more active involvement in that, but people then start to know you. So in my city, people know me. I'm the largest independent billboard operator in my metro area here, which now I've kind of started to build that brand of, oh, if you want a billboard called Chris, even if I don't have the right inventory, I can at least help somebody out and send them to the right rep for another company. And so I've been able to do that.

31:10Okay. And is it typically six month term, a 12 month term, as long a term as you can get? Like what's typical in terms of, If you're going to advertise, we'll put your ad up here. How long is that going to stay up for? Most billboards that I do, I do 12 month or longer contracts, specifically on the static, which is a printed vinyl sheet that goes up and gets stretched across there. And the reason is there's sunk costs into the actual print and the hanging that you want to make sure they have it. Billboards are also one of those long-term always on. You typically bake that in or you kind of, okay, it's going to be$1 ,000 a month plus costs, the printing costs, or you kind of like eat that and amortize it over the course of the year?

31:49Yeah, you can do it either way. So I actually break it in as an added cost and say, hey, look, this is your print cost or whatever. Now, if it's somebody I've worked with and I need to work on a deal or something like that, then I'll work with them. But most of the time, it's just big to an industry standard is they pay for their print, they pay for the install. Maybe you'll cover the graphics design or something like that for them. But most of the time they would do that. On the digital, it's a little different, right? Because you can just design it. And I literally can take go design right now, type into my computer and send it to any of my signs.

32:16And it goes up live in two minutes. So a little less work, a little bit. Wow. That's cool. There's benefits and detriments. And I like to share people, everybody's like, which one do you want to have? Personally, I actually like the old fashioned static signs the best. No maintenance, always up unless they get knocked down by wind, which doesn't happen because they're made to handle like a hurricane five strength winds, then they don't come down. The lights may or may not go off. that would be the only thing that happens and I go replace a light bulb or have somebody go replace that light bulb.

32:44The digital, I have to worry about internet. I have to worry about power. I have to worry about the actual screens going spots or whatever. You see a lot of signs up that have spots out or signs down. And that is part of the game, right? These are just ginormous, you know, 10 by 30 foot or 16 by 40 foot television screens. They will eventually, that are sitting out in the rain, in the cold, in the weather, they will go out over time, but they have great opportunities with them as well because you can sell a day-to-day spot you can sell out our spots you can put something up take it down you can barter you can trade with things for that you can sell your question originally was the contract length and i would say that most contracts are 12 months up to 24 months some get shorter in the one to six months just depending on the location you know if you're looking time square those are like hour by hour minute by minute contracts that they're selling and they have their way to do that but if you're wanting to do.

33:37Wow. Yeah. Right. They're getting high dollars for high minutes, but the ones on the highway that you see, most of the time you'll see an advertisement up there for about 12 to 24 months. I always was curious about that because I've had some friends be like, look, I'm up in, I'm up in Times Square, you know, take the picture, grab the screenshot kind of a thing. But it's like, it may have only happened for 90 seconds or something like, who knows, but you could say, Hey, I was featured. I was featured in Times Square billboard. My daughter, I did that for her birthday. Right. So we went out and put one up for her birthday on the billboard and she got a picture in front of it with happy birthday right after the new digital one going up and so that was fun i did that with my parents i took them out i have one out by the lake here locally that everybody goes to to the lake in the summer and so as we were driving out there and i was like i slowed down i was like hey look at the sign and it was them it was like love you mom and dad just whatever so they could see it you know just fun things that you can do so there's some abilities to do things that you on the digital that you couldn't do on a static but personally i like the static ones just as much now when you start to look at the difference in the two of why you would own one versus the other.

34:36The static normal rotation is you have eight advertisers per side on a digital billboard. And you start to look at that math. So one sign on a regular old-fashioned versus eight spots on a digital. That gives you a lot more inventory to move through for just having one sign on one side, one sign on the other. You have 16 spots on one side. Yeah, it's more work to go out and sell that stuff. Inventory is a big deal when you want to open up because if you can't get a location easy or you're paying higher dollar, you need to have that. And so being able to have people, more people be able to advertise.

35:09And again, you don't have to do it. It's constant. It rotates in every seven seconds on average for an advertiser. So it comes up every minute on average is what they would have. More with Chris in just a moment, including how you can get actual traffic stats for your billboard location, what his day-to-day involvement looks like, and when he felt comfortable retiring from his day job right after this. So last month, it was time to replace the air filter in the car, which is about the level of vehicle maintenance I'm qualified to do. So I google up the part number, I find this random store that is selling it, and then to my absolute delight, I see that they're running on Shopify.

35:43How could I tell? That little purple shop pay button at checkout. It meant not having to create yet another new account. It meant not having to find my wallet. I am paid and checked out in just a couple clicks. You already know that our sponsor, Shopify, is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, including that car parts website and dozens of side hustle show guests. And you probably already know about the built-in store templates and marketing tools that make it easy to get your store online and get found. But what you might not know is that Shopify can also help manage your inventory, ship products internationally, and even handle customer returns.

36:17On top of that, you've got access to their award-winning 24-7 customer support if you have any trouble. So let's see less carts go abandoned and more sales going with Shopify and their ShopPay button. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash side hustle. That's shopify.com slash side hustle. One more time, it's shopify.com slash side hustle. Spring is this natural reset point. And if you've been putting off dealing with some of the messier parts of your business, well, maybe now's the time to do a little spring cleaning. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O.

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37:27Let's make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash side hustle. That's Quo, Q-U-O dot com slash side hustle. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. Does anybody ask you about, well, how many cars are driving by every day? Like, what kind of traffic stats you got for me? Because I think this is actually kind of cool. like, okay, on these big road trip thoroughfares on I-80 or I-35 or something like, bored on your drive? Check out the Side Hustle Show. Tune in, make some extra money.

38:01But like, does anybody ask how many eyeballs are really seeing this? Yeah. So you'll get some very sophisticated that want to know how many. So great news is state highways put out a census every year and they're tracking people driving on highways. So they're actually counted multiple locations upon the highway everywhere across the country. So you have at least an accurate within a year or two, how much actual traffic. Now there's all kinds of different technologies that are out there. See how many people are in a car, how many people drove by, how many people are paying attention, recall, those kind of things.

38:31You do have the ability to have analytics as far as how many people are driving by on a daily basis, estimate a number of oppressions because you start to look at, all right, we have this many cars going this direction, this many cars going this direction. Maybe there's, it's kind of like the newspaper, billboards, radios, they all have this. We expect one and a half persons per car that would drive by versus It's just a single car, you know, and looking at it like that to do kind of an algorithm around that. But that's all like public data. Well, the piece for sure on the highway traffic is. And then individual billboard operators would then have their own amount of eyeballs they would give it to.

39:02Just like a magazine or even a show would say, a podcast may say, I have this many downloads versus this many viewers versus this many followers versus this many, right? Like they may count minutes versus hours. Yeah, how do you want to measure this? Normally whatever makes them sound the best, right? So that's what I would say that it's kind of not universal across everybody, but most people do traffic counts across the country. Okay. And is the pricing, obviously, the more viewers, the higher price you command? What kind of range is typical? Absolutely. So you start to look at that. And sometimes that is the case.

39:34You can have higher impression counts and you would have higher amounts. But if there's 10 other billboards right there, prices come down. It's probably similar in the media world, right? you start thinking about podcasts or YouTube ads or other things. When you're starting to run ads, if there's a lot of others in this space, it's not just the amount, it's the quality, it's the type, it's the time, all those different things playing to effect. I have, like I said, billboards that are static on probably a quarter of some of the other highways that I get almost the same amount or rates for the billboards that I would if I got on a different highway.

40:05And the reason is there's no other competition. So they want to be there. their billboard stands out. So recall is a really important thing. As you're driving down the highway, you want something that's memorable. So if I'm driving down the road and there's a thousand billboards, I may not pay attention to them. They may kind of get white noise to me. But if I'm driving down the road and there's one billboard and I literally, my truck hits it or I have to drive underneath it, I'm going to recall that one a lot more than the one that I just drove past a thousand of them on the highway. So value is determined not just on impressions, but it's on the location, the different things around that specific one.

40:41Okay, right. And thinking of trying to find the advertisers that are going to stick around long-term, they see the long-term value of kind of this similar to, I imagine, radio advertising, where it's repetitions and recall, like getting in front of people day after day after day. And also probably a direct response. I see a lot of personal injury attorneys like, call me. I guess a combination of the two where it's like, I would like to see an ROI based on this. I don't know if I could directly measure it, but I noticed that the phone rang more than it used to as a basis of having this thing. And you want to, and I tell people that all the time, it's not the only advertisement, right?

41:13They shouldn't do just this for direct response. So if you're trying to do only this and it's the only thing you're going to do today and you're looking for the phone to ring tonight, probably isn't the right method for you. However, you want to be up there. So when they do need it, not everybody needs a HVAC or an air conditioner repair tonight, but they need it at some point. And you, what you need to be is when they look you up on Google, which is how most people search something, they would say, Oh, I saw that. So now I have trust because I've seen them over and over for years and now I trust them.

41:41And so even though two others came up, I know this name, I trust this name and I'm there. So they're top of mind. They have the awareness. They have the trust factor. Billboard's do a great job of that, being always on, becoming a trust factor thing. I even have sales teams that use it. If you're on a company that sells to local businesses and they say, hey, I put my business up on there, not because I want people to. Actually, it's so that when my sales team goes out to make sales, people say, oh yeah, I saw your billboard. I know you're real. You're legit because no one's just wasting money on a billboard in a local town if they're not real, right?

42:13Most of the time you see them, you know, they're there, they're going to be there for a while. So it brings credibility as well. So it's great as an owner to have those options to different things. So you'll have everything from furniture stores, to lawyers, to doctors, to car dealers, to HVACs, to you name it. You kind of have a little bit of everything. Yeah. That awareness play is really interesting. It reminded me of back when I was painting houses, in college and we try and blanket the town with the little yard signs. Yard signs, that's right. And early on, I was like, why isn't the phone ringing?

42:40We got 20 of these things placed. But what it was, was when we'd go cold calling door to door, oh, I've seen your signs everywhere. It wasn't, I'm going to take action on this while I'm driving. It's just building that brand awareness and kind of giving the impression that like, dang, these guys are doing a lot of work around here. Like, what am I missing out on? almost the other almost subliminal billboard slash advertising hack was from brian scudamore 1-800-GOT-JUNK and like purposely like his franchisees purposely go and park the truck at these busy intersections assuming with the permission of the parking lot owner or whoever's owning that property they're not paying for the billboard they're just parking the truck when it's not in use and you see it over and over again and every time i see one of his trucks at these busy intersections i'm like i know your game i know your game because he talked about it on the show i thought it was really creative yeah it's a great way to bring awareness you're right it's It's like the We Buy Ugly Houses signs you see everywhere, right?

43:29Those were really popular for a while. Anything on the tools and technology side that help you manage this inventory or manage the team that helps put it all together? Yeah. So with mine, it's a small team. We use a lot of spreadsheets. So the technology for the signs themselves, depending on the manufacturer you have, have ways to upload and manage your content and how that's going. Finding them, Landglide is a great app if people don't use that. I use it for real estate purchasing, which basically is all that county data while you're driving on your phone, show you who owns what, where it is, lines, lot lines, all that kind of stuff.

44:01So Landglide is a great opportunity for somebody to grab. There is a fee for it, but it's a great app just to have if you're in the real estate game. Most people that are real estate investors probably have that one. Cool. That one is new to me. I never heard of it. We'll link it up. Landglide. Landglide, yeah. At this point, you're sitting on this inventory. At what point do you have to get involved? Is it when an advertiser turns over? What's a day in the life for a week in the life look like today? Yeah, so the last couple of years, it's been a little boring. I work about five hours a week, maybe.

44:30When new customers call in or I know I have some inventory coming up, I may reach out to people. Because it's long-term, you kind of know out in front, three to four months out when their contracts are coming due so you can have those conversations and start to look for somebody that may make sense to fill them. And sometimes you just, if you don't, you leave them, take them down, the sign goes up and you're surprised by who actually calls you and says, I want to be up there now. I've been waiting on the sign to come open because I have some signs that haven't been open in years. So if you have that, then there's the demand pent up.

44:57Somebody's just waiting for someday that sign's going to come down and they get to advertise on it. And so they'll call me. Yeah, do you keep a wait list in that sense? Yeah, a wait list for it. So just working with different ones and the locations matter. Like I have one that's out by the local lake. And so I may call RV dealers or boat dealers, stuff like that that makes sense seasonally to play out by the lake versus something else in a different location that it wouldn't make as much sense for them to play. so I think you have to just look at that so a day in the life I do answer a few phone calls send a few emails make sure that pick up checks for the accountant or you have those direct deposited whichever way again the team is important I think that I wanted to free up my time to be able to make those decisions to do what I want to do that's the idea of financial freedom was to not have to go to work every day and pick it up so that's what I've been able to do I've hang out with my family a lot so I'm able to make all my daughter's events I'm able to hang out with my wife, maybe a little too much.

45:50She says, I'm always home and she's always home. So she's like, all right, you need to get out of the house, but it's great. Yeah, go find another hobby. Yeah, exactly right. Was there a monthly income target where you felt comfortable saying, I'm going to do this. I'm going to pull the trigger out of this early retirement thing. So when you start looking at wealth and how you define that, I think it's one of those definitions of financial freedom is you have your expenses and you have your income. And And once you cover that, then you're technically out of the rat race. Now, I'm a very, very conservative person.

46:20That's why I buy a lot of things with cap, do that. But I'm one of those that want to make sure I have at least double of my expenses coming in or triple my expenses come in before I would have stepped away. I'm not one of those that just say I get right even with it and I'm out or one month. So I've had these billboards now. I started in 2011 and started growing it since then and been able to do that. So this has been years in the making. but as I slowly grow, continue to build, you just kind of look at that expense number, which seems to grow. I don't know how that happens, but when you have a family, your expenses seem to grow every year along with it, but that's what it kind of looks like.

46:51So as long as I could get and cover those by multiples, then I felt good to step out and away from the rat race and be able to escape. Yeah. I have a little bit of a buffer on the cashless. I'm the same way. We talked to other people like, I made my first 50 bucks. So I quit my job. Whoa, whoa, whoa. How are you going to turn that into 5 ,000 or 15 ,000? And it's actually one of those interesting mindsets. So as a builder and somebody that's had this mindset of saving and investing and building, leaving. So I did all this while I had a corporate W-2 job. So I had several jobs in the past. And so as I was building these, and then when I finally stopped, it's kind of that weird dilemma, like now I'm using some of this and that feels weird.

47:30I'm not just accumulating and investing and reinvesting and to live off of it's a little bit weird for me. but I think it's important to be able to just to step back and say look we're good for here on out I mean worst case I sell the billboards and cash out best case I continue to to hold on to them and they continue to grow in value and we live off of them for longer and I continue to build new ones so I'm actually looking this year to add several more to my portfolio and hopefully will and my goals is to double the number of boards I have in two years so as I start to grow and continue because there's like there's a point where it's like how much is enough and then how much do you want to keep going?

48:04And so this is just a game. It's pretty fun though. Yeah, that was the next question. Where do you want to take this? You want to add more inventory? You want to sell the thing? But it sounds like you got your answer. You want to double the number of faces. So what I actually really want to focus on is teaching others. So I want to help others build wealth, get out of the rat race and achieve that financial freedom. So this is where I'm going to go next is actually teaching a course on building your billboard. So it's called the Billboard Academy. It's going to come the next couple of months. If somebody wants to learn a little bit more about that, they could check it out on wantmore.org.

48:34You could get a download free guide to creating passive income via billboards to see if it's something you'd like to look into. It gives you kind of the starting point for that. So that's what I'm doing on the next phase. So I'm looking forward to going and teaching others what I've learned, put into practice. So this isn't one of those I'm just saying, you should go do this, right? It's everybody's doing. I actually have done this for years, not one year, not just during an upcycle through the last 15 years as I've built out and continue to grow it. And it's a very trusted source of income that most people would recognize as a good investment, not just a fly by the night that may be done tomorrow or not.

49:09These are quite tested over about a hundred years, right? Or more. That's right. Wantmore.org, the Billboard Academy coming soon. Go check that out. I wanted to ask what's surprised you the most over the last 13, 14 years of doing this or any mistakes that you wish you could do over? It's more about the time of learning, the years that you're in the game to get you better versus a get rich quick thing. And I think that surprised me how many people want to play the get rich game versus want to play the get wealthy over time game. Both work, but I think it's one of those, I can play the sure game over time.

49:40If you just started buying a property, a billboard, a business, whatever it may be, creating that income, starting to save it, like you're saying, not when you make your 50 bucks, you're out and you jump out and you say, oh, look, I'm rich, I'm out of this game, but to continue to do it consistently. I think that surprised me that more people aren't doing that. Yeah, it's something about stacking up this incremental cashflow, doing it year after year. And before you know it, you're living very comfortably. Plus you have this whole asset that you can go and exit for a big long sum if you ever want to get there.

50:07I remember I asked Miles Beckler, we're talking about online business versus local business, like sweaty startup style things. And I was like, hey, Miles, you know, any shortcuts to get started? And before I could even finish, he's like, shortcuts lead to long delays, my friend. To your point about getting rich quick. Exactly right. It's like, if instead of trying to get rich quick, you took this slower, more methodical path, you'd find out that you did it pretty quick on a big time horizon. I mean, you're still a young person. I think you got a lot of years ahead of you. People would realize that they have the ability to build that wealth over time and it doesn't take a lot.

50:38It just takes the consistency over it. Yeah. 10 years seems like a long time, but in the grand scheme of things, you're going to have a lot more life ahead. It's going to come whether you like it or not, right? Very good. Wantmore.org. You can find Chris over there. You can find Signs of Good on Facebook. We didn't talk about that, but there's a nonprofit or charity component to this business where from every dollar or every ad that gets sold, there's a charity component to that. Signs of Good. You find it over on Facebook. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.

51:07It's more about who we were coming versus just what we have. And it reminds me, so I was in my barn the other day. So I have a CrossFit gym in the barn and I was in there working out and there's two garage doors, and this little hummingbird flies in, and he's flying across the rafters. He got himself stuck up in the top. He's going back and forth and back and forth, and he's just wearing himself out. He comes down, goes right back up there, and he goes back and forth. So I finally get a feeder out and start lowering him down slowly, little bit by little bit. As I watch him wear himself out and come down, I start to think of myself, he finally got out.

51:42He finally was able to get him lower enough that he could actually escape the barn. But how many times is that us where we're not looking, we're just flying harder and harder and harder. We're trying harder to get out of the rat race, to make the extra thing, to have the extra business. But what we really need sometimes is to take a minute or even have somebody that can have that outside perspective. So who do you have that outside perspective? Do you have a coach, a guide, someone that's showing you that like I did for that hummingbird by stepping him down, step by step using that hummingbird feeder.

52:14He was able to finally get free. I didn't have to touch him. I didn't have to do anything, but he just needed somebody to point him in the right direction to let him reach that freedom. Find a mentor, find a guide if you don't have that so that you can see the next best steps that you need to take and how to do that. And that's one thing that's helped me the most is to be the guide that helps others become a free hummingbird that they're able to go get out of the rat race, get free financially and live that life that they were desiring to live. I think that's a really powerful metaphor. I think about like the fly slamming against the window, trying to get out.

52:52You know, it's just like, dude, the door's open. Go two feet that way. That's right. But I feel like you very rarely take the pause to do this in our personal life. Like I'm doing the same thing, expecting different results. That's insane. And I'm wondering why it's not working. Yeah. So I think that's a really powerful metaphor. Watching him do that. It was a lot longer of a process than I wanted to invest in that little bird's life. But as an hour went by, I slowly worked him down. It was fun to watch because at the end, I just sit there and I was like, how many times has that been me? Like, I'm just trying so hard.

53:23And then somebody else, though, that could have showed me a step faster, a different way to approach it. And I could have easily escaped. But I just kept going harder and harder and fighting the system or whatever it may be. So it's not always about that. Well, perhaps billboards will be that escape path for you or any of the other side hustles that we've covered on 11 plus years on the podcast here. A couple of notes before we wrap up for me is like looking at it as an alternative investment, like a different asset class to park some money into that you have a little bit more hands-on control over.

53:55Like, oh, I can proactively fill this ad space with advertisers. I can proactively go out and seek better deals rather than the efficiency that's kind of naturally baked into like a S &P ETF or something like that. And I really like the cashflow plus equity piece where it's like, oh, if I have four faces making$2 ,400 a month, that's cool. But it's also become this asset that can now be worth seven to 12 times that if I were to go out and sell that. So I think that's really, really powerful and how it seems like an attainable path to building wealth. It's like, you got to have something that you own.

54:30You can't just be working for money all the time. So that's what stood out to me. Again, sidehustlenation.com slash billboards as well. You find the show notes links to everything that we mentioned. That's where you'll also find your listener only bonus for this episode. That's my list of 25 other unconventional rental ideas, things that other people are renting out for a profit. You can download that for free. Again, side hustle nation.com slash billboards, or just follow the show notes link in the episode description and you get right over there. Big thanks to Chris for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.

55:02As always, you can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thanks for supporting the advertisers that support the show. We had a whole show about advertising, you know, you can support the ads. That's what makes the whole thing tick. That's 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, not going to lie. I kind of want to buy a billboard after listening to this. So until next time, let's go out there and make something happen.

55:30and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.