Start This Simple Side Hustle Before Everyone Else Does⏐Ep. #216

What if I told you that there's a business where people literally pay you to torture themselves and they're freaking addicted to it? I spent the last month diving deep into the mobile, sauna, and cold plunge industry. And guys, the numbers are kind of nuts here. Why did I look into this industry? Because I emailed my newsletter, 30 Business Ideas, and this one came in as number one that you wanted to learn about. So here we are. I'm talking about operators pulling 10 to $50,000 a month with 50% gross profit margins, and some are hitting break even in only 75 days. Now, why is this happening? Well, the cold plunge market hit $318 million two years ago and is projected to hit half a billion dollars by 2030. And the crazy part is that search volume for cold plunge and sauna keywords increased 370% over the last couple years. People are googling this stuff like it's going out of business. So today I'm going to break down five real operators, real businesses with, with their numbers, tactics, failures. Who's crushing it in this space? How are they making money? Who has a physical location? Who is only mobile? Is the bigger trend in saunas or cold plunges or both together? At the end of this, I'm interviewing a guy in Michigan who's expecting all of his equipment to be paid off within under a year with 50% margins. I'm going to profile a gym partnership in Texas hitting 130 recurring members in less than a year, and a business owner in Maine that serves over 12,000 people a year. By the end of this video, you're going to know exactly how to enter this market, what equipment to buy, how to find customers, and most importantly, how to avoid the mistakes that cost these guys tens of thousands of dollars. I wanted to look at five different business models in this space so you could compare and contrast which ones you like or prefer. And I'm going to break down all five and rank them from five to one. And I like number one so much, I went ahead and interviewed the guy at the end of this. What's his pricing strategy? What are his equipment regrets? Why did he choose wood burning over electric? You're not going to learn this stuff anywhere else. So let's get started. All right, in fifth place is Denver Mobile Sauna. This is Denver Mobile Sauna run by a guy named Micah. Now, I'm only ranking this business fifth because the competition is so high between these five businesses that I'm profiling. There's nothing wrong with this business. Denver Mobile Sauna is a mobile, sauna and cold plunge business outside of Denver, which is the same type of business that my number one on this list has. But I'll get into why I prefer that business in a little bit. So just to set the stage, they have mobile, sauna and cold plunge units that they drive around, drop off and rent out. Here's how their pricing works. 300 bucks for two hours, 450 bucks for four hours, 525 for eight, or $600 for an overnight rental. And for an extra $200, you can rent for the whole weekend. So the math here is straightforward. If you're doing just 10 rentals a month at an average of $450, then you then you're looking at $4,500 in monthly revenue, but your costs are minimal. It's basically just your time and your labor and a little bit of gas. You do have to maintain the equipment and pay for insurance, but those costs are very minimal. I like the idea of charging both per hour per day and per weekend because this is called price anchoring. Someone goes to the website with the intent to book it per hour and they see that they can pay just a little bit more to book it for the weekend. About 70% of the time they're going to go with that option. He's going to spend the same amount of time and money and work picking that thing up and dropping it off whether they rent it for two hours or two days. So you might as well juice a little more revenue out of it. And the interesting part is that he's not just doing drop offs. He's partnering with wellness studios for pop up events. That's one thing that's unique to this business that I didn't see in a lot of others. This creates a recurring revenue stream without having the overhead of a physical location. And the beauty of this model is that you can start it as a side hustle. You don't have to quit your full time job. If you do two to three rentals on the weekends, then you're making an extra one to $2,000 a month just from weekends. Okay, fourth place is Cedar Grove Sauna. This owner turned a side hustle into an empire. Jackie Stratton up in Maine owns Cedar Grove Sauna and she is a freaking legend. Here's why. She started this business in 2020 as just a side hustle. Looking for some off season cash, if you will. Fast forward a few years and she's serving 8 to 12,000 people per year. Let me repeat that. 12,000 people per year. And what blew my mind about this is her operation. She only burns through 10 cords of wood annually. And now one cord of wood is about half of a truck bed full. And depending on the market you're in, a cord of wood is going to cost you between 400 and $900. So right off the bat, we know that her yearly wood cost is, which is her only real cost of goods sold is going to be between four hundred and nine thousand dollars. She has eight staff members and she operates two fixed locations plus one mobile unit. Now, the reason I ranked her above Denver mobile saunas is because she's hedging your bets. Having a physical location sends a signal to the market that you're here to stay, that you're permanent, and maybe that you're a little more expensive. It's like when I used to operate iPhone repair stores. I could charge much more at my stores that were fixed in a shopping mall next to a McDonald's as opposed to my locations that were just a mall kiosk or in an airport because my customers had no clue if I was actually going to be there a month later if they had a warranty claim to file. Don't underestimate the signal that this real physical fixed location sends to the market and how much it helps you stand out from your mobile only competitors. Now, Jackie's mobile unit rotates weekly to different locations across New England. And the brilliant part about it is that she's built an email list of sauna aficionados. These are people that literally plan their summer Tuesdays around her events. She's created a community, not just a business. And I've noticed that she's so committed to authenticity that she takes international study trips to Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Sweden. She's not just running a sauna business for some extra cash. She's become the sauna expert in her local market. And that also sends a signal that you're a premium option and that you know what you're talking about. So what started as just a Covid era side hustle has transformed into a full time operation because her demand was overwhelming. That's the power of starting small and letting customer demand pull you forward. It's kind of like when Crumble launched. I read so many articles that talked about the thousands of cookie recipes that they tested and how they took all of their learnings from Silicon Valley and from building tech products and put it into the cookie business. That story sells. Believe it or not, that story enables them to sell more cookies when you might think on the surface that they're not interrelated at all. So when it comes to Jackie's business up in Maine, my key takeaway is that community beats competition every single time. She's not just selling sauna time. This is not just a commodity, not just a way for her to make some extra money. She sold a whole experience, became an expert in it and built a tribe around it. Okay, third place, Chillwagon Wellness. And I love that among these five businesses that I'm ranking, we're hitting all pockets of the United States, not just the cold markets for the saunas or the hot markets for the cold plunges. This model works anywhere and everywhere. So Chillwagon Wellness, I call these guys the young guns. Vincent and Brock down in Arizona. 22 years old, doing over $60,000 in monthly revenue. Here's exactly how they're doing it. Their revenue model is private bookings, 350 to $500 for a two hour minimum. Then they do events where they set up their units at festivals and farmers markets and charge 35 to $45 per person just for one quick session. Then they even do corporate jobs where they come into companies and charge $1,500 for a half day where all of the employees can use the units for free. Their operational costs per event are only 30 to $60, which which is just ice and gas. Here's what their setup looks like. It's a custom trailer that has two cold plunges with jets and a sauna for five people. Compression boots, synthetic turf, and a really clean layout. But what makes them brilliant is not their trailer. It's the fact that they're not just offering sauna and cold plunges. They created a whole experience around this that's called Plunge Sweat Coffee. It's a branded event that's basically workout, then cold plunge, then sauna, then a coffee social. What's brilliant about this is the increased surface area. You're casting a wider net. Maybe some of these people have no interest in a sauna or a cold plunge. They just want some coffee and hang out with their friends. Maybe some of these people just love cold plunges, don't even drink coffee, but they're going to go for the cold plunge. It provides endless upsell opportunities, endless surface area, and enables you to capture those customers that intend to come for a one time experience and to sell them on recurring experience as well. But their business to business strategy is where they really shine. Here they partnered with another local business called Burn Boot Camp and a few other local gyms and the gym owners love these guys because it elevates the entire event. It's kind of like having a great clips inside a Walmart. It's a symbiotic relationship. You go to get your haircut, you know what, you might as well pick up a watermelon. You go to pick up a watermelon and hey, I need a haircut. It's co marketing. These are businesses that don't compete with each other, but they're attracting the same type of customer, someone concerned about their health. And it enables the business owners to position themselves as Arizona's premier wellness concierge and not just a mobile sauna. And now that I think about it, Denver mobile sauna was number five because they weren't really doing any of these cool special things. They weren't doing the hard things. Remember, the harder way is usually the better way. Coordinating events, calling other business owners, forming partnerships, that's just hard. And there are risks associated with it. But that's what helps you stand out. Surely it's not cheap for Jackie up in Maine to fly to Finland to learn more about how saunas work. And you're not going to see an immediate return on investment with stuff like that. But over the long run, if you're willing to play the long game, it pays dividends. All right, now these guys in Arizona, they spent 3500 bucks on Facebook ads and generated 80% of leads from that ad spend. And I would bet that of the remaining 20%, a lot of it came from that ad spend as well, but it just happened organically. For instance, you see a paid ad and you share it with a friend. Depending on what your attribution looks like. In other words, depending on how granularly you're looking at that data from Facebook, you may or may not capture that additional organic customer that came from your paid ad. And these guys are focusing on business owner testimonials over just individual reviews. And this is because their business to business strategy is first and foremost and business owners trust other business owners more than they trust individual consumer reviews. So they really, really put a lot of effort into trying to get testimonials, case studies and reviews from business owners that they're partnering with other gyms or corporate events, festivals, etc. These guys also have a huge location advantage. Scottsdale and Phoenix is a wealthy demographic that has year round demand for cold plungers because it's freaking hot. It has a fitness obsessed culture and when they launched, somehow they had zero competition. They've since added mobile IV therapy for Additional revenue streams. That's going to be a whole other video. And I love that these 22 year olds really understand that in the wellness space, the money comes from stacking services to maximize your RPC revenue per customer. Med spas do this really well as well. Okay, time for number two. This guy's name is Sam. He has a business down in Cleburne, Texas, about an hour from me. I interviewed him on my podcast a year ago. It was episode 84 on audio. Came out on October 28, 2024 or on YouTube. You could see that interview in the show notes below. Now, this business is called Drip Sauna Co. And I promise they're not ranked number two just because I interviewed the owner and I know more about it. It's because of the piggyback method, which I'll get to in a minute. So the owner of Drip Sauna Sam is a guy that's a lot like me. He's distracted, he's launching all kinds of different businesses. He had a fencing business that did well. And then he's like, eh, let's try something else. Then he started installing stock tanks, which looks something like this. You buy it at tractor supply for 500 bucks. He installed some pool equipment from Amazon that cost one or 200 bucks, graded the land, put it down, charged three to $5,000, grew it with Facebook ads. It's kind of like a kiddie pool, but nicer and also for millennials. And it's just a way to cool down in the hot Texas heat. He started that business and crushed it and is still crushing it, still growing it. That's a whole other episode as well. But then he started thinking about the contrast therapy business, which is what we're talking about. Cold plunge to sauna, sauna to cold plunge, back and forth, all kinds of health benefits, yada, yada yada. But he thought, I only want to launch this if I can piggyback on another business and immediately tap into their customer base. So he gets a couple business partners and he starts looking around, is there a gym, Is there some sort of a business that I can put this inside of? Because you don't need a big footprint and just immediately start tapping into their customer base. Kind of like that Walmart great clips example I just gave. And they came up with this idea because they went to a bachelor party in Louisiana, they woke up with hangovers and they went and did contrast therapy. And that was their light bulb moment. We need to bring this to Texas. But here's where it gets brilliant. They spent two Years trying to find the right standalone location. Then Sam went to the gym one day he saw a picture of some unused space, sent it out to his business partners and said, hey, what if we just see if we can use this space? It was about two bedrooms worth of space. So he talked to the manager. The manager said this could be interesting. They worked out a deal and Sam started with four infrared saunas that cost seven to $8,000 each. All of these can be financed. He bought two Colt plunges at $10,000 each, and he paid $2,000 a month to the gym to rent the space. Now it's positioned in the perfect spot. You walk into the gym, you get checked in, you start going to the equipment, and you walk right by this space. Within a few months, they had 130 monthly recurring members that were paying them $75 a month for unlimited usage of their units. That's a 45 minute session. Or if they wanted to accommodate walk in customers, they just charge 30 bucks per session. In case you're not doing the Math, that's over $10,000 of monthly recurring revenue. And they broke even in under a year, including paying off all their equipment. Their one regret, they didn't install drains underneath the cold plunges because swapping out the water is kind of a pain. So if you're going to do this, install a drain. Their competitors are charging over twice that same amount, 150 to 175amonth for the same exact equipment. And it's more inconvenient for the customers because now they have to go to the gym and then they have to drive to the contrast therapy place. They are a one stop shop and less than half the price. And their rent is even cheaper than their competitors as well. Same equipment, half price, more convenient for everyone. Win, win, win. And if some of his customers want to bring the cold plunge to them, he will install a stock tank at their house. And that's a very unique setup. He makes around $1,500 profit per job on those stock tank installations. And he finds almost all of his customers from Facebook ads. And anytime you're in entrepreneurship, you always want to offset the reliable recurring stuff with the one hits. The higher ticket offerings. The sonic hole plunge business brings in monthly recurring revenue. The stock tank installation business brings in thousands of dollars at a time. And it's just nice because being an entrepreneur is extremely volatile. Income is extremely lumpy, and it's nice to be able to smooth that out a little bit. This one's number two because of the gym partnership. He's got a built in customer base. On day one. There's natural cross promotion opportunities. The gym shares their email list with him. He doesn't need any marketing because the foot traffic is the marketing. And I always like to say in any retail business, you can either pick the best location or you can pick an okay location and spend a lot more money in marketing. Your location is your marketing. Now here are the tactics that Sam uses to acquire customers. He makes this first session free. This creates an addiction. People love how they feel afterwards. He offers both private and public cold plunges. Private for introverts, public for the social content for the extroverts. That's also a built in viral marketing tactic. And this is just a great business. So time for number one, purely nomadic sauna up in Grand Rapids in Michigan, home of the University of Michigan. This is Danny. I spent an hour talking to him last month and I just love the way he did things from the start. He started with one unit. He paid $22,000 for it and then he added a second unit for $10,000. Once he had enough demand for that, he's forecasting a full payback of all of this money within 12 to 18 months with 50% profit margins. This business is great for him because he also has a home inspection business and it helps offset that income. And one kind of intangible that I love about this business is that Danny gets his four kids involved to teach entrepreneurship to his family. And as a father of four kids, I completely endorse that. He also noticed that his customers have more demand for a wood burning authentic experience. Remember, when it comes to asana, you can do infrared, you can do electric sauna, and you can do wood burning sauna. Now, of course, wood burning is a little harder. You got to supply the wood that comes out of your cost. If you use pine, it's going to burn quickly. You want to use oak because it's more dense, but it's also more expensive and heavier to carry around. But Danny says it is well worth it. He finds his customers on Facebook Marketplace. That's it. Not boosted posts, not paid ads, just organic free posting to Facebook Marketplace. And his pricing, 350 per day, 650 per weekend, which is Friday evening to Monday morning or 1200 for a full week. His biggest business is saunas. But people can pay a little extra to add on a cold plunge, which is just an inflatable tub that cost I think a few hundred dollars. Now I really love the way Danny did this because his other business, Home Inspection, is kind of seasonal, so this business offsets that seasonality. So if you have or want a seasonal business, the best way to combat that seasonality is to add another seasonal business to the other seasons. My friend owns a bunch of pressure washing businesses and he says the best thing a pressure washing business can do is to start a Christmas light installation business. If he could do it all over again, he would have bought his second unit first because his second unit was cheaper and it's a lot lighter because it's an aluminum cedar hybrid. It weighs about half as much and you can move it by hand. Another thing I love about his story is that he was the first mover in Grand Rapids, much like the guys in Scottsdale. Do a simple scrape on outscraper or just do a simple Google search on Google Maps and see if you have competitors within an hour of you. Now I'm just going to sound like an eternal optimist here, but whether you have a lot of competitors or no competitors, either one could be good. A lot of competitors could signal a lot of market awareness. A lot of people looking for this service. A lot of opportunity to stand out and be better. No competitors means less market awareness. Not a lot of people could be searching for it. But if you can educate the market a little bit, you can be first. Because surely eventually there will be other competitors. Why not be first? Now if you really want to get into the nitty gritty about insurance costs, towing capacity, what his cash cows are, other customer acquisition strategies, where he finds his wood, where he finds operational efficiencies, how he partners with wedding parties, birthday parties, events. Check out my interview with him right at the end of this episode. Alright, key takeaways from all five of these businesses. Facebook Ads, Facebook ads. Facebook ads. Facebook ads. They're driving 60 to 80% of leads across multiple operators. And the great thing about Facebook Ads is that you can start with just a Facebook Marketplace post. If you've got demand on Facebook Marketplace, then you'll have even more demand if you boost that Facebook Marketplace post. And then you'll have even more demand if you're willing to do proper Facebook ads. Also, I made a 45 minute video called Facebook Ads Guide for Noobs that's in the show notes as well. Of these five businesses, the ones that are doing the best are partnering. They're partnering with existing businesses that have the same customer base. Gyms, wellness studios, Airbnbs. Make your first session free. Get testimonials from business owners, not just from consumers Offer tiered pricing. Just like the popcorn at the movie theaters, you're probably going to go for the biggest one because there's only $0.79 extra. The same principle applies here also. When you book these corporate events, it's a lot more surface area. Every single employee that uses your unit on their employer's dime might become a customer of yours on an individual level. You're not selling cold plunges. You're not selling saunas. You're selling longevity. You're selling an experience. You're selling doing hard things. You're selling that feeling that people get when they come out of these things. You're selling the sizzle, not the steak. Do not underestimate location. Ever. Never underestimate location. Whether that's physical location or a digital location of where you're advertising your business, it's everything. This industry is still in the education phase, but you will be riding a tidal wave. We're still very early. We'll probably still be early in three to five years. That means you gotta be patient. Probably helps if you have a love for this thing. As a user of saunas or cold plunges, It'll help this business or side hustle be more sustainable for you. All right, without further ado, please hear from Danny directly. I've nomadic saunas up in Michigan. Share this with a friend that might want to start this business. And thanks for hanging out on the Kerner office. Okay, so you start cold plunging, literally, in a lake by cutting out the ice. You're into it, Your wife's not. Then you're like, all right, to get the full benefits, we gotta do sauna and cold plunge. You get an infrared sauna. You don't like it so much, you build a real sauna. You like it. And then at that point, cause your. Your brain works kind of like mine. It's like, all right, how do I monetize this?

Actually, when I built the cold plunge in the backyard, my wife was like, oh, if you're gonna do this crazy thing, I'll do it with you. So she actually jumped pretty quickly, jumped on board and really enjoyed it. So, yeah, So I started looking at what it would cost to build one. And I was like, oh, the cost, the time. I don't know if I can do that. And then I saw a guy over in Minnes Post, Hey, I got three saunas. I'm switching kind of how I do my business. I'm selling them. Here's the pricing. And I looked at them, and I was like, yeah. And I started doing the math in my head and I'm like, I can't build them for the amount of time. And I started thinking of like, okay, I'm taking time away from my other, from my home inspection business. I'm like, I can't do it for cheaper than this.

And this is for a mobile sauna specifically.

Correct, Correct.

What was the price?

I bought two of them actually from him. One was a hair over 20 grand, the other one was under 10 grand. I originally wanted one, kind of reached out, said, hey. So he shot me some videos, gave me some details and I was like, hey, yeah, I got to do this. So we talked about it, reached out, said, yeah. So I drove out there, picked it up. When I was out there, I was looking at kind of the other two he had for sale and I was like, yeah, maybe if, you know, if things go good, we can at some point do something.

And if you have one rental unit of any in any business, you rent it out and you're done. You can't rent it out again. Right. So that's probably what you're thinking. You're optimistic, you're like, yeah, I don't know, I'm feeling pretty good about this. Like I'm going to buy one, might as well buy two.

Yeah, yeah. So I get back and I start using it and part of the thing was like, hey, I never had a wood, wood burning one. So it's going to take me some time to figure this out. I love sauna. Like, hey. So almost every night we're cranking up the sauna. I just parked it my in my driveway, neighbors were coming over. I just kind of doing a little community, you know, community sauna. So yeah, just kind of enjoying it, figuring out the little quirks. And you know, I think what I've realized through one of my favorite things about business and starting businesses is figuring out the process and kind of creating efficiencies around the process. And so I was like, okay, how can I make this process the most efficient? And I mean, I gotta kind of try it and figure it out and make mistakes and yeah, just have fun with it. So I can kind of do that. So I started doing that. My wife is a designer, so she started doing some of the, working on some of the back end design. We started the website and you know, one of the things, obviously the sauna doesn't have too many consumables other than wood. I mean that's obviously the biggest expense, if you will. And my parents, they live on a farm and they have access To a lot of free wood.

Yeah. So when it comes to the wood, is there like an authentic sauna that doesn't need wood necessarily? Or if you're going to start a business in this, like you kind of need an authentic sauna. That's.

So you can do, you can do electric. There are electric saunas where you can get like steam and it can filter feel very close. The problem with that is, well, how are you gonna guarantee that there's the correct power source on site? I mean, with electric vehicles, people do have a lot more 30, 40, 50amp plugs in their garage. But I mean, at least here in west Michigan most people don't have that. So, you know, okay, do I drag a generator along then? You gotta. Yeah, I'm going.

So the wood burning is critical for the rental aspect because of the power issue?

Because of the mobile and the power. Yeah, yeah.

Whereas if this were affixed at someone's home, then it, wood burning is not as important.

No, no. Then you could easily do the electric and still get with some of the nicer electric ones. You can definitely get a lot more.

Is it the full real experience as an electric one? Like if I wanted one at my house, would I be okay with electric or is it kind of not fully authentic or effective?

There's something about the nostalgia of just like actually feeding a fire wood. I mean, I'm kind of a pyro.

I'm a pirate, so I get it.

So it's like, oh, there's something, there's something about that. You can put it at a, you know, on your driveway in the city, you can take it out to your lake house, you can take it out to the woods. You know, it's like, yeah, that you can have in a lot different, different areas. And the guy in Minnesota who I bought them from, he had actually worked out a deal with the Minnesota parks where he had it parked at one of their like boat launches. So he'd kind of feed them some of the proceeds as a fee to have it there. And then he's kind of going more to instead of like. So the way I do things is it's more of either a weekend or a week, week long rental. So I bring it out, drop it off, give you all the woods, teach you how to use it, and then come back and pick it up.

Okay. So when you go out to see these, you end up buying two of them then.

So I bought the first one, drove that home. It was probably a couple months later he texted me, goes, hey, I got somebody Interested in the other one? I've already done business with you. I, I know you kind of mentioned you were interested. If you want it, I'll give you kind of first dibs on it.

Okay. So you bring the thing home. When does the mobile cold plunge come into it?

That's an interesting thing that we've been planning. So I bought a couple of. There's like the inflatable kind of like the same like stand up paddle board material type cold plunges. So I've picked up a couple of those and what I'm realizing is like, man, unless you have a chiller in the summertime in Michigan, it's hard to keep that water cold. So our goal or our idea is to just kind of stick with those inflatable tubs, bring those along, you can fill them up, put ice in there, leave it outside in the cold. It's not a higher ticket rental item, but it's just one of those add ons where, yeah, most people do want to do that kind of contrast therapy. What I've seen a lot of other kind of sauna businesses do is they do kind of like an outdoor shower type deal. You hook the hose up to it, kind of just either have like a pull string or something where you can turn it on, you know, get that cold water and get back in the sauna. So there's a couple different options for doing that. And. Yeah.

Okay, so are. You're not always renting out both together. You rent out them out individually as well or they always go together.

The saunas are the ones we mainly rent out. And then the cold plunge is kind of an add on, if you will, to the.

Okay, so you never. Yeah, you don't rent out the cold plunge by itself.

No.

You primarily rent out the sauna and sometimes people pay extra for the cold.

Correct. The cold lunch? Yep, correct.

Okay. And it's just like, it's just the inflatable ones with the chiller on it. Correct. How much do those cost?

The inflatable ones are just a couple hundred bucks. Those are pretty, pretty cheap and they're pretty good. If you want a chiller, then they're, you know, they're anywhere from a thousand to, you know, a couple thousand bucks.

So let's go back to when you first buy the sauna. You bring it back home. What does the business look like those first 30 days? What do you do first when you start the website, when you start marketing? How do you market all that?

Yeah, I think I kind of took the approach that I did when I started my home inspection business where it was. I want to build a good digital kind of foundation. I've seen how Google, how getting in early is important and pays dividends in the long run. Here in Grand Rapids, I don't know of any other mobile sauna rental companies. There's a couple on the outskirts, kind of outside of Grand Rapids, in west Michigan area, one up in Rockford and kind of over by the lakeshore. But my thought was, okay, I want to get in early, and even if I'm not running this thing full force, I at least want to start laying that foundation. So getting the Google business, trying to start getting reviews, trying to get the website up, start putting pictures, start getting kind of all those things that Google likes to see.

So you do that first week or so?

Yeah, first couple of weeks doing that. We just. Our daughter is coming up on three months old, so been a little. It was a little bit of a crazy time to decide to. To start a business, but that's how life works out and you just gotta roll with it. But so one of the things we decided to try was, hey, let's just throw this out on Marketplace. You know, not really push it hard yet, but just kind of get some rentals under our belt and kind of go through the process. And so that's kind of what we did throughout there. And like, anything on Marketplace, you get some, you know, random people kicking tires, and then you get some people like, hey, I want it for this weekend. And so got our first couple rentals through that.

Sorry, what did your Facebook Marketplace post look like? Like you. You posted pictures of the unit. How did you price it? Was it priced by the day? By the week? And I imagine people were probably on there looking to buy one, not even looking for rentals, and it just kind of popped up.

Correct, correct. So, yeah, I just kind of. I put the day price on the listing. Hey, mobile rental, 350 bucks. And then in the description, like, hey, there's a mobile sauna. Here's some details. Here's my pricing for weekend week. And then I put the website down there, like, hey, if you want more details, here's the website. And that was kind of just a funnel to get people through to the website. I use Squarespace, so they have the acuity scheduling. So I threw that up there. Yeah, I actually got a couple rentals.

So 350 for a day and how much for a week?

It's 650 for a weekend, Friday evening to either Saturday evening or Monday morning. And then a week is 1200.

1200. Now, what does your average customer look like? Is it a dad, a mom, a family, a party, a group, a business?

This last one, I had a wedding and the wedding day. The guys are like, well, I mean, the girls are doing the makeup and all the, you know, the process of getting ready. The guys were like, oh, we don't have much to do. So what are we gonna do? Like, oh, we'll rent a sauna and we'll kind of hang out, get some cool pictures and yeah, that we kind of kill some time, but also not just be okay drooling our thumb. So I've had birthday party and a lot of it is people interested in kind of the health and wellness and just people who are, yeah, looking at kind of experiencing something different. I've had at least one guy be like, yeah, I want to build my own. But I wanted to kind of try something out first before, you know. Yeah. Before I start a three month process of. Yeah. Building a song.

So it's just surprising to me that a wedding party would even think to do that. You know, like, why do you think they thought, let's rent a mobile sauna? Like, is it the culture up there in Michigan or they're just becoming more popular?

It's not really west Michigan. It's definitely not part of the culture here. You go up to the upper peninsula of Michigan and the sauna culture is pretty strong up there. One of the bigger colleges in Michigan, Northern Michigan, I didn't get that info. When I was talking to them, they're like, oh yeah, we've all done sauna. Like, you know, we've done electric and wood and so they were definitely somehow steeped in that culture. But yeah, I think at this point it's definitely mostly people who have been around it and like, oh yeah. So we have a small group from church and we, we rent out this big kind of lake. It's during the winter or during the summer, it's a summer camp. During the winter they rent it out just to anybody who wants to use it. So we rent that out every winter. And when we're out there, that's kind of where I started cold plunging. One of the guys was like, oh, we gotta rent a mobile sauna and bring it out here. And that's where I had kind of first heard of that idea before that I would have never, you know, never thought of. Of that.

You decide how to price it for those first couple jobs, I kind of.

Went off of just kind of what other saunas? You know, the Two other companies that were kind of semi close by, kind of what they were going for. And I had been kind of watching their calendars through the last, last winter to see, okay, what availabilities do they have, how many weekends out are they booked? And just kind of getting some of that data of like, you know, and obviously not all of that could be true. You know, sometimes they could be, you know, have an event or doing something themselves, but. And then kind of basing it on that just to have kind of similar, similar pricing to what they have. And then, you know, and then the guy who I bought them from in, in Minnesota, he kind of, you know. Yeah, I kind of went off of kind of what he was doing too. And he was saying Minnesota. You know, he started I think like four, four or five years ago and was one of the first. And now there's just, I mean there's a ton of mobile rental, mobile sauna rental companies in Minnesota. So he said the market there is definitely, definitely happen. You know, for me it's like, hey, having a couple other mobile sauna rental businesses in the area is great because it, it builds awareness that, hey, this is actually a thing that you can do when you're, you're the only one. It's, yeah, you're, you're kind of fighting upstream, but it's nice to have, yeah, other people kind of doing it too.

So how did you get your jobs after that first wave of Facebook marketplace posts?

So we're still kind of in that, in that first wave. I'm starting kind of looking at this next wave. I'm think the research I've done, you know, summertime, not a huge, not a huge market for songs. You'll have the occasional guy, the guy in Minnesota, he's like, yeah, I pretty much shut down during the summer because this is a full time thing. And he's like, yep, I kind of shut down, spend time with my family, do, you know, do other things. Just. He's like, the first two years I marketed, marketed, marketed, couldn't really drop, drum up enough stuff to make it worth it. So he's like, if I get calls, I'll still rent them out, but I'm not pursuing anything, not really, you know, pun the pavement. And then he's like, but then, you know, come the beginning of fall, once you start getting some cool evenings, some cool days, he's like, that's when it's just, you know. Yeah. When it really takes off.

So how long have you been at this business now?

Three or four months. So pretty okay. Yeah.

All right. So first month goes by, you get your first jobs, you like what you see, then you decide to buy the second one, right?

Yes. Yep.

Okay. And was that a good decision? Were you happy you did that? Were you able to keep both rented at the same time at least occasionally.

So I haven't gotten to that point yet. So, I mean, at this point, financially, is it, was it a good decision? We'll see. My big thing was with the amount of interest there are in mobile saunas, I don't have any fear that, you know, hey, if a year from now it's like, oh, I can't rent this thing out, you know, yeah, there's, I can definitely offload it, but I don't, I don't foresee having an issue. I think one of the, I've been kind of trying to play around with, okay, what can I do off season, right. Where I can, you know, try to get these at least semi consistently booked up. And one of the things I've thought about is partnering with Airbnbs or other short term rentals where it's like, hey, you can have this kind of as an add on, you know, when people are renting it out. It'll draw attention to your listing. But then also, you know, a way to partner especially for, you know, we have a lot of lakes here in West Michigan. Michigan. So, you know, a lot of those lake. That's one of the things that I've kind of seen where people are willing to do the sauna even when it's hot outside, if they have a lake that they can just kind of go and jump in and yeah, you really.

Haven'T even gone through a full season then. Correct. Like you bought the second one to kind of prepare for the winter time.

To prepare for the winter. Yeah, yeah. One of my big things is kind of doing this as a family. I want my kids to get that entrepreneurial bug. I want them to see kind of the process of, okay, what does it look like? And okay, what, you know, what are the ins and outs? And you know, we're moving into this new world with AI where, you know, that 9 to 5 job, you know, who knows what's going to happen in that world? And I think being able to know the process to, to start a business, to run a business, to operate a business and you know, to see some of the frustrations and some of the, you know, just like, okay, what does that look like? And so, yeah, exposing my kids to that.

What other marketing channels have you tested to get bookings successfully.

So those are the only ones I've done so far.

Just Facebook Marketplace.

Yep, yep. I've had a couple events that I've kind of reached out. We just kind of weren't ready for that. Like a fitness, there was a fitness week. They were like, oh, can we set up the sauna? And I was trying to do that, but just kind of wasn't able to get everything in place by then. But yeah, so I think there's events like that. I think long term events aren't really my goal. I tried to guard my weekends and evenings for family if I can. But I do know that that is one of the avenues a lot of mobile sauna rental companies do is where, where they'll, you know, either park it at a lake, park it in a lot, do kind of a, hey, we got a one hour time slot, got eight slots, you know, 30 bucks a person. And then you just kind of have wave after wave and you're there kind of managing this on us. I do know that is one of the, one of the ways people do that. You know, again, that is an option to get things rolling. But again, the less weekend evening work I can do, the better in my.

Opinion when it comes to burning the wood in the sauna. Do you need a certain type of wood like hardwood, Softwood does not really matter.

To get it up to 190, 200 degrees, you definitely need a hardwood oak, maple. But oak is the best, the easiest kind of to find around here. You know, the drier it is, the hotter it's going to burn. So yeah, so having seasoned hardwoods is definitely key. The nice thing about the saunas is though, they're very efficient at burning. I thought that was one of the things that I was surprised by. Just the, you throw a couple logs in there to get her going and then you know, maybe one or two while you're saunaing and then that's really it.

So what kind of towing capacity do you need to pull one of these things?

So the first one I bought is a little bit beefier. It's 3, 500 pounds. So you definitely need, you know, like a full size truck. The second one I bought is actually, it's a company, I think they're out of Minnesota. It's aluminum trailer, which is pretty lightweight. And then they use, they frame it with cedar, like two by fours. And then the outside is a thermoplastic. So it's kind of like a translucent plastic. So it's super light. So I can pick that one up, move it around. Kind of by hand at first when I was like, yeah, this is a little, I don't know. But the more I use that one, I'm like, oh, this is definitely the way to go. And as far as the sizing goes, that one holds about as many as, you know, as this bigger one. It just doesn't have a changing room. So, you know, for. For most situations, that was just as good.

What are you forecasting your payback period will be like once the cold season starts? How quickly do you think you can pay off your first unit?

I think it'll take about a year, year and a half. Insurance is, you know, it's not cheap, but it's not expensive. It's nothing crazy. It's a couple thousand bucks and then it's a year. Yep. And that's an additional 500 person after that first one. So from the amount of interest, I'm already starting to kind of have some bookings out into fall. So there's already kind of some, some of that interest coming in. Again, definitely not running this as my main source of income, but just having something, you know, on the sides. Again, just trying to kind of create separate revenue streams.

So I would think you've got like over 50% net margins with this business. Like your costs are your gas, your costs are the insurance, and then your time and then wood. Right. Is there anything else I'm missing?

I mean, yeah, again, I have access to free wood, so. So it's not a huge, you know, but it's more the time of going out and cutting it. And that is one thing I did hear a lot from other business owners is don't let people use their own wood. Don't let people try to throw.

Yeah. Can't control what they do with it.

They're old deck boards in there. And then you're.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

What would you have done differently, looking back with this business?

I mean, nothing at this point. I think the only thing is I might have. I personally love this sauna that I'm in. The bigger one. As far as, you know, business wise, I think the other one makes more sense. Just as far as it's easy to tow. It's ways less I can move it by hand. I probably would have gone the other way, started with that other one.

And what was the price and size difference between the two?

So the first one was 20, like 2100, 2200, something like that, or 22,000.

22,000?

Yeah, 22,000.

And how big was it?

So it's got about a. I think it's a ten foot, like, hot room. And then it has like a four foot, like, changing room. It has a solar powered battery for lights in the sauna and it has an outside light. It's a bigger stove. It's a nicer stove. It looks a lot more kind of classic sauna.

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