Codie Sanchez breaks down the real money at festivals like Coachella: not ticket sales, but backstage services. Portable toilets rent for $350 to $5,000 per day, AC trucks for $2,000 to $5,000. Operators make $300K to over $10M yearly from weddings, construction sites, marathons, and film sets year-round.
Chapters
This is wild. So Coachella pulls in $120 million each weekend. The headliners get the credit, but there's a business running backstage nobody talks about, and it makes more per year than most people realize. No, it's not merch. No, it's not sponsorships. It's not even food. Think, what does every single person at a 125,000-person festival have to use before they leave? Porta-potties. Thousands of them. They can go from $350 a unit up to $5K. How about those portable AC trucks keeping the VIP tents from becoming ovens? That's $2,000 to $5,000 a day. And every single one of them had a signed contract back before the gates even opened. But while Coachella is just 2 weekends, these businesses run 52 weeks a year. So things like construction sites, weddings, film sets, marathons— we know porta-potty operators running event contracts that do anywhere from $300K up to $10 million plus a year because they've got repeat customers, new events lining up. So the move: when you see something big and flashy, don't watch the headliner. Find the service nobody can skip, the one with the assets that rent on repeat. That's the business you want to buy.
