This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey there, what's up? You are listening to Side Hustle School. I'm Chris Guillebeau, and today's story is one of the ones that I first heard about probably six months ago, when I first began planning the show. There were a few stories that really stood out, stories like Max Robinson in episode number two, the guy who made $700 a month from a blog he'd set up with fish tank reviews, and then the chicken saddle story from episode 10, and stories like these kind of made me think, this is a topic that's worth exploring in some detail. And so today's is one of those stories that I've been saving up. It's about how a Los
Angeles man makes more than $5,000 a month renting out cars he doesn't own. And I'll tell you exactly how he does it right after this. No matter where you are, you've probably heard about the sharing economy. There's a service or app for just about everything these days. You can get paid to lend a set of tools to a neighbor you've never met. You can invest in a crowdfunding
project led by strangers on a different continent. And now, several services let you rent out your car by the hour, day, or week to someone who needs it. If you have a car that you don't drive every day, it's one of the easiest ways to make some extra cash. Well, in Los Angeles, Taseer Asan took this hustle idea several steps further. After creating an account with Turo, one of the sharing economy services that operates as a middleman between renters and car owners, he quickly learned how to optimize his price and listing details to bring him just about as much business as he could handle. Within a short period of time, his car was being rented an average of 29 days every month,
so essentially all the time. Factoring in insurance and other costs, he was making more than $1,300 each month simply for communicating with renters via email and managing the occasional airport pickup. But that's when he decided to raise the stakes. Now, some of us in this situation, if we were a little bit creative, we might think of acquiring another vehicle, or maybe even two, if we were really ambitious. But Taseer decided to lease an entire fleet of cars, 16 to be exact, and listed them all for rent. Now, each time he did this, he took care of a price low for the
first few rentals to ensure that they would be rented quickly and could generate immediate positive reviews. Then he gradually upped the price as the demand for his vehicles increased. He was also smart about which kinds of cars he selected. Based on his research, he noticed that the best opportunities were either at the low end for renters who wanted the cheapest possible cars, or at the high end, people who wanted to drive a nice car or an SUV, perhaps for a weekend outing or to impress a date. Taseer structured his car acquisition accordingly, choosing a few expensive cars and half a dozen cheaper ones. Now, in fact, he did have one advantage. He got the
cheaper ones during an incredible promotion when the manufacturer was overstocked on a particular model, the Chevrolet Cruze. Imagine leasing a Chevy Cruze for $18 a month and renting it out for $35 a day, he wrote in a blog post. You don't have to imagine it because that's pretty much what I'm doing. To make it all work, he found a partner at an airline parking lot who would handle many of the pickups and returns for renters visiting from out of town. Leasing 16 cars might seem like a pretty big commitment for a side project, and indeed it is. But once Taseer did the math based
on his initial experience with one vehicle, he knew it would turn a profit, or at least he was fairly confident. And so that's when he began renting the second, the third, the fourth, all the way up to 16 cars for his entire fleet. The point is that he grew it only as he saw how profitable it could be for him. With so many cars, he does have to spend a lot of time communicating with renters, but because he partners with services like the people at the airline parking lot, his overall commitment is fairly minimal. The only challenge is when he wants to use one of his cars for himself, which one does he choose? So let's talk about Taseer's story, a classic side hustler narrative. So maybe you
don't want to lease 16 cars. In fact, you probably don't. But this is the kind of thing that's fun to explore. It's low risk as you're experimenting with side hustles. So say this service is available in your area or a comparable one, and you have a car. Why not set up a profile in that service and rent
your car out a few days a month and see what happens. Or think about if it could work for you to lease or buy or somehow acquire an additional vehicle to do it with. I'm not saying that there's not time and money associated with that. I'm just saying if you compare this with any other startup, the stakes are extremely low. Even if it didn't become the wild success that it did for Taseer, you wouldn't be out a lot of money and you'd also have a pretty good story.
Now pay attention as well to Taseer's lesson on acquiring cars for low end renters or for high end renters, but no one in between. This makes perfect sense if you think about it. Most people, if they go to rent a car, if they want a nice one, then they have various preferences. They're willing to pay more. If they don't want a nice one, then they probably don't care. And they probably want
the lowest possible price. And this applies to a lot of industries, much more than just car rentals. So just remember the middle is mediocre. Average is boring. Now again, I mentioned the part in the middle of the story about his fantastic once in a lifetime lease deal where he was able to rent this particular model of car for $18 a month. Now, obviously that is tremendous and probably not
replicable. You're not going to be able to go out and get the same deal, but that's okay because stuff like that kind of falls in the nice work if you can get it category. It's awesome for him, but keep in mind, not every one of his vehicles is leased at that incredible rate. All the other cars are profitable too. So the point is he did the math. He figured out,
I can make this work with the vehicle I already own. What would happen if I try to scale it? And so far it's worked really great for him. Now I have to say, I love this story. So I got a little bit curious and started looking into this myself. I looked up Tarot and a couple other services in
my area and thought about doing some tests. My problem for now is that I have too many hustles and I actually have a career as an author that I'm trying to focus on as well as this show, but you never know. I may need to borrow a 16 car garage before the year is over. So if you have one of those garages I can use, or if you try this for yourself, maybe with just one vehicle, let me know and we'll follow up with everyone on the show to let them know what happens. And if you're listening to this and you think, well, that's totally crazy.
You may very well not want to lease a dozen cars, maybe even one. But if you listen to these classic hustler stories and you begin to apply the same kind of creative thinking to your own hustle, that's when you'll see results. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is much better. To find the show notes for today's episode, just go to sidehustleschool.com. And if you'd like to show, give us a shout out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever social network has been invented today using hashtag Side Hustle School. I'm Chris Guillebeau and I'll see you tomorrow with another story.
