Marimba Rental Business Hits All The Right Notes

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hello, my friends. Welcome to Sados in School. This is Chris Guillebeau. I have a pressing question for you as we begin today. When was the last time you were in Dallas, Texas and found yourself in need of some emergency marimbas?

Yes, I did say marimbas as in the musical instrument. Well, good news. I have a solution for you. Next time you're in that situation, you know who to call, or actually it's not me, the person you'll hear about in this episode has a solution for you. One of my favorite episodes of the new year, it's all about a father of four who starts a marimba flipping business to fund his child's college tuition.

You could say this story hits all the right notes. You could say it's music to your ears and you could say it's coming right up after this sponsor message. Arriba! [Music]

Cassidy Lackey is no stranger to the world of side hustles. He's had many while working his day job as a programmer and IT manager.

Among others, he launched a number of visitor bureau sites in his surrounding area of Texas and Oklahoma. These sites feature things like real estate listings, vacation rentals and fishing guides. He also acquired an online drone forum and grew it into a thriving business, one of the top drone communities in the world. Several years ago, Cassidy's side hustles were proving lucrative and required more of his time. So he decided to take the leap and walk away from the nine to five life.

He is now a full-time hustler, but with many projects. He's also a father of four kids. And at the time our story takes place, his oldest was starting college soon. He didn't have enough money saved for tuition, but he didn't want to go into debt. So what would he do?

He would start another project, something that could help him pay for that tuition. Now, right around this same time, his younger son caught the percussion bug as a middle school student. Cassidy received an email from the instructor that he would have to either buy or rent a marimba for his son to practice. Always the supportive parent, Cassidy sized up his options. The recommended rental facility was an hour long drive away and this magic marimba cost $60 a month to rent.

Plus there was a terribly long contract to fill out and you had to lug the four and a half foot 35 pound marimba home. He thought there had to be a better way. He could get cookies delivered to his door in 15 minutes. So why not marimbas? Surely he wasn't the only one with this problem.

Cassidy decided to test his hypothesis. He wanted to offer a better alternative to parents than the one that was presented to him. So he jumped on Craigslist and bought five used marimbas at $500 each as one does. His plan was to clean them, fix them up and rent them out. He figured if the business failed, he could just turn around and sell them again.

He spent $8 for a domain name built aside himself and DFW marimbas was born. Cassidy would charge $35 a month and delivered to students homes for free. How's it working out? Well, he's now been in business for a year and he's scheduled to hit $3,000 in monthly income. So in other words, it's worked out pretty well.

Here are a few details for everybody out there who wants to get in the marimba racket. Cassidy usually keeps around five to 10 marimbas on hand at all times. He buys more in the summer when he gets them cheaper because there's more on the market when students finish school. And if you're wondering where the marimba renters come from, aside from all of you, of course, there's gonna be a rush on marimbas in Dallas after this episode. Well, Cassidy has a couple of approaches.

One is Google AdWords. A lot of people go on and search marimba rental whenever they need to rent a marimba. Crazy how that works. Another effective strategy has been sending quarterly emails to the 100 percussion and band instructors in his area. In those emails, he introduces or reintroduces himself, lets them know that his business is growing and includes links to the many positive reviews he's received from his customers.

His goal is to have every percussion instructor in the area pushing parents to his service. Now, so far he's been able to handle deliveries himself because he only rents the smaller three-octave marimbas. These can be tossed in the back of his Jeep, no doubt known as the marimba mobile with the seats down. He stacks them about four to five high with cardboard in between each one. Students keep the marimbas for one to two years, so he doesn't have to worry about delivering or picking up very often.

As for what's next, well, he's determined to find the answer to the question that haunts many side hustlers who become full-time business owners. You might call it an existential dilemma to scale or not to scale. Should he buy delivery vans and hire drivers? Should he contract out to an existing delivery service, but with drivers who can't answer customer service questions about the marimbas? Or should he just continue to grow slowly while handling his own deliveries?

Time will tell, but I have a feeling he'll come out okay, at least as long as he stays in tune with what people need. So this is hands down one of my favorite stories of the year so far, probably one of my favorite stories in many months. I personally want to move to Dallas so I can rent marimbas from Cassidy. Unfortunately, I don't think he rents them by mail just yet, but maybe in the future, maybe somebody else out there wants to corner that market. And notice in the story his process and how this comes to be.

So he encounters this problem. It's annoying to go drive an hour, pay too much money to a place that doesn't necessarily provide great customer service to rent this instrument for his middle school kid. Now, secondly, this instrument is uncommon. There's not a lot of competition out there. Yet at the same time, it's common enough that there are enough potential customers to make it worthwhile.

So even though there aren't a huge amount of people playing the marimba, this is an instrument that's in every high school music class, every high school marching band. So you know that there are customers out there. Now also there's a proven pathway to reach those customers because let's say you need to rent such an instrument, what would you do? I'm betting that you would either Google marimba rental in your city or you would ask the band teacher what to do. And Cassidy has covered both intake points.

So super smart. It's working really well, $3,000 a month now in recurring marimba rental income. This is what it's all about, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this story. I enjoyed working on it.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. I wanna hear a story like this from you sometime. To find the show notes and rent your own marimba, just go to sidehustleschool.com/752. That is for episode 752. And for those listening in real time, the Sidustle Society is now open.

We are taking new members for the first time in 10 months. I would love for you to join or at least come check it out. You can do that at sidehustleschool.com/society. S-O-C-I-E-T-Y. Thank you so much.

I'll be back again tomorrow and every day with more awesome stories just like this. Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]