Utah Dad Makes a Splash with Paddle board Rentals

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

[Music]

People are always looking for ideas, ideas of side hustles they could start, some kind of business that anyone could do. Well, listen, somebody out there could totally do the business I'm gonna tell you about today. It has low startup costs. It's gonna bring in something like an extra $10,000 for the guy who runs it just this season. It is in fact a seasonal side hustle built on the demand for outdoor activities.

And what's really allowed it to thrive was the owner's use of Google Maps. I'm gonna tell you about that today because for everybody out there who is tired of Instagram and Facebook, I hear you, listen to what this guy told us. He said, "Instagram and Facebook added approximately zero value to our business. 99% of our customers find us on Google search or Google Maps by searching paddleboard rentals near me." And as you might've guessed at this point, this is a local business that is renting out paddleboards from this guy's garage, doing very well. And so not every business needs social media.

If you are a local business like this one, getting those hyper-local search results can bring in an entire customer base on its own. That's what this guy's been able to do. Utah Dad makes a splash with paddleboard rentals. The story's coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

A few years ago, JJ Haglund searched for paddleboard rentals and he found a tech executive renting them out of his garage.

It was a side business for him and JJ thought it was also a brilliant way to expense all his toys. Eventually, the guy built it into a full fledged rental shop. Fast forward to 2020, JJ was living in Utah and working as a product manager for a Fortune 500 company. He and his wife were brainstorming ideas for a side hustle that wouldn't cost a lot of money to start. When they had some experience here, they had dabbled in other projects with mixed results.

Selling jewelry from Alibaba on daily deal flash sites produced a decent ROI, but quality control was a huge issue. They also tried selling T-shirts, but they ended up losing about $3,000 and sitting on a bunch of boxes until finally donating the extras. That's when they remembered their experience renting paddleboards a few years earlier. And they thought, why couldn't we do that? The couple lives close to a number of popular lakes.

So maybe it would be a good way to help people get outside, make memories with their families and put aside any pandemic stress. To launch JJ's paddleboards, he spent less than $2,000 on the initial rental inventory. He was buying inflatable standup paddleboards and life jackets and lawyer fees on drafting up a good liability waiver. He built the website using Wix.com, optimized it for Google search and added it to Google Maps. It was all fairly simple.

When they landed their first customer, JJ breathed a sigh of relief that it actually worked. However, it took a few weeks for it to pick up because it was an unusually cold June. But once the summer warmed, everything was smooth sailing, mostly. He was constantly selling out and getting more requests than he could handle. He celebrated by buying more and more paddleboards every time he made enough money to reinvest back into the business.

All told, in the summer of 2020, he made around $7,000, but put all those profits into more boards. He now has a fleet of 15. And so far in the 2021 season, he's brought in around $10,000. And most of that is straight profit. Now here's a key point.

JJ thought social media would be a big source of customers. But other than being an avenue for family and friends to know about the side hustle, he says Instagram and Facebook didn't add much value, if any at all. 99% of customers find him on Google search or Google Maps by searching paddleboard rentals near me. See how important this can be for a local business that needs customers to physically show up? Google Maps is huge.

Now I said it was smooth sailing, mostly. There was one big challenge. And that challenge was keeping track of reservations. JJ had made a basic contact form on the website, but it wasn't a reservation or inventory tracking system. And that made everything cumbersome.

People would fill out a form, get a text confirmation. And then when they showed up, JJ would print out the liability waiver, get them to sign and collect payment using Square. Sometimes people wouldn't show up and JJ couldn't do anything about it. He also didn't get paid. Plus he'd have to manually update the website every time they sold out for the day.

He wanted an automated system that would make the reservations track inventory, accept payment and have customers sign the waiver all in one. This would solve several problems at once, both in terms of all the manual work, as well as making sure he got paid at the time of booking. So if people don't show up, well, they have already paid. At first, he couldn't find anything that fit his needs and was affordable. But then he stumbled on peak.com.

That's peak like look, P-E-E-K. This platform had everything he needed. And now he could focus on the fun stuff, meeting and talking to customers, rather than spending all his time on administration. JJ hires help when the family goes out of town. He can still coordinate everything remotely, including all the customer communications, but his part-time employee can be there for the customer to pick up gear and then clean it when they drop it off.

Speaking of cleaning, it's also been a great opportunity for him to employ his kids to wash the boards between rentals. This teaches them hard work and helps them earn some money of their own. [Music]

Congratulations to JJ and his family. If you happen to be in Utah and would like to check out stand-up paddle boarding, I was gonna say go to his website, but you could also just go to Google Maps and type in paddleboard rentals and you're gonna find him. And that shows how a business like this is gonna benefit so much more from that sort of placement than from any social media.

Good work, JJ. Look forward to hearing what happens as he continues to grow that business. And before we go today, I also wanna mention a new book that is out this week. In fact, it's out today, if I'm not mistaken, or at least very soon. This new book is from Dory Clark.

It's called "The Long Game, How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World." I've known Dory for a while. She has made some fabulously successful LinkedIn learning courses. I actually went to her for advice on making my LinkedIn courses just because hers have done so well. And I love the subtitle and whole theme of this book, "How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World." So check that out wherever books are sold. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1723. One, seven, two, three. Thank you for tuning in today. I hope you'll come back tomorrow. New episode every day.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.