This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings and welcome. Thanks for tuning in today. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host of "Side Hustle School," bringing you a new episode every single day since January 1, 2017. And guess what? It's all free.
It's all free with the goal of helping you earn extra money without quitting your job. Okay, now this is our weekly segment called "Failure Friday," one of my favorite things to work on. It all stems from the principle that we can learn as much from failure as we can from success. So throughout the podcast, I'm always telling you lots of great case studies of people who have made lots of money and built a business and created freedom for themselves and all kinds of good things. But throughout that process, there are often missteps and challenges and things that go wrong.
And I try to highlight those as well, so it's not always a fairy tale, like it's meant to be very practical and realistic. But this particular segment, we really focus on the things that go wrong. So every week you get a different story here. The stories will vary, but often they begin with an idea, an assumption, something that someone thought would happen. And then of course, what really happened, hopefully along with some lesson as well, usually.
In today's short story features Richard Bexson. He's originally from the UK, but has spent a lot of time living in Costa Rica and other parts of Central America, maybe elsewhere around the world as well. He travels quite a bit, like I used to. Hopefully I will again at some point. We told the story of his bicycle transport business on episode 1438.
Cyclist puts wheels in motion on bike box bits. Basically he was helping adventure athletes, triathletes and so on relocate their equipment to different races and other adventure staging areas. Now this is a business that has a lot of built-in complexity, which is part of what turned out to be difficult. So Richard's gonna tell the story better than me. I'm gonna hand it over to him.
I'll come back with a very brief wrap up at the end. [Music]
- I'm Richard Bexson and I was featured in Side Hustle School on episode 1438, where I discussed my bike box rental business. Today I have a business failure story regarding a business I used to own called BC Rent Costa Rica. It's a company that rents high performance road triathlon and mountain bikes to locals here in Costa Rica and also tourists that come here that basically want to do some biking, whether that be road biking, want to do a triathlon or Ironman or want to basically do some mountain biking. But again, it's very high-end performance bikes, bikes from five to $10,000.
And it's probably typically avid bikers that are really using this. The reason that we set the business up was we saw a demand for it, but also we had another company called BC Box Costa Rica, which was a company that actually rented bike boxes so that you could basically ship your bike anywhere in the world whenever you're traveling on an airplane. So you'd basically take your wheels off, put it inside this bike box and then take it on the airplane with you. And then when you got to the destination, put your bike back together. So we thought, you know, kind of hand-in-hand the bike business would also go hand-in-hand with the box business.
What we found out though, after spending basically close to $40,000 on new bikes was that it was a little bit more, it was a lot more work. There are a lot more moving parts and also a lot more things broke. You know, the bike box business was very simple. It was, you know, hard plastic bike boxes. You give them to people, they give them back.
Whereas the bikes, there's a lot more moving parts. And of course, especially the downhill mountain bikes needed a lot more maintenance. And, you know, we had to charge quite a lot more for clients that were actually using these. And there really wasn't the market demand there for that. And also is we had some clients crash some stuff and broke some bikes and, you know, and it's, they had to kind of end up paying for it.
And then we had to get it all fixed. And all in all, as I said, there was just a lot of moving parts for, you know, not much money really in the grand scheme of things. So, you know, going back to this, I mean, if I was to do this again, basically I don't think I would do it just because again, there are simpler business models, easier way to make money. You know, I would say that, you know, success in one business does not always translate to another. You know, and we showed out $40,000 to buy these, you know, high performance bikes, even before, you know, even renting one.
So, you know, I mean, a little bit of advice and tips out there for people. If I was to do it again before actually buying the bikes, I would advertise the bikes as if I had them to see if there was demand for them. You know, because I think we would have seen that while there might've been demand, there might not have been demand, you know, for the really high end, high end stuff. Also, I would have probably, you know, I would have increased our rates right from the beginning, charging more, just because again, the maintenance of the bikes was a lot of work. You know, we had to service them every single time they came in, we had to repair stuff.
And, you know, again, like rental cars, they were just kind of abused a little bit more, so the wear and tear was a lot more. And also is, you know, again, we continue to try this stuff. We're about to probably try renting jet washers and portable generators and other such kind of equipment to rent. We like the renting model where there's like a lot less moving parts. So anything that we can rent basically that is pretty simple, you know, we're gonna try, but we're gonna put it up on the website first as if we have it, try it to just make sure that there's market demand for it.
And then if it is, then we'll go ahead and actually purchase the equipment. So that's it. I wish the best of luck to everybody out there. You know, I think for every, you know, five businesses that I start, maybe two or three are successful, two or three are failed. But I think it's important that everybody just understands that, you know, success is not a straight line.
You know, speak to your customers, you know, do some market testing. It's very easy. You know, it's, you know, don't get excited and carried away with a business idea, spending again, $40,000 to later find out that again, it's not really a viable business model. So I hope this has been helpful. Thank you very much.
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Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is the theme of failure Friday. I'm so glad that Richard persevered. Although I love the quote that he said, I'm going to use it at the title of the episode. If I could do it over again, I'm not sure I would.
That is very honest. You know, there are lots of different businesses that you could pursue. And as you develop the skill of coming up with business ideas, you know, it's all about choice and decisions and triage, you know, in some ways, prioritization. So I really respect that honesty. I could probably say that about some of the things I have started as well.
If I could go back and do it over again, I would do something different. Well, anyway, thanks to Richard once again for sharing that honest story, transparent and truthful, I should say, as well as honest. Check out his website at bcboxcr.com. That is b-i-c-i-b-o-x-c-r.com. He's also got a site, namutravel.com, n-a-m-u-travel.com.
He and some partners are Central America travel experts. Offering custom built itineraries to Costa Rica, Belize, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama. Lots of good resources there. If you have a question or an update for us about your hustle, if you got some feedback or an idea for us or just wanna share something, sidehustleschool.com/questions. As I said, there is a new episode every single day.
I'm so excited to make this program for you. It's all free, you can subscribe or follow wherever you like to listen to podcasts. All right, that's it for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School.
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