Welcome to Ghost Business - where mediocre business ideas go to launch 🚀 or die ☠️

Hey Ghosties,

I’m testing out a new layout, let me know your thoughts. Personally, it feels a little too professional, like wearing a suit to basketball practice. Anyways I hope you enjoy this new format, I stole it from another awesome newsletter 😈 

You vs. Enterprise

Buy then rent… all for a profit. I was in San Diego on vacation. There were 4 options for transportation while I was there: Public transit (pass), Uber/Lyft (eh, maybe), Enterprise rental (only for work), and Turo.

I tried everything but Turo. Public transit was often a last resort or something I used if I felt guilty with how much I had spent the night before. Sometimes it’s nice to remind you of your roots, until someone literally sh💩ts themselves on the bus, and you’re re-reminded on why you never take the bus. Ridesharing is great and convenient, no need to worry about parking or gas, and it allows you to get a couple more beverages at dinner 🍻. Enterprise is good but their bread and butter is company cars so they can get away with charging much more. Then there’s Turo.

Turo is like Airbnb for your car. While on vacation I like to ball out a little. I’m not a big car guy and would likely never buy an expensive car, due to higher insurance, maintenance, gas, worry about people hitting it, worry about me scuffing the rims, yadda, yadda, yadda.

But there’s something about revving a v8 that speaks to the knuckle dragging caveman testosterone inside of me. So I rented a dope Jaguar from Turo 🤷‍♂️

But when I pulled up to the owners house, I was SHOCKED at what I saw. An entire fleet of cars; Tesla, Maserati, Porsche, Jaguars. You name it, Sonny (the owner) had about 15 of these at his residential house.

I had to know more about Sonny.

• First class fleet: He wanted to offer premium cars to make more per day from rentals.

• Only auctions: He got most of his cars from auction, paid all cash for a steep discount.

• Maintenance check: He employed his mechanic cousin to give each car a diagnostic and fix after purchase and to keep costs low, he cleans and details them himself.

The fleet is flying… Sonny said he averaged $1k per month profit on all cars, meaning he was making about $15k per month running his fleet. I turned my napkin around and started doing the math, if this were me, how would I build this?

The End Goal

The final product would look a lot like what Sonny has going… a small fleet you could own from your home, managing customers, detailing, maintenance, etc.

People would mainly find you through Turo but you could have other ways to be found. Company partnerships, wedding venues, bachelor party bookings, and upscale vacation rentals that can also include a sweet car.

The MVP

Testing matters… you want to test this business for many reasons. First, do you even like dealing with people. They will ding the car, return it on empty, scheduling difficulties, maintenance, etc.

Start out with whatever car you have. Clean it out top to bottom and take pics with your phone (they show you how to take photos) and list it!

That’s it!

Work out the kinks of renting to strangers and slowly grow your fleet and partnerships.

Scaling Up

After figuring out your ROI, you can begin investing in bigger better cars. Often times your car payment will be smaller than your Turo income. So you’ll have to keep saving all of your cash to compensate for damages and low income months.

But if this were me, I’d go niche. Buy one brand or “type” of car and go all in. Here’s an example of someone only renting Tesla’s in Hawaii.

Personally I would go VW Bugs or Mini Coopers, for 3 reasons.

1. These cars have a cult following

2. Maintenance becomes streamlined when all of your cars are the same model

3. You can easily target these online “clubs” and brand yourself as the go to person for this type of rental.

I would also ad advertising as additional revenue. I met a driver making an extra $200/mo using Firefly on top of his car. You simply put one on the car you’re renting out and you’ve increased your income by $2.4k/yr per car!

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

This is a solid 3. It would take having a car (you can rent out) or getting a cheap $5k car to lend. Reasonable but not cheap!

Scaling this would be difficult as a one person band, as you want to have some chops of light maintenance (changing your own oil) as it can save a ton of cash.

Also dealing with people, late returns, dirty cars, damages can all add up and be a headache.

As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea 😉 

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike

 👋