Latest / Building The Business / From a Broken-Down $5K Car to a 50-Car Rental Fleet w/George Madden of Car Rental Coach

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From a Broken-Down $5K Car to a 50-Car Rental Fleet w/George Madden of Car Rental Coach · Building The Business

• Will: hey, welcome back to another episode of Building the Business. I'm incredibly excited. I've got a really special guest. somebody I actually got to meet in person not too long ago. His name's George Madden. George and his business partner Peter Habib started Car Rental Coach. George, I just want to say thank you so much, man, for hopping on the show. George Madden: of course. Very happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Will: George, I'm I'm really excited, man, from just from a personal perspective in the sense of we actually met through the Entrepreneur Dinner Club, which shout out to those guys who are running ads. And we popped onto that, had dinner together, got to sit down with you and Peter, and I just thought you guys were two of the sharpest young guys I've met in a long time in terms of just how you guys are running your business, how you're thinking about things. George, I I want to start with back at the beginning. you and Peter were both separately running your own car rental. companies. I I'm just super curious, man, what led you down that path? What what you know, of all the different businesses that you could go down, like why did you choose that one versus, you know, you could have put your entrepreneurial talents anywhere. What got you started into into renting out cars? George Madden: Yeah, so just a brief background on myself. I've always been infatuated with entrepreneurship. I was at flea markets since I was 12 years old, selling stuff with my grandma. There's a lot of stories about that, but I'll get it. Get into all of that part. Then from there, I had a bunch of small businesses, went to college at Penn State, graduated for finance. And at that point, I was really interested in real estate. So I ended up getting my real estate license as well. And I had a few successful companies at that point. One of them was in the seven figure range for drop shipping, e-commerce, Amazon stuff. But during that time, I knew that wasn't really sustainable because I wasn't really building a brand. It was just a lot of drop shipping, e-commerce stuff, which is great for quick money. But as you know, from being in the space that there's always different trends in entrepreneurship. And there are areas where you can make money for a short amount of time, but not all of them or something that's going to be sustainable for life. So went into real estate a little bit and bought a couple of properties. And I realized that based on how the market was and the amount of money I had at my disposal, I didn't have enough money to live off of the cash flow of real estate. It was really just a good wealth building tool. And I still like real estate, but I wanted to find something. else. And then, you know, I talking to my wife, she was in the used car dealership space with her father. And I was asking them because they were selling a decent amount of cars if they ever thought about renting them because I was on the rental mind from the real estate. I started doing the numbers on them. And a lot of these economy cash vehicles could bring in over $1,000 a month in revenue, which was similar to the real estate properties I was buying in the $150,000 price range at the time. So from there, I went all in on it, learned everything I could, watched every single YouTube video there was on car rentals, learned about the tax advantages, how to borrow to buy more vehicles, and then really over the last seven years have just lived in breathe the rental car space. Will: Dude, I I think what's really cool is that you you know it I don't I don't know why it hadn't hit me that you're essentially the same kind of cash flow arbitrage of real estate but to car renting out cars instead of homes. I d I don't know why it never hit me until you're just talking about the the similarities and I was like, yeah. And in my mind I'm like obviously a much lower capital intensive risk to like get into versus say getting into real estate where you know if you're especially if you're going the investor route and you gotta have potentially twenty percent down, if you're doing it, you know. know as as a small business. So actually I don't know why, but as you're saying, I was like, my gosh, yeah, that makes total sense. You're renting this out. I guess George, I would I would just be super curious. I you've probably told the story a thousand times to people, but I'm just super curious, man, what was the first car that you got? What were the first like two cars that you got? In my mind, I'm I'm always picturing like George Madden: Thank you. Will: man, I'm gonna get the like nicest car and I'm gonna rent it out and that what's that's what's gonna make me the most money. And I'm sure you've seen people go down that path before. But like for for you, I know you mentioned the economy car side. What were kind of the what was the first car or first couple cars that you got? George Madden: Yeah, so I started with a 2012 Chevrolet Sonic and I listed it on a platform called HireCore at the time, which they're no longer in business. Just think of HireCore as high risk Turo where they don't vet the customers as much. But I was just learning. I didn't even know what Turo was at that point. I just found out you can get insurance through some of these apps. And at that time, the insurance regulations were a little bit more strict when I started than they are now where there's more providers. But we throw the car on hire car. It's a car that I put about five thousand dollars cash into. So very affordable, very cheap. And that's when I learned a lesson, though, because that first car broke down on the very first trip with my renter. So now my wife and I are getting into the car to go pick the renter up. Take them back get the car towed. Hope you know trying to beg them to not give us a bad review and I learned that with cars versus well real estate You have to do a little bit more maintenance and testing especially when you're sourcing these things from auction and even if the car looks like it's in good condition It still needs to be driven, you know at least a couple hundred miles and inspected But I learned that you can't really rush getting the cars ready even though I would like to list things instantly. And that car ended up being a big headache. And at that point, my wife was talking to me and saying like, hey, this doesn't make any sense. You we made $50 on this one day rental. I'm picking the car up with you. If we would have to pay somebody to do this, this would be like hundreds of dollars and then a tow. So now we're down a couple hundred dollars on the first rental. But. I knew it had proof of concept. I was still really excited that I actually saw the car get listed and rented because I saw the potential of what it could become. Then after that, we bought a 2008 Kia Spectra and this thing was again in the $5,000 price point. I learned some things about the mistakes I made with rushing it. I invested in getting a hardwired GPS trackers this time around. So I knew where the car was and then. Also, you can see if there's any foul play by the renters because when you're dealing with cheap cars, you're not always dealing with the most desirable customers that are going to be the most forthcoming with the truth on what's happening. And they'll try to get free trips a lot of the time. But that car goes out. I learned the side of private rental, so I was able to actually rent this outside of Turo because in this case, this young woman wasn't eligible to get insurance through a lot of the apps because of her age. She was about 20 years old and before the audience thinks I'm taking advantage of charging really high rates to 20 year olds I was 23 at the time myself doing this so pretty much the same age This car though. We put it on the road for two entire years, and it brought me in over $27,000 in revenue And then at the end of it though she ended up totaling it through a DUI year two, but remember this is only a $6,000 car. I then realized, wow, I'm in the insurance business, not just the car business. And that prompted me after that story and fighting them, I was able to do enough research on Pennsylvania insurance law that I was able to make a case that it didn't matter if the renter was intoxicated during the time. A lot of back and forth and I didn't have AI at this time either. So it was a lot more, yeah, lot more time intensive to do these insurance claims than the process I go through now. Luckily was able to win that and they valued the car at eight thousand dollars. So overall I was up over thirty thousand dollars on my money on this one vehicle and that's still one of the most profitable vehicles I've ever had based on just return on investment. But that prompted me to get into the insurance industry after that and then I got fully licensed for my surplus lines which deals with like high risk. insurance claims in cars specifically. And then we took those, you know, all those mistakes, all that knowledge we gained to help clients too. Because when you're in the rental car industry, you're not just in the rental car industry, you are in the insurance business, especially as you grow and you scale this. Will: Yeah, it actually reminds me of one, just a dude, crazy story. Talk about the difference of two cars, two right off the bat of the first one just like I'm picturing your wife at the time just being like, man, this crazy guy with another crazy idea. And, you know, is this gonna work out? And then your second car just, you know, absolutely talk about proof of concept in a in such a positive way. It's so funny how I I it just makes me think of as business owners and entrepreneurs like there's gotta be a little bit of crazy in you that's like willing to to be resilient during times where someone else might be like that this just is a terrible idea this isn't gonna work and you can see the light bulb and like no I can I can I can see the next steps and what it's gonna lead to. George I I want to dive into because I really want to get into car rental coach and what you guys do at Car Rental Coach. But I think one thing that's really important to know for the audience and I got to learn about from you guys is You know, there's a lot of people in the info space that teach people how to do stuff that don't actually continue to run the business that they're coaching people to do. And there's no shade on that. It's just, you know, a different thing. I what I love about you guys is you guys are still own you guys still own and operate your own car rental side of things. And so I I just to give context to people listening, could you give us a breakdown of you and Peter, just sort of like the the business you guys still have in terms of you guys are still actually renting out cars, what that looks like for you guys, you know, maybe just how how it's grown and how you guys are doing. that and then we that kind of sets us up for like why you guys are such an authority in being able to do the car rental coach side of stuff. George Madden: Yeah, absolutely. So after those couple vehicles, at that point, now we really saw proof of concept and my wife stopped telling me to go get a job with my finance degree, you know, because we didn't have a choice, right? We didn't have to struggle as much as possible. I didn't invest all that time to go to college. I had good offers making six figures out of school, but I never wanted to work for anybody. So went full into the car industry. Then year two comes around. We get onto a platform called Get Around at that point, another Turo competitor that's also out of business. What made Get Around really unique in Pittsburgh for that time, they really wanted to expand into the Pittsburgh market and they were giving bonuses based on the zip codes that you were putting the vehicles in. So they had 11 zip codes that were eligible in Pittsburgh total that would all receive, I believe it was a $2,000 bonus for just putting them on the platform and then guaranteed earnings of a thousand dollars a month. for three months, even if the car doesn't rent for a single day. So I reach out to the get around rep and I'm the only one in Pittsburgh that even takes them up on it. Nobody else is even doing research in our area that get around exists. So I take all 11 spots. I buy cars just for this. But here's the issue. As you know, being in Pittsburgh, I had to put these in three different zip codes completely. So one of them was by Coup De Ville in that area. Another one was closer to Southside. And then we had another one in North Shore. So now I had to find three different parking garages. And then the logistics of it is what made it a little bit complicated because these cars need to be checked out after every single trip. And at this point, I don't have the funds to have an employee because I'm using this income to pay myself and then also just reinvest as much as I can into buying as many cars as possible. So we put all the cars there and that was a great summer in year two. We were able to put over $50,000 in the bank account. after expenses and now we had a little bit of a nest egg to start reinvesting into the other cars and I had some money too from the e-commerce stuff, but I didn't want to drain my bank account because I wanted to make the business self sustainable. So we get those cars and then I realized, wow, this isn't like a lifestyle I want to live. I cannot drive to three different parts of Pittsburgh every single day with my bag of tools, my oil, my fluids. And then remember you to find car washes near these places. You have to take them to the gas station sometimes. So this is a full time job for not that much money at 11 cars at that point. So then I think, OK, now it's time to really expand this thing. We have proof of concept. All the cars are making money, but I need to get a location. I need to put all these cars in one place. If I ever want to build something that's, you know, 50 cars plus. So at that point, we shared a location. with actually my wife's father. So they had two locations side by side. I bought half the land. So we rent half the land out of the entire property. And then we both invested in building a garage and then hiring a full-time mechanic because they were at a size where they couldn't justify having a full-time mechanic even though they were successful with car sales. So the rentals allowed us both to come together. Even though I own the rental car company, they own the used car dealership, but we shared the resources and split the costs to then have a physical location. That point, I'm like, OK, I really need to get more cars to make this worth it, because now all the money is going into paying the mechanic, the new overhead I have. At that point, I put in some personal funds. I had really good credit. I still have really good credit at the time. I actually got some interest free credit cards, which people don't realize you can do to buy cars. And then We were able to get over 20 cars at that point. Remember, we're buying these things really under market value. We're buying 10,000 to $12,000 vehicles for around $6,000. And that's the benefit of having auction. And that makes a big difference at scale. But now we have something. And we had two years of tax returns at that point. We were able to get an SBA loan on top of that at the end of that year. So now we had another $200,000 to put into the... vehicles at a very, very reasonable interest rate. Like compared to a car payment, it's amazing. I still have a little bit of debt on that loan just because it was such a great interest rate, I didn't want to pay it off completely. So now we have 50 vehicles, And now everybody is asking me, hey George, can I get a rental car or how do I invest in your fleet? And I was never into taking outside investors. I like to have complete control of my business. Which can be good for some people at different stages, but at this point I had the capital, I had the cars, I had the location. And I did a few one-offs for friends and family where I'd let them buy a car and manage it and do that. But now I'm getting everybody asking me like, hey, like they're seeing the posts online. They're saying, how do I get into the rental car business? And then, you know, my dad's friends, my wife's friends, everybody's saying, wow, that sounds cool. How do you do it? Right? So I'm like, okay. And I'm taking phone calls too. And I'm spending hours of my time. helping people and I kind of realized a lot of the people that ask you for the advice, especially when it's free, they don't end up doing anything. So now I'm just sitting there like wasting hours on Joe Schmo, who's never even going to start the business. And he just so much wants to pick my brain to figure out how much money I'm making at a point. And at this point, I see an advertisement from another guy in Pittsburgh that looked close to my age and that's Peter. So Peter was near the Pittsburgh airport. I'm on Sawmill Run Boulevard in Pittsburgh. And I saw an ad that said, hey, looking to make money off of your vehicles, we're running a co-hosting network. at the Pittsburgh airport. You can send your cars to us. So he was building his business on other people's cars. And to be completely honest, I felt a little bit intimidated at that point because I'm like, all right, there's another like young shark in Pittsburgh. And you know, you're in the area. We do have a lot of entrepreneurs here not to diminish it. But it's not everybody's super tech thinking sometimes. So was like, all right, there's a real competitor. He's running Facebook ads. He has the skill of advertising. I see he's getting reviews at the airport. And then funny enough, me and my wife were out to dinner that night. I had probably just a few glasses of wine. So I was probably a little bit more apt to call him than I normally would have been. But I called him and I was like, was a client that wanted to invest. It's like going through somebody's funnel, like they always say. So I'm like, all right, let's see what this guy's about. I call him and then I decide just to be honest with him and tell him, hey, so I own the law. I I am the largest Turo host in Pittsburgh. He's trying to do what I'm doing. I said, come down to my lot sometime. Let's just talk about the business and network. At that point, I wanted to fill him out, have him come in, see what he was about. Maybe there was room for collaboration, but I knew I didn't really want to compete with him too much because I saw that he would be valuable to join forces with. Then we ended up meeting up. I ended up really getting along, becoming friends. And then we both discussed it that he had the same thing going on as I did, where people were constantly asking him for advice. And both of us paid for mentorship and have gone through all the different programs from going to Alex Hermosys at acquisition.com to Ryan Blair's mastermind that we're a part of too. And we thought, wow, that should be a business that we work on together. We already have the demand. We have the proof. The other guys on social media don't even have as many cars as we do and aren't nearly as successful. And we had all the skills from all of our years in business to create car rental coach, where the main goal of that was to keep people from going through the same headaches that we had to go through building the business for the last seven years and help either expedite their success and help them either start or scale a car rental business. Will: Dude, I I so cool to hear your journey. I didn't even realize that's how you I we were talking and I I knew you guys had met. I I must have missed if if Peter brought it up that you had called him kinda out of the blue. I didn't even know that that was that side of it. Which I I think is so cool. I you know, I I think so many times and what you brought up is I know this isn't like directly tied to where we're going with the podcast, but I do think it's really important that You know, you you just you took a chance, right? You put yourself out there and sort of got to meet him and you know, it could have been a screw you, you're a competitor, I don't want to talk to you, but it turned out to be this great collaboration. I've got to meet you guys and if anybody who gets to watch the YouTube channel, I highly recommend it. you'll get to see Georgian videos. You also get to see Peter. Peter's super sharp, another just really, really sharp guy, and somebody you just like want to root for, just such a nice, nice guy. I I just think it's really funny that that's how you guys ended up meeting. just goes to show you if always advertising yourself, new opportunities can come about. And so for Peter, just putting himself out there, he was able to meet you and and hey, now you guys have this really cool business. I guess George, I I would love to get into so for car for car rental coach, you obviously had a lot of people who are reaching out, I think so many of us business owners can relate to this. Hey, how are you doing what you're doing? Hey, can I can I pick your brain? Tell me, tell me how to do the same thing you're doing. I I would love to dive in though, because I I think I'm trying to put myself into I I'd interviewed someone years ago who was renting their car on Turo. And my initial thought was like, man, do you like I'm just gonna I'm gonna play the role of like probably the the business owner or professional that's out there listening to this going like Man, do I need to have like I I guess I assume like I'd have to have like twenty grand, forty grand saved up to like even start something like this. Again, I like my misconception was before talking to you guys, like the nicer the car, the better it's gonna do. I guess I'd I'd be curious if someone's thinking about this, whether they're a professional or maybe they're another business owner who's looking for a a place to like invest cash, how do you how do you recommend even getting started? I I you know, in my mind I'm like Are there a thousand people doing this? Is there still an open opportunity here? I've got all the limiting beliefs I think anybody else would probably have about this stuff. So when someone comes to you guys, starts working with you guys, yeah, how do you help them assess sort of where to start? George Madden: Absolutely. So one thing that differentiates Peter and I with car rental coach versus a lot of the other, you know, online, I guess we'll call them gurus. A lot of people say, start with no money down and stuff. And sure, maybe if you have access to amazing credit or investors, you can do that. But I'm pretty strict on wanting people to have at least ten thousand dollars to start the business with, because that's going to give them some room for error. And that's also going to be able to help them source one of these economy cars. So, you know, I'm not one of those people that thinks you should even start entrepreneurship with zero dollars. I think sometimes it makes sense for somebody to work a job and save 10,000, 20,000, whatever that number is for the venture you're looking to do. Then take that into the business and start, instead of starting with just completely zero. I think that's unrealistic. So about $10,000 is what I recommend to start. And that could be a credit card that could be cash. I prefer cash though, because it's less risk. And then you can find these vehicles when you do the market report and figure out which vehicles are working in your area, where you can find them for six to $7,000. I'm not going to go real unrealistic and say you can get them for three. Maybe you can from auction and if you have a mechanic that can fix it, let's say six to $7,000. That can put you in the range of buying things like Kia Soles, Hyundai Elantras. Mitsubishi Mirage's and we're talking vehicles that are maybe 10 years old like 2016 2017's are newer and they only have to have under a hundred and thirty thousand miles on them. So with Turo right now you can put on a vehicle that's 12 years old or newer and under a hundred and thirty thousand miles and these cars do cash flow about a thousand dollars a month in revenue and then your overhead for them is not that expensive. It used to be more expensive, but now we have commercial insurance. You can get that for about $65 a month. Your hardwired tracker about $12.95 a month. I have a car wash subscription on each one of them for $15 a month. And those are the expenses that are reoccurring happen every single month. And then you have to deal with maintenance. But yeah, if you have $10,000, it's obviously you're not going to make, you're not going to get rich off of one vehicle. But a lot of people come into this wanting a side hustle where they can make an extra thousand dollars a month. And on that, majority of people we see make at least 100 % return on that vehicle in year one. And that's just talking about the vehicle revenue and what you're taking home. That doesn't talk about the tax advantages you get for buying rental cars, which depending on the tax year, you can get up to 100 % bonus depreciation on these. So Peter and I have worked with people that don't even care about necessarily making money off of the cars. And these are people with a lot of money, right? So we worked with a few pro athletes, stuff like that, where people come to us, they have a million dollars they want to start with. They're looking at this for the tax advantages to get them in a different tax bracket and then still own all of these vehicles, which we consider assets because of the way we're using them. And we're buying them under market value at their highest appreciation point. So if you buy a 2018 Kia Soul with 100,000 miles on it, well, year two of it has 130,000, it's not dropping in half in value. Like when you buy a brand new Cadillac or something with zero miles on it and pull it off of the lot. So about $10,000, you can be successful with it to make about $1,000 a month. But if you want to do this full time, you want to build it up to about 20 cars. And that's when I realized you could have a full time employee while still making a profit on it. Will: Wow, man. So okay. So a couple things that that came out to me. One, I didn't even think about the tax side of things and tax implications of doing the car rental side of things. And yeah, I mean, in that case, absolutely, the the vehicle is an asset, right? It's creating producing revenue and producing income for you. and then it got me thinking too, like, I you know, George, I wonder, like, you know, one of the things that I I sort of think about is we live in a major city, you know, Pittsburgh, maybe it's not New York or LA, but obviously it's a big City, there's a lot of people coming in from the airport or for conferences, things like that. you know, I I guess maybe a limiting belief I might have is like, does this only work if you're in a major metro area? Do you have examples of people who are maybe like in smaller communities who are also making it work? I don't know if that's like, you know, even you know, I'm thinking State College, for example, which is a smaller town where Penn State is. Like yeah, I'm kind of curious, like do you see examples of that? Do you recommend people, hey, if you're in a maybe a more rural area, this probably isn't the right thing. Like you want to be in a major metro area. How how has that played out with your guys' clients? George Madden: Sure, so when we work with people even before we work with them, we do a market analysis report and we only are going to take on clients that we know this will be successful with. We have turned down people for being in very rare circumstances. I will say it's very surprising though that even those smaller areas can produce great results. So for a few outliers, we had a guy in Alaska, very small town. It was like a couple thousand people there, but there was a need for tourists in that area and his vehicles were renting out full time. Granted, he didn't grow it to a hundred vehicle fleet, but he was able to grow to 10 vehicles, which he wanted to do because he had a full time job and he wanted this as additional income. And we were able to look in his area, see what the few rental car company, which there was only one rental car company, were doing and kind of replicate that to make him money. So not every area is going to be able to sustain like a 200 car fleet. I haven't found an area where somebody can't make money with at least five vehicles. That being said, New York is one of the few places that I do not recommend starting the business at because of insurance regulations. So what Peter and I offer to with Car Rental Coach, we have different programs and different ways people can work with us. We have a co-hosting network too. So the co-hosting network works like this. If somebody were to come to us, a lot of business owners, professionals, or maybe there's somebody that's not in a market that we would say is ideal and we don't feel comfortable with them starting the business there, they can still buy the cars and then ship them to our co-hosting network in Tennessee where they will run the vehicles there. They have over 150 just in that location alone. And they do everything from A to Z. They manage the vehicle. They talk to guests, they'll file the insurance claims for you. Everything you can think of, they'll even source the car. And all they do for you at the end of every single month is send a check for whatever your profit is. And there's different splits of it, but usually that for ours, it's 25.75. So the co-host takes 25 for managing everything, doing all the work. Then the investor gets 75 % of the revenue still. And don't have to do anything. And I like that model too, because Peter and I even ship cars there when, you know, certain cars make more sense for that market. And also with me, I have 50 just in Pittsburgh. I don't know if I want to take it to 100 just in Pittsburgh and get more staff. I now I have two other co-hosts I ship them to as well, as I'm making more money because I have more money now to invest than I did before. So I'm able to scale even faster. And different headaches come with scaling a business in one location when you have to get multiple employees, especially in the car industry with what you're paying. So there's different ways to do it. But yeah, co-hosting is a great option if you're not in an ideal market, but everywhere I've seen, you can usually sustain at least 10 cars unless you're just in the middle of complete nowhere, you know, off of the grid or something. But even to answer what you said at state college, I had two clients there and they were making good money. Parents weekends, people coming in. Students would need it. But a great way to make sure your utilization is always up, we advertise the cars directly to Uber drivers and Lyft drivers. And as you know, that's a big business in state college alone. you don't need that many people to rent the car. It's not like you have a new customer every single day. Some of these guys will take the car from you for six months at a time and just use it for work. And those make some of the best long-term clients you can find. Will: That's actually man, it's so smart. The more that you you're George Madden: this. Will: talking about it, the more I'm starting to think through all the different possibilities of one, co-hosting is wire wild. I never even thought about that as an opportunity. It's super cool that you guys have gone that route. This is why I love doing this podcast. I just hear about different model ideas. I'm like, wow, I never even thought that you could do that. and then what was I gonna say? You know, it it really got me thinking, so I had to gosh, it wasn't too long ago, I had to take this little puddle jumper flight to like do Boys PA, you it was from Pittsburgh to do Boys PA. I could have driven, took this little puddle jumper flight. But there's no there's one Uber driver in the entire town. And I learned the hard way because he wasn't available that day. And there's no car rental at this little airport. But there were like, I don't know, probably 200 people going in and out of this airport every day. And I'm looking back thinking, gosh, if I had known about like Turo at the time and someone had a Turo car there, I would have been like, yep, that's exactly the the route I'm gonna go. And then I I think about like, dude, you're so right. Like, how many I I used to be a physical therapist and I had so many friends who do travel physical therapy and they didn't want to put all the miles on their car. You know, they'd only go somewhere for 13 weeks, maybe, you know, maybe four months, five months. And like, you know, the idea of driving across country, driving all the way back when it's like, dude, I could have found a Toro, I could have found a a car to rent during that time. Yeah, it's just it's just really cool as you're bringing this up. It's hitting me, the business owner of me, is like, wow, yeah, I'm seeing all the different opportunities that are out there, which is so cool because I you I think the initial thought is, I'll get a car, I'll listen on Turo and I make money, which is great. But it's also like, hey, well what if what if they're you know, you guys are thinking outside the box besides just relying on how Turo's gonna, you know, do for you guys. Sorry, just sort of talking out loud. It's just really cool to think through the process here of, I'm sure a lot of other listeners are like, okay, I'm putting the pieces together here of all the different ways that this can work. George, for you for you guys, for a car rental coach, I'm super curious, what's kind of your guys' process look like? If someone's wanting to to work with you guys, for example, or they're like, hey, I'm I think about someone like me or another business owner who's listening to this who maybe has, you know, definitely has the 10,000 in savings, and they're like, you know, I'm looking to maybe just thinking about Potentially stock market. This might sound like a really cool idea that I could run. or maybe it's just a professional. Maybe it's somebody who's just been saving up and and they're working a job. What's kind of your guys' process? Like how do people start with you? Like how do you guys guide people into finding I know you mentioned there's a sort of market research part. What what's sort of the process someone goes through when working with you guys? George Madden: Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing they do, they go to carrentalcoach.com and they're going to fill out a survey right there just to initially qualify them to work with us because like I said, we are very, very strict on only taking on people that are going to be successful. And that's why when you Google car rental coach, you'll see 50 five star reviews, you'll see endless testimonials, you'll see YouTube videos of clients that I've had, know, just praising it, saying it changed your life because we're only working with people that will be successful. So at that point, then we have our team get on. We have usually Peter or one of our other team members gets on a discovery call with them. And really that's, I don't even like to call it a sales call. It's a discovery call because we want to see if this is even a good fit. Peter turns down probably half the people he speaks to a day. So we look at their market, we see the area they're in, we see if they have the actual financial means to make this business a reality, have to make sure the partners are, whether it's your spouse, a partner, everybody's on the same page and wants to actually do the business. And then if we decide that you are a good fit to work with us, you get assigned to one of our coaches. So it's either myself or another coach that has at least 30 vehicles themselves and have been doing this business for years. And at that point, You know, it's not just one-on-one coaching. work with you. Well, like I said, we have different programs, but for this one specifically, we work with you for three months getting on weekly calls, least weekly, sometimes twice a week. We go through your report. We help you find the right vehicles you're going to need. And then you get access to all of our member resources. So we give you the exact GPS as I use after I've tested out 15 different ones on my cars. We get you connected with the best commercial insurance for your vehicles. Like I said, car rental coach and myself personally are licensed in insurance. So we're able to find the best commercial rates around you and then refer that. You also get all of the connections we've made. So we help people with vehicle sourcing. We have a partnership with Hertz. We can actually help people find discounted vehicles that they're actually getting rid of in their rental car fleet that are at the end of their life. But for the industry we're in, they're just at the beginning of. On top of that you get all of my insurance documents how to win every single claim I have case studies you get access to our slack community where we have over a hundred and fifty other members in there That all communicate they do meetups Tons of different channels with every thing you can think of within there alone We have monthly group calls with the entire team And really we are holding your hand and we are giving you access to every single thing you need in the industry. So it's all custom. You know, as part of that, we build people websites for the industry. We help them with their actual advertising. Peter and I have spent millions of dollars, not just on this business, but since we started entrepreneurship on meta ads. So we're very, very successful with those. I'd say that's one of our number one skills is advertising. So we help people get set up with meta ads. We help them get set up with the AI we use. We send them all the artifacts that we use in Claude to help us interpret our data. But anything somebody needs within the car rental space, we wanted to build the complete ecosystem from finding the right car, to sourcing it, to getting it insured, to having somebody help you with claims. We do it all and encompass everything. So once you work with us, you don't have to go anywhere else. Will: Dude, I I love it. I I George Madden: Okay. Will: I'm super curious for you guys. So when when it sounds like that if you go in, there's a blueprint to follow, which i is super important in something like this. Do you for you guys, what's kind of a a normal I don't know, what's what's kind of a normal student result? Like I know you have your your your outliers who are probably, you know, you built huge businesses off this. Just kinda like what's a I don't know, maybe it's a an example or just sort of what you've seen overall is like kind of a typical result if that's somebody, hey, somebody gets up to like three cars and they're they're, you know, cash flowing twenty five hundred bucks a month and it's only taking them five hours a week or a month. I you I'm kind of curious like what's What's something typical? Because I I know a lot of business owners that hear this, they're all or nothing. It's like, I'm either gonna go all in, I'm gonna go super hardcore and build this thing, but it's like, hey, there's there's I I have a feeling there's plenty of people who are like, you know, maybe this is taking five hours a month, ten hours a month, and they're they're you know, netting an extra three, four, five K, which pays for a kid's college curr you know, college tuition over time. So just kind of curious. I I don't know if there is a sort of typical, but just kind of like what you would say is more of an average, normal situation. George Madden: Yeah, absolutely. So we have two different types of people we typically work with. So one, they're just starting the business. And then two, they come to us with a car rental business, but they're not profitable. So we're going through a complete audit, fixing things. And typically, there's a lot of reasons they're not profitable. They're buying the cars wrong, they're not in the right area. But for our like smallest clients, and this is based on their goals to write like some people that I've worked with just want to do this and they have their kids run it. that make the extra money like you said college things like that I'd say about five cars on the small end is what people typically get and that's within year one you know but within the first month of working with us everybody's getting a car in their cash flowing in month one unless there's something on their end where they couldn't find the car but typically everybody within month one has at least one car on the smaller end of things within the first year all of those people build it up to at least five and then When I'm working with the business professionals that want to take it more, I don't want to say more seriously, but they want to put more effort into it or they want to focus on this. I've had clients that have built it up to over 150 cars themselves, starting with zero with me. And we have videos on our YouTube with actual, you know, proof of this. Everybody can say that. But yeah, I've helped. I've worked myself personally with over 200 clients that I've coached. And then car rental coaches as a whole has worked with over 500 people. But yeah, I mean, we range from five cars to 150. A lot of people hit around that 20 mark. And, you know, we're still growing though and we want to do some follow ups on clients as well. But yeah, all depends on the goal. So we have some people that will do over a million dollars in revenue on the car business. And then some people that might hit 10 to 15,000 in a year. But either way, you know, depending on the goals, it's still a big milestone. Will: Dude, I love I I yeah, I just think it's really cool George Madden: Thank Will: that there's you guys have found so many different ways for this to to help people out and Yeah, I just I think of like I could see where it's one of those things that you get into it if you get good at it, like any other business or skill. You're you can see kind of how you and Peter did of like, my gosh, we could take this thing to a you know, to a certain level that's gonna pay for your lifestyle and pay for actually have even enterprise value. and then I see people who are like, Man, I actually I I got my nine to five. I do really well, but like it'd be really sweet to do something on side for five hours a week, ten hours a month maybe, and and and net four or five K extra of revenue. That's huge. Like that's a major difference in someone's life, especially if we like extrapolate that out yearly or or even over multiple years. Like that's that's incredible. I'm George, it's got me thinking like where do you see the industry going? Like right, like in my mind, I'm I'm like, hey It's really wild. I would have thought I guess me years ago would have thought, well, Uber and Lyft probably dominate all the people who would need cars. And then, you know, I then Turo came on and I was like, man, this is staying around and obviously there's a clear need here. Car rental businesses in general, you know, Hertz, Enterprise, all those guys are still still kicking it and doing their thing. I guess w mm What's kind of your outlook for the next, I don't know, a couple of years, five years of of the market and industry? I'm gonna guess that you're bullish on it, but just kind of curious, like, are there any potential roadblocks that you see? Just because I know you're in the seat of being the business owner and you're living it, running the business itself. Like, yeah, I would just be really curious. Where where do you see things going with it? Do you feel like it's only gonna continue to grow? Do you feel like there's some cap at some point? George Madden: Yeah, great question. So there's a reason you don't see me in my advertisements, you know, running around in Ferraris and stuff like that and all the exotic cars. I don't think that is the best industry to be in, except if you are in very, very niche markets. I've only worked with a few people that have done well with luxury cars because we can get insurance for those two. You have to really be in a place like Miami and it's still competitive. So you have to come in with an advantage. As far as the car industry goes on what I think is going to be successful, I think these economy cars are going to be successful in that under $12,000 price range. Because when you're getting these cars at the end of like enterprise's life cycle, things like that, you're now able to offer them for a lower rate than what enterprise and these other companies are doing. And another thing that makes you know, private rentals from a small independent rental car company nice. enterprise and things like that is that there's less restrictions on it, right? We don't require as much verification, as much down payments. It's a lot easier to get into. We don't have young driver fees. So we're going after the market that a lot of the big guys aren't going after. And because of that, we're getting people in long-term rentals at these affordable rates. So I think with the industry that the economy cars are going to keep crushing it. I think that I think the people that are getting into this business and they're buying things too high end. And when I say too high end, it doesn't have to be a Ferrari or Lamborghini. It could be a brand new Ford Explorer that has zero miles on it because they're not accounting for depreciation, all these other things. And now you're really just competing with enterprise. We're looking for people that want to use these cars for income, keep them for long amounts of time and then lock them in for a very affordable rate. And then build relationships with them. I think if you're in the economy market, you're going to be able to do well, especially because, you know, I never make excuses based on how the economy is doing, you know, my business will be successful regardless, but I can understand it, you know, with the economy with cars, well, Same thing with real estate. The bottom cars are always still going to need rented because you're going to push the people that would typically rent luxury that aren't doing as well into those. So there's always going to be a demand for these because people have to get around regardless. They need them for work. It's a necessity. That's why we build it 80 % off economy cars, 20 % things a little bit nicer that we do for tax deductions too. But I think that is still going to be future. The economy cars dealing with people that need these cars for gig work. Especially, you know, we have a lot of people coming from different countries that need these vehicles too, that can't get approved through enterprise and stuff like that. So huge, huge demand as the world keeps becoming more more integrated. But as far as the far future of it, I think the economy cars, all that, at least for the next five to 10 years are still going to keep crushing it and probably will for our lifetime. But I'm very bullish on the Tesla cyber cabs as well. And Cool thing for car rental coach, we're one of the first people on the list for purchase orders for them because of our relationship with a much bigger company that I won't name in this podcast, but we were on the waiting list for a thousand units. So car rental coach clients will get first access to those whenever our purchase order gets fulfilled. Very bullish on those because they're thinking about a $30,000 price range for them. And I mean, that sounds beautiful having the cybercabs on the road doing Uber for you all day. Then you have your Tesla robot detailing them when they come back and then building a charging station with the infrastructure where you can charge others. So like long-term futuristic stuff, I think the cybercabs are going to be a disruptor. Not saying that economy cars won't still be needed because I see that still being in our lifetime, but very bullish on the cybercabs. And once those are launched, myself, Peter, and then the car rental coach community are going to buy up as many as we can. Will: Dude, that is it's got me kind of kinda excited to think about where the future's gonna go then, man. Of just seeing that. But I I you yeah, you said some things that I think I was just thinking like of even you know, of how many people maybe only need a car five times a month, really, maybe to go to the grocery store or something and instead of buying a car, you know, paying the monthly payment on it, all the interest rate that goes with that, assuming they're, you know, they're not able to pay it all in cash. or even if you're leasing a car, like your your lease is sort of mapped out. Obviously it's based on estimated mileage. But you know, I just like thinking how many opportunities are out there for someone who's like, I'm gonna use this one day a week to go to the grocery store, but I'm a recurring you know, I'm I'm a recurring client, I'm gonna use that car. But I I don't as a consumer, I'm just thinking too like that what an advantage of not having to be on the hook for that car, which In most cases if it if you're not a business owner, you know. it's lost most of its value as soon as it comes off the lot for you. And so just thinking on a consumer side, like how beneficial that can be too from that. So George's been really fascinating, man. I I thank you so much for for coming on. I think it's been really eye opening for me of just looking at the I think I was so pigeonholed in what I imagined car rental the car rental space would be on the private side of just, you know, hey, you put it in a stall some you know, parking spot somewhere and it's on an app and someone goes and uses it. But Dude, I've learned so much in episode. I didn't even think about one, the tax benefits on that side of things, two, you know, th the concept of recurring use in in specific areas too of like people who are going to Who maybe live in certain places for only a short period of time wouldn't make sense to own a car. and then co-hosting just blew my mind. Absolutely. I didn't even think about like you being able to buy a car, give it to an existing place, they'll go ahead and manage it for you. So, dude, I I've I've learned a ton from this. I I George, I would love to just know if anybody's out there who's listening to this, first off, I just want to say thank you for hopping on. I should say that first. So dude, thank you so much for hopping on. Two, if if anybody's out there I'm sure there's gonna be people who are like, do I want to know more about this guy? And also you guys have an amazing YouTube channel. I gotta shout out. Like, I've watched quite a few of your guys' videos. You and Peter do an amazing job on your YouTube channel. I'll have links to that in the show notes. But how can people reach out to you guys? How can they learn more about car rental? What's the next best step for them if someone's interested? George Madden: Yeah, so yeah, is anybody that's interested in starting or scaling their car rental business or if you have a car rental business that's not successful and you want it to be looked at by people who've been in the industry for seven years that have done millions of dollars in car rentals, you can go to carrentalcoach.com and you can apply to work with us there. But if you're not ready to take that step with working with us, go to our YouTube channel at car rental coach. have. Hundreds of videos that really break things down in depth We really put a lot of time into that trying to provide the most value to you guys as possible So watch the YouTube and if you decide that working with us would be a good fit you can apply a car rental coach thought Will: Cool. I will have George. I just want to say thank you again. And George Madden: for that which is associated with. Will: if you see Peter, tell Peter I say hey as well. huge shout out to Peter, really great guy. And please go check out the YouTube channel. I can't stress it enough. I was so it's kind of funny actually being in Pittsburgh. I was watching videos of George walking around in his car a lot and I was like, my gosh, I actually know exactly where that is. And to be able to go see that. So go check out their YouTube channel. I I'm actually gonna go do some more research now too. I I hadn't thought of all the different sort of routes that you can go with this. So now I'm super curious and fascinated of of kind of the different routes you can go. So I just want to give a shout out to George and Peter. Check the show notes for links to their YouTube channel, to their website, and to be able to contact them. And we will catch you guys on the next episode of Building the Business.