From Zero to Vending Hero: How to Build a Profitable Passive Income Stream

Hello everyone. We are going to talk about vending machines today. So again, if you are looking for, you know, I was looking, I've been in Austin this weekend. I was looking at just the price of everything, the price of food. You know, I ordered a three piece chicken from Popeye's and ended up being $14. It's just the price inflation is just going crazy. And I do not think that going forward, people are going to be very successful if you just have one income stream. If your only income stream is your nine to five job, I don't think your pay is going to keep up with. And the scary part is in the U.S. we just keep printing money. So it doesn't look like there's any stop in sight for us. So I think the best way to help my audience is to get more income sources. So as the price of things go up, it's going to be hard to get your salary to match it. But if you can start a new side hustle that makes you a 1,000 bucks a month, 2,000 bucks a month, I think that's the way going forward for almost everyone. So if you have one income stream, I want you to watch this video. You don't have to do vending machines, but find another income stream and get that going. And then maybe you find a third, maybe you have a fourth. I was looking, I have about 28 right now. And that's what I would like to start seeing for my audience. So we have on, I am not the guy that knows about vending machines. So I have brought on Mike, my friend. We've done a bunch of business together now and talked a whole bunch. We have each other's numbers. We've been texting back and forth different ideas. He is Mr. Vending Machine. So Mike, can you go ahead, do a quick introduction of yourself, tell a little bit about your story, how you got into this, and what vending machines have done in your life. And then we'll talk with the audience about how they can get involved. Yeah, thanks, James. So I think the interesting comment you made about kind of inflation and stuff, I was reading something this morning where since 2020, the cost of the dollar has gone down 24%, which is just mind blowing. Like anyone making 100K is in reality making 75K with inflation. It's just so crazy. But back to your kind of start there. I actually got into vending because I wanted to find a thing that didn't require as much capital upfront, like my initial rental properties. And I couldn't keep coming up with 10, 20% for down payments. And with these vending machines, you can finance them. You can go talk to your local gym about, hey, wouldn't it be nice to have protein shakes here after you get done with a workout or wherever, your local church. We have a vending program that just landed his own church and all the kids that come through during the week for CCD. And it's just such a easy way to quantify a return of you buy a soda from Costco for 50 cents and you sell it for $1.50 and 67% margin right there. Yeah, absolutely. No, I totally agree, especially in my industry. You know, I do so much crypto. So I love having a real life product. I love my digital products, of course. And you know, those are the easy one. I can just sit on my chair and make money. I mean, I'm never gonna not love my digital products, but it is nice with vending machines. You are selling a real product. You can touch it. You can go to Costco and buy it and feel it. And you can sell to real people. And it actually ends up being a win-win-win situation because where you place the machine, they're usually happy because they have an extra amenity that people didn't have before. You're happy as the business owner and the consumer's happy because they're usually in places looking for, hey, I would love a Gatorade right now or something like that. So having those vending options there. So I love this. You don't really have to sell. You don't really have to market. You just put a machine there. People are looking for what you're selling. It's a real product. And then the other pro you talked about is not needing a lot of capital to start because like you talked about, real estate, if you wanna get into real estate, good luck getting in without 5K, 10K, 20K in a lot of cases. If you're gonna be doing flips or something like that, you might need 50K or 100K. But what we found with these vending machines is the vendors, the vending machine vendors, which is kind of a funny, funny thing, but they'll give these machines with zero down financing because they know, okay, this person will make profit over time. So we'll take some profit over time. And that makes it a very easy thing to start up, very easy thing to scale. Once you get one machine set up, you don't have to wait to save up another 2K to get your next machine. You can go right away. Let's get our second machine. Let's get our third machine. Mike, in how many machines do you have going right now? And then about how many machines have you helped in your programs across the country people get set up? Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think we just crossed the 20 machine for our personal route, machines in micro markets. And then we've helped, oh shoot, we're probably over 500 at least, probably pushing 750 now. And the community of people just kind of one machine, one income stream, one machine, one income stream and parlaying that to, you know, leaving their nine to five, doing all kinds of things. Okay, yeah. How many machines, what would you say an average machine makes when you get it placed? I know it varies wildly based on where you get a place, what kind of machine they end up getting. But if somebody wants to make this kind of their full-time thing to replace, you know, maybe their 70K a year income, is that, are we talking, how many machines would you say on average it takes for people to do that? And how long would you say it usually takes? Yeah, it's all about the location. So, and what I mean by that is the foot traffic of a place where the machine is sitting. Like, is it at a Jiffy Lube or is it at a hospital or is it at, you know, Epley Airfield? And where is the location? So I think with that, typically anywhere between one to, we have micro markets in the community doing 10 grand a month. We have vending machines that are doing around a thousand bucks a month and then everywhere in between. Profitability usually comes in play above 600 bucks a month. So it's really easy to kind of get profitable, but I'm going up to Seattle for a meeting tomorrow with a 1,400 unit apartment complex. And I think it'll do six grand a month. And so, you know, with cost of goods being 30% and time and labor being 10%, probably 60% of that will be profit. That's amazing. Yeah, great, great margins there. David would like to know, I'm in Australia. Does Mike help people in Australia? Yeah, can you talk about the international side? I know you're mostly US based. Have you done some international stuff and what kind of results have you seen there? Yeah, and we can get into this with the program, but we absolutely do help international folks. I had a call with a guy right before this in the UK and actually vending started in Japan. So the US is, in a lot of ways, kind of behind. A lot of the manufacturers now are coming out of the US, but international, absolutely. It's a more mature market in a lot of places, including Australia. Yeah, absolutely. I was in Japan a few months ago and it's crazy. They have vending machines for everything. You just walk down and some of them are really complicated. It's like a game to try to figure out how to put stuff out. But yeah, definitely a lot of international opportunities as well there. So for people who are just getting started, because I think this video is not really intended for people who already have three or four vending machines and just want to celebrate successes. That's amazing. We're happy for you. This is for people who are more thinking about getting started. But what would you say are the hardest parts of getting started, the biggest hurdles? And what do you kind of do to help people get over those hurdles, especially if they're trying to do it on their own? What do you kind of help with to get them over those initial hurdles? Yeah, so I think the first thing is we have a training program that can, at the end of the day, you got to find good locations. Like that's what makes or breaks your vending route, your business, all the revenue kind of projections you want to hit. And so helping you kind of think of places that you might not typically think of like, oh wow, that place will do really good, or how to like structure it with businesses where they're all about employee wellbeing and trying to get employees back in the office so then maybe the business will actually pay and it's free for the employees. Like that type of stuff we go over in a training course where it's an easy way for people to see like, tell me, is vending really for me or not without like a lot of investment? Yeah, do you want to talk through what all you go through here in this training course? Yeah. This is kind of newer. Do you want to talk about what all you go through and have people been finding success just with the training course and maybe talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so in this course, we've had a lot of success with people that are kind of, I want to try to see if I can do it myself first mentality. And so we go over everything from, do you need an LLC? What kind of insurance for your vending machines? Breaking up locations. So if you live in a place like a college town, maybe you target luxury apartments, or if you live in like a big manufacturing town, you target big kind of employee warehouses. So we go through that. We also go through where to source machines, how to finance machines, how to set the prices and what products to put in them. Cause there's a whole, you know, you think about Coke and Pepsi, the psychology of products and how to price them is fascinating and you can really drive sales just from your machine. So the whole operational side, and then of course, you know, being Mr. Passive, I'm huge on how do you build a system to make your route run without your time? So I go over that in the course as well. And then, you know, at the end of the day, if you go through the course and you're like, oh, this is really intriguing, but I don't have time to call into businesses that you outlined in the course, you know, then we could potentially explore more of a do it with you offer that's a little more intensive as well. Okay. I love it. And you know, one of the things I love most about all the different testimonials you have here, which you, by the way, great social proof. A lot of these programs I see, and it's like, hey, is this ever actually helped someone? But you have no shortage of different success stories. And one of the things I noticed about almost all of them is they all talk about how they had no vending experience before. So this is for complete new people who, you know, probably have used it. They know what a vending machine is, at least. That might be a prerequisite, but they have no experience with buying or thinking about it or any of those things. And they've been able to use, yeah, either the training course, if you're kind of wanting to try it more yourself or the full vending, what's this, what did you end up calling it? The Vendingpreneur Accelerator Program. I love that. It's a good name. Yeah. And I've had a bunch of people contact me and they say, we want a vending machine empire. And that's something that really resonates with people. But these are all people. Yeah, this guy here is Jason. Zero knowledge to 10 locations in six months. So those are really great testimonials. What would you say is the average, like how long it takes to kind of get rolling to a place where, hey, this is working for me and I'm going to make it happen? Yeah, it's a pure numbers game. And so Jason's in Minneapolis. So he's in a great market. In fact, he's up to 25 machines now. I got to update this testimonial because he's been in for a year now and up to 25. So he's fully rolling, but he's also in a huge market, right? So in that case, it's a pure volume game. And then it's just repetitions at bats. I would say if you get, if you're batting 300, you're an all-star in baseball, it's the same thing with vending. If you get 10 meetings, you're going to close a lot of them, but getting those 10 meetings is always the hardest part. So it's a repetition game that you just need to keep chopping wood and carrying water. Yep, that's right. Finding those locations. Dave wanted to know what sort of products do you sell in vending machines? So this could be a very exhaustive list, but what do you find are the best sellers, the best machines right now? And maybe, I know there's a lot, when people hear vending machines, they think soda chips, but there's a lot more than that now. What have you kind of seen some trends going on right now? Yeah, and James, I can actually share my screen. I got a couple of examples pulled up if you want me to do that. Oh yeah, that would be great. I love visual. Yeah, exactly. From YouTube, we might as well use the visual part of it. Yeah, so David, this is what we would call a smart cooler. That right side is refrigerated, so we can do anything from the healthy energy drinks and recovery shakes and things that you see to salads and subs. And then the left side is ambient, so not refrigerated. And we can do everything from laundry pods to incidentals like phone chargers, if it's in a hotel and you forgot your phone charger to bags of chips in your traditional vending. I mean, we get a lot of requests of like Tylenol and over-the-counter things for hangovers. So really, you can do whatever will fit on these shelves, and this is just one example. Okay, yeah, I love that. There's all sorts of things. We were talking, Mike, the other day about a kombucha dispenser. I've had some people who are like, well, that's pretty crazy. Kombucha's up and coming. So you want to take advantage of the trends. Even if an apartment complex has some kind of machine, if you say, hey, we can put a kombucha machine in your clubhouse and we can brand it with your apartment on it, I've had some people who are, hey, that's really exciting. We would like to do that. And it's an added amenity where the apartment complex, when they have people come to tour, especially for luxury apartment complex, that might not do quite as well in a lower income area or something. I don't know if they're as much into kombucha, but that's an added amenity that the apartment complex can say, hey, we have a kombucha in our clubhouse there. Absolutely. And James, this is, you're spot on. You want to tailor it to what your clientele wants. So in this case here, this is actually a physician's office. So it's a lot of nurses and doctors that want the energy drink for the late night shifts at the ER, but they also want the salads, like you see on the top of that cooler and the farmer's fridge containers, but then they want their midnight craving of a candy bar. So you kind of, and then the cool thing is those kiosks on the left there, they have a suggestion box. So we're constantly getting, oh, we love this or double down on this, or that's why there's like five different flavors of Cheetos because that's kind of the biggest hit. So you can kind of arise to whatever the location wants. Okay, love that. So you talked about making this passive. So can you talk about how much work is involved in a machine? And then maybe how do you end up turning that passive? That's actually one of the questions I get quite a bit is you keep talking about vending as a passive income stream. That's not passive at all. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so this property tomorrow, meet with it's 1400 units in Seattle. That's a five hour drive from where I currently live. So with that, we're going to hire someone off TaskRabbit to build the micro market for the property. And then I have a local operator I've found where we're going to structure it as 20 bucks an hour, because they're going to be the ones stocking it, handling products, shipping it to their house. And then we're just going to do a profit share. So I have the contract. They're going to be the ones with the boots on the ground, and it's just going to kind of run itself. And people are a little surprised. It's not hard to hire help because these things can be stocked early in the morning. If you're an early riser, late at night, if you're a night owl, Tuesdays, Saturdays, Wednesday, it doesn't matter. You just got to do it once a week or consistently. So I, whenever I hire these operators, I just like, what works with your schedule? And a lot of people are like, oh, I work a graveyard shift. So I want to do it on my drive home before I, you know, or, oh, I work on the weekend. So I want to do it in the middle of like, I don't care. Just do it once a week. Amazing. Yeah. David wants to know how does selling salads in vending machine works? Do you have to top it up every couple of days to keep it fresh? That's a, yeah, I love that. So most people would be surprised by this, but we found the best salads of all the grocery stores and stuff with the best margins and the longest shelf life are actually from Walmart super centers. And so Walmart super centers here in Oregon, they stock their salads on Tuesday and they have a nine day shelf life. So we always go to the places with salads on our route. We always, our operator goes by on Tuesdays, snags the salads in the morning. And then he's there at least once a week anyway. So the following week, when he goes back down on Tuesday, he'll pull the ones that don't have a longer shelf life left or he'll mark them as a discount. But we never buy salads in bulk. So we never, we haven't had that problem. Like we've had no shrinkage. Gotcha. Yeah. And salads aren't something that sell probably quite the same way that Sprite sells, you know, where you're selling 50 a day or something like that. So. We'll sell 14 Reese's in a day and 35 Dr. Pepper. That's crazy. Yeah. Amazing. I love this. All right. Well, hey guys. So you guys watching again, please look for extra income streams. I think vending machine, if you don't want to do vending machines, fine, find something else, but consider vending machines. I think this can work for almost everyone. Best way to get involved. You can try going it yourself. That's totally fine. You just, you gotta find some places to place them. Then you have to find the right vending machine, try to get the zero down financing where you can buy a used machine, then get it placed, make, you know, get the right products, get the right margins, figure out the best way to stock it. If you want some shortcuts to doing it all yourself, I think this training course 197 bucks and just the questions that answers where for me, I don't know, I'm kind of a analysis paralysis type of person. So I would be like, oh, what's the right margin on, you know, do I double the price that I get it at Costco or how do I do that? And I would stress out about all those decisions, but Mike goes through answers all those questions. He gives you cold call scripts. So as you reach it out to, you know, apartment complexes and airports and all the different places, he gives you different scripts, different email campaigns that you can do where you day one, you send them this day three, send them this day five, send them this marketing flyers, which that's something I would have never thought of on my own, but Mike has some good marketing flyers in there that have some pictures of the machines you can drop in. Those work way better I've actually found is going in person. It's funny, you know, with COVID, we all went to do everything online and now we're getting back to people want to meet in person and people want to see and connect with people. So it could be a great option in your city. So this is kind of the cheap option. If you're like, I just want to try this out. I want to just get going, see if I can find some placements. This is a great option for you. And then Mike does have his full vendingpreneur accelerator program that you can get into. You can schedule a call. So this is something where you'll, you know, get all your questions answered. And if you just have some questions for Mike, I mean, don't fill him up with just, you know, too many tire kickers. But if you have some questions like, I want to try vending machines. Is this right for me? Hop on his calendar. He's got some slots tomorrow and Friday. So go ahead and hop on. I'll leave all these links down below as well. But I think this could be a great option for anyone in my community. So Mike, thank you so much. Do you have any, let's close with some inspiring words for people who are, I need a new income stream. I don't think I can do this. This is too hard for me. This is too complicated. Surely it's not going to work as well as Mike says it is. And then maybe talk about your guarantee, your confidence in being able to make people successful with this. And we'll close with that. Yeah. So I think the first thing is, I just, at some point, you don't want to be controlled by your nine to five or your boss. And so to start hedging that bet and building those income streams in other ways, vending is a very easy side hustle that can turn into freedom for you. I think the second piece with regards to the guarantee is if you book a call with us, we're actually going to do a market analysis of where you live and how many businesses fit our criteria of revenue generating locations for vending. So you will get that for free. In fact, James, we did it for you. I don't know if you remember, but we ran it for you in Nebraska, I remember. And so this is a way for us for free to help you make an educated decision of like, do we really want to go down this path? And what if the market's too saturated where I live? I love that question. I just laugh because look how many new builds have been done. We talk about, hey market. And yeah, it's just funny. So anyway, all of that, I'm passionate to be a resource for you guys. And at the end of the day, I think James and I, we have one thing, a couple of things in common, but we're both family fathers and we're from the Midwest. And so we're chasing that freedom to spend more time with our family. And that's ultimately why I got into vending. Yep, absolutely. And that's what I really appreciate. How many people are in your programs total? Ooh, probably like 280 now. It's been good. I mean, it's been fun and something that I'm super passionate about. And 95% of those people are chasing the same motives as us and spend more time with their family. Yeah, I mean, that's super fulfilling just to have a program. 280 people who have started this and are working on an income stream. And again, this is a scalable income stream. One thing I hate, okay, I'm not super anti nine to five. I know the slogan on my YouTube channel is ditch the nine to five, but your nine to five job is not very scalable. So you might get a 3% raise or if your boss is feeling real generous, you might get a 5% raise. But when you do something like vending machines, you can have one machine making $1,000. You can get your second machine and double your income. Then you can get your third machine and another 33% increase. And it's really just up to you how much work you want to put in, how much you want to hustle. And you can turn it into five figures a month. I don't know. You don't have any six figure a month vending machine people yet, do you? Not a month, but that's my goal for my route in 2024. So challenge accepted. Yep, exactly. And if you get the operations figured out where it becomes passive on your end, there's nothing stopping Mike from going out, okay, let's get another location. And then you get better at it as time goes on. You know what meetings to take, which ones not to take, which emails to send, which not to send. So I think that you'll hit it. And I think this is a great potential income stream for my viewers. So that's why Mike's been here several times and I'm sure we'll see you several more times over the years. So we will go ahead and wrap up there. Audience, thank you guys so much for coming, for watching. Let's see, is this worth it for someone who is disabled with roughly $900 monthly? So you might need help. It depends how disabled you are, I would guess. But you'll, because you'll have to go, to start with at least, you'll have to go to Costco, get the products, fill up the machines, unless you can get somebody to help you with that. Like I've got a queue of college students who are gonna be doing it for me as I get different machines placed. So it's definitely something. And there isn't a monthly cost really. Let's see, able to work and move. Okay, perfect. Then yes, I think this would be a good option for you. So, you know, and if you have more questions, you can schedule a call with Mike. He'd love to talk through it with you, answer any of your questions. So audience, appreciate you guys very, very much. We will be back tomorrow with something new, some other income stream for you. And Mike, thank you so much for just working with me. Thank you for building this program, helping 280 people that you've helped achieve financial freedom. And I look forward to working more with you in the future. Thanks, James. Thanks for having me on. Love what you're doing. Thank you, everyone. Hope you all have a great rest of the day and we will talk to you later. Bye-bye.