How She Turned 1 Car Into A 100-Car Business ($250K⧸Month)

How did an immigrant turn one car into a $250,000 per month empire? I rented my old 2011 car and I made money on day one. Today, she manages 100 plus cars in Miami, one of the hottest rental markets in the country. I financed cars under my name, my husband's name, and even my mom's name because that was the only way to start. What started as a desperate experiment turned into one of the fastest growing rental businesses. In this video, Natalia reveals the move that made her business double overnight. And the financing tricks she used to get luxury cars on immigrant credit. Risky, but worth it. How much does this car bring in? $1,300 a day. Can anyone start a business like this? Yes, if they will follow what I'm about to show you. Natalia, awesome being here with you today. Tell us, how did an immigrant go from nothing to 100 plus luxury cars? So the short answer is a lot of hard work and being present here and amplify all the good sides of myself and the professionalism into what I'm doing every single day. I like it. Well, where'd you come from? How many years ago? Tell us that backstory as well. This business started seven years ago. It started just from one car from 2011 Porsche Cayenne, which was bought by my husband to me personally. And then I figured out there is a platform called Turo, where I posted the car for the very first time and started this business. Nice. And where'd you immigrate from? I'm from Ukraine. So we're in Miami. It's one of the toughest markets for luxury car rentals. I mean, what makes it so competitive? Miami is actually a perfect market for exotic car rental because of the vibe of the city and the culture of Miami. Because people are coming here specifically to show off a little bit and to rent a car, rent a luxury yacht, and spend their time with actually showing a luxury lifestyle. So walking through the process, if I walk in your lawn, I'm like, hey, I want to rent this McLaren. How long until I'm actually driving it? So we have actually two types of reservations. So you can walk in, as you said, or you can make a reservation online on the website. So if you make it online on the website, you save yourself a lot of time. You would just, in about one minute, make instant reservation. And then when you walk in here, it's like five minutes, and you can drive the car. If you walk in here, then you need to present your driver's license insurance, and we verify your insurance. And that may take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes, depends on how busy the insurance company is. But I would say 30 to 45 minutes tops, and you're going to be out of here on the McLaren. Take us way back to your very first car, the Porsche that you started to rent out. I mean, how much did it make that first month? When did that light bulb moment for you be like, oh, this could be a legit business? Talking about how much it actually made, it's hard to remember. I think it was rented for maybe $175 or $200 per day at that point, because the supply was not that big. So even that, all the Porsche Cayenne was renting for a quite decent amount of money per day. Now, the moment when I realized it's actually a business that I can trust, and I want to move on, was on the third trip. Because third trip is when the damage claim happened, and the car got crashed. The third trip. The third trip, imagine. So anybody can say, hey, third trip damage, I would never ever do this business, because it's scary, right? Right away, somebody damages your car. But for me, I looked at it as this platform paid for the damage claim. So I can trust that platform, and I can do business with them. I can invest in more cars. I can add more cars on the platform, because I know for a fact, if something happens, they're actually fully responsible for that. So it's not about how much car was making that made me think that I want to be in this business, but actually a situation, it was the accident, that showed me that I can trust the platform. That accident happens, and what happens next? Do you buy 10 more cars and go all in on this? Or what happens next then? Right after that, we bought BMW 6 Series convertible. Very specific choice. I made my research of what cars are in demand on the market, and it was white in color. So it was super, super specific. So that's how gradually I started to add more and more cars to the fleet, as I was at that time already confident, like, it's the business to do. It's no secret you're competing with the big brands like Hertz and Enterprise. What's your edge? I'm not competing with them, because I don't have that type of cheaper cars. They rent for $20, $30, $35, $40 per day. I don't have that type of cars. I specialize in luxury and exotic, but even my back lot is $100 per day minimum. So it's completely different types of cars that you will not find in Hertz and Enterprise. They just don't have them. Yes, some of the brands have luxury and exotic division, but the prices and the selection is completely not same as here. Like over there, yes, they might offer you one Bentley and one Porsche 911, but it's not going to be same as mine, customized green interior Porsche 911 in matte black color, right? So everything's going to be very stock in there. And it might work for some visitors who, you know, not really selective and they're okay with that type of choice, but our clients are different clients. That's why I'm not competing with those brands and my clients will never, ever go to those brands. What room do we got here? So this is my office. This is where I spend most of my time and everybody pays attention to my golden Mac, which looks very fancy, but the whole place is fancy because of the cars. So that's how it's supposed to be, I guess. Yeah. So that's where I work every single day. Well, break down your business model for us. What does that look like? So 60% of the revenue comes from normal daily rentals. Usually we try not to rent for one day at all, at least two days minimum to some of the clients. Of course, I can let that to be done, especially on the lower season and anywhere from Sunday to Wednesday, it's more doable because then customers, you know, are not coming too much on those days. And then on top of that, we have co-hosting. So co-hosting, I would say about 25%. And then the rest of the revenue comes from online courses that I sell for tour business and how to do this car rental business overall and the long-term reservations. So for the long-term, as I mentioned, we just started developing this Uber thing, but I really think that this will increase percentage-wise in our business structure because there's a lot of demand for that. But we just recently got insurance for Uber and Lyft and all this ride share. That's why it's just increasing and growing. The co-hosting piece of that. Talk to us, what does that exactly mean? The easy explanation is if somebody has a car or somebody did tour business or any car rental business in the past, and now for whatever reason, that person is not willing to deal with those cars no more, they come here and they sign the co-hosting agreement and I do work for them. I provide a service of renting their assets to my clients. Now, as I said, we're doing 70-30 split. So they're going to get 70, I'm going to get 30. So that's in simple words, I'm responsible for everything that's happening with the asset, with the car, and they're just collecting monthly revenues of those vehicles. Now here, talking about the co-hosting, I really want to share that when I had about 10 cars and about the inventing part. So when I had just 10 cars, I met a guy who was very tired of doing car rental business and he had just a little over 10 cars as well, maybe 11 or 12, something of that nature. But his cars were Rolls-Royce Dawn, Lamborghini Urus, G-Wagon, Bentley, so all the nice cars. And we had a conversation, said, listen, let me put your cars on Turo and I will be doing a revenue split with you. We actually did at that time 50-50, which is ridiculous in my opinion at this point. But this is what we did. But what that did to me as the business, imagine yesterday I had 10 cars and today I already have 20 cars. So my fleet expanded tremendously just in one day, just overnight. And that trick helped me because my company started looking like I'm twice bigger. The reputation thing started to change because now people look at me, hey, she also has Bentley. She also has G-Wagon. So we want to rent more from her, even on Turo that customer retention is happening. People are coming back because you have more cars. That's a big part of the business success here. The co-hosting itself. What's your monthly revenue split between owned and co-hosted vehicles? So as I said, business itself around $250,000 per month and the co-hosted vehicles bring around 50 per month. The greatness about the co-hosting part is all the costs are offset to the owner of the car. So that's why when we receive a co-hosting share that we take them as the management fee, we do have some labor costs of the day I have to pay for the building and stuff. But remember I charged them for being on site $100 per month, right? And a lot of this costs are not associated with me no more. So that's a lot more pure revenue compared to what it is just with rentals of my own vehicles. Here's the thing about luxury cars. Everyone has a need for speed, but without control, you're headed for an expensive crash. That's why Natalie didn't just add more cars to her fleet. She grew smart knowing exactly when to put the pedal to the metal and scale her business. And with an all-in-one cloud financial system like NetSuite by Oracle, your business can do the same. NetSuite has helped over 43,000 businesses unify their accounting, inventory, HR, and financials into one convenient platform. Instead of juggling spreadsheets or guessing, you get real-time insights that show you exactly where your money's going and where you should go next. It's like being able to see into the future of your business, allowing you to make accurate projections, automate the busy work, and drive decisions with confidence without second guessing. If I wanted to scale a business, NetSuite is the tool I trust to guide the critical decisions that make it possible. Don't just move fast, move smart and start growing your business today with the number one AI Cloud ERP. You can learn more and download the free CFO's Guide to AI Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash upflip. That's netsuite.com slash upflip. You started on Turo. How important was it to start on such an established platform should other entrepreneurs copy that? It was an easy entry level and that's a great thing about all these platforms is anybody can join, right? Even about Turo itself, you need just one car. Obviously you have to follow all the policies, you know, and play their game really. But how much time, efforts and money they save me, it's hard to even imagine because I didn't have to do no marketing, right? I didn't have to do no legal work, no, you know, customer retention, all these emails they send to them, no billing, even taxes, like they collect sales tax and send it to the state so then I receive pro revenue. That's why working with the platform is a great thing to do and I would strongly advise to anybody who wants to car rental business or any other business that is possible to do on the third party platform is great. But... But, there's always a but. But you need to realize that you are very depending on that platform. Anything can happen with the platform itself. They can change, they can disappear, right? Anything can happen with the platform itself and if your business is 100% dependent on that platform, then you are in trouble. And I realized this point from the very early beginning, that's why private rental business was always a part of what I was doing. That's why my advice would be to definitely start with platforms but always keep in mind that you need a plan B in case something happens. Welcome to FanBlitz. Are you ready for FanBlitz? Yes. Let's do it. How did she pick the first three cars? Based on the market research. If you had to start over with one, what would that be and why? Same car. I mean, Porsche Cayenne. That was a perfect choice. Do you think this type of business is manageable in every country? No. There are countries where the demand for the car rental, especially exotic car rental, is not there. That's why no. But if you manage a fleet that is applicable to that specific country, then yes. Do you have a favorite car in your fleet that you never want to sell? Yeah, there is one car that I bought for myself. It's the Mercedes S-Class. I bought it brand new and I bought it on purpose white and white so it's not popular for rental because usually S-Class needs to be black and black and I do not want to sell that car. That's my baby. If aliens invaded tomorrow, which car from your fleet would you escape in? Rolls Royce. I like it. What's the weirdest thing a customer has left in one of your cars? A gun. Oh, that's horrifying. Have you ever had someone steal one of your rental cars? Yes. Many, many times. Many times. And it's been done from the customer, from our business location, from the airport, so many times. Yes, unfortunately. What's the most expensive mistake a customer has made with your cars? The most expensive mistake is a total my car. You turn the wheel not the right way, you lose control and total the car. That's very expensive. And that's a wrap on fan butts. So we got this beautiful red Corvette here. Talk to us. What's the monthly payment versus the monthly revenue on something like this? So the monthly bank payment is the least car is $1,200. And on top of that, you need to think about insurance. That's another $150. Now on Turo, this car would make around $2,500 to $2,700. On private rentals, it is from $3,500 to $4,300. So as you can see, the profit margin off Turo is much higher, but that's the numbers on this specific car. What's been your year over year revenue to date? So back in 2018, we started in August. So it was just a few months out of that year. It was around $30,000. And that was a great success as well with just a few cars. And then in 2024, it was $2.4 million. And this year we're gonna close over $3 million. Wow, let's go. That has to be exciting to look back. I mean, immigrant, failed fitness company, now over $3 million in revenue. I'll be honest with you. When I look at the tax returns and all the CPA documents I receive over my email, I like, oh my God, I actually did it. Actually, I'm at that point when I see those numbers on my paperwork. So of course it feels very great. But I would tell you back in the very beginning, I couldn't imagine that this would be the case. I didn't feel like I'm gonna go that far to be honest. So I believed in myself and I do believe in myself similarly right now, but that is a huge jump from $30 to $3 million. That's a lot. You get a lot of advice as an entrepreneur, I'm sure. But what's been the most valuable piece of advice you've received that has changed the trajectory of your business? I would say that the most valuable advice is I'm really getting from my husband, to be honest. He's a part of the business and advice that he gave me at some point of time that I need to risk more to scale this business more. And that was applicable both to co-hosting, buying more cars, trying different cars, trying different types of cars. And that really changed everything because it's worked out. And all the jump into the development of this company came from that specific advice. Are you ready to launch, scale, and grow a business like Natalia did? Inside the UpFlip Academy, you'll get a roadmap to shortcut your success with 25 plus step-by-step programs taught by active entrepreneurs, plus ongoing business workshops, live trainings, and a database full of business ideas and community to share resources and celebrate your wins. Scan the QR code to join the UpFlip Academy today and start surrounding yourself with active entrepreneurs to help you start your business idea. After all of your expenses, including car payments, what does revenue and profit margins look like? So I would say the profit margin ranges from 15 to 20%, not more than that. There is a way to actually go higher if you can afford lower interest rate car loans, which I cannot. And that way, if you have access to that type of capital, your profit margin is going to be higher than mine. So I would look at that profit margin and from 250,000, I have $40,000 net profits. For you, what's your typical co-hosting agreement split? I charge co-host 30% for management fees, and also co-host is responsible for normal maintenance of the car, meaning that we actually do the maintenance for them. We buy tires, we change oil, windshield wipers, brakes if needed, but this will be on their report as deduction every single month if those occurrence actually happen. Now, we also charge them for storage fee at this location, $100 per month, and the car wash fee. Every rental has a car wash as a deduction of $25. What's the biggest mistake co-hosts typically make? They take a car that is not in high of the demand, on top of that with high interest rate or high down payment, because the return from that car is going to be minimal, maybe not sometimes covering the car loan payment at all, but they're already going to be stuck with that because the day after they want to sell it, they're already upside down. That's why the biggest mistake is really the type of the car some people buy and the high interest rate they accept from the bank. How important is Instagram and social media for your business? It's very important. I would say that we are getting more brand awareness results from social media rather than actual leads because the meta advertising is not too successful for us because it's just showing ads to people that maybe in future will be interested or maybe looking out for different companies, but I'm more successful in Google ads and that's why I take social media such as... We have a YouTube channel as well. So all that is brand awareness so people see us and remember about us. You know, we post a lot of entertaining content as well. You know, all those trending videos, you know, where you remember the guy who was doing the paddling thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that worked for me. Yeah, we did the exact same thing, but in the Lamborghini. So I was standing in the front trunk of the Lamborghini and my sister was, you know, doing the exact same thing. So we're doing fun stuff just to attract attention, obviously, but it's all brand awareness, not real sales. For you then, like roughly what percentage of your bookings come from social media? I would say from Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, we're getting not more than maybe 15% of the leads. So it's a very small amount compared to other sources. It's nothing, but it's still good. So we keep it up. I know you're big on social media. What was your most successful social media post ever? What kind of results did it generate for you? Yeah, so I have a social media page for the GM Lux for the car rental itself, and I have a social media page Natalie Turo, which is about teaching and learning how to do this business. Now, the most successful, in my opinion, is the video about Porsche 911. It's not here today because it's rented. The reason why that post was so successful is because I gave the breakdown of how much I paid for that car, and that was super cheap, and how much I invested into the lime green interior and the tech card wing and all the specifications in the body kit. And I explained to people that I had it for many years, and I made about $200,000 on that car. Wow. Yes, including if I sell it, though. It's not just like cash that I already took from the car. So that's popular because a lot of people are like, hey, no way she did it. Like, no way. Like, it's not true. And when that type of conversation starts in the comments, then the social media boosting, you know, so more people can see it. From those videos, the benefits that I get is the co-hosting because that attracts a lot of attention to, oh, she does that, so let me bring my car and get some money out of it. And people are bringing cars to me for the co-hosting once they see that type of videos. How did you decide what types of cars to add to your fleet? So in my fleet, there is a combination of everything. I want to be diverse to serve every type of client. That's why if I feel like I have a shortage of the convertibles, for example, because some of them were totaled, then I would need to add a convertible to the fleet. Then another part is I'm watching all the good deals, right? If somebody shows up in my door and say, hey, Natalia, I'm done with doing tour business, for example, I'm selling the cars and they're selling under the market price, I buy them. So it all depends on the circumstances, but the diversity is the key. Everyone's going to make mistakes. For you, what was the most expensive mistake you've ever made in this business? My most expensive mistake happened quite recently. And the mistake was to get into relationship with private equity group. What happened is private equity group reached out to me and said, hey, we want to consolidate your business with a few more businesses and create something great together. The cost of my mistake is my time. I spent 10 months into negotiations and I was completely turning around the flow of the things in the company. I stopped buying cars. I stopped developing new systems. I actually made my team smaller. So I was following all the negotiations that we had with them. And at the end of the day, I realized that they were fooling around pretty much. And when they brought the contract, thanks God, I took it to my lawyer because she said, Natalia, you are signing off your entire company to them. Nothing belongs to you no more. You don't make no more decisions and you're pretty much employed here. And at first I thought, oh, this must be a mistake. There is no way this reputable people and I looked them up. I did my due diligence. There is no way that they are doing this. But then no, at the end, I figured that it was a catch and there were two companies who actually end up accepting the offer. And one of the company completely disappeared. They absorbed all their cars and they left with nothing. And the other company is in New York and they are struggling up to today from the relationship they entered. So my advice to anybody who is watching this, no matter how successful you are in your business, if an offer like that comes out, you need to be very careful about what are you accepting and read through the contract because you may get in very big trouble. I could have nothing by now if I would sign that paper. Yeah. What is your customer retention rate look like and how do you have people always coming back? The customer retention has always been a part of our business. I do not have data percentage wise, but out of my feeling, probably 25 to 30 people are renting again and again. I would say everybody else is not visiting Miami more than once in their life or maybe once in three, four years. That's why we don't know if they will come back or not. But the tools that I'm using is SMS marketing campaigns that helps a lot. So we always find a way of how to remind them about us. Another thing is that I always create this personal touch to every renter when I meet them in person or when I talk to them over the phone so they remember me. I try to talk about them. I try to talk about myself. Something that will create a bond between me and the customer. You help people that are behind on their car payments. How do you structure those deals so you're still making money, but also helping them out as well? In some of the cases, I'm not making money in the first few months because my target is to help them to catch up with the payments first. Because if you think about it, if I don't do that, they will lose the car and I will not have an opportunity to make money on that car later. That's why I prefer not to charge them for the storage fee, for the car wash, for my percentage. And once the car is current, then it's my time to take everything back. So once the car is current, the customer will receive only the bank payment and nothing on top to give back everything that I put it inside of that process. Dears, if you want to continue watching real entrepreneurs tell real stories, make sure to subscribe down below so we can keep getting amazing entrepreneurs on the channel like Natalia. How much time a week do you spend creating content? I spend not more than one hour a week to spend to create the content, I'll be honest with you. We have a lady, a social media manager. She's coming here weekly and we quickly do like three, four videos, you know, all in one shot pretty much to save my time so I'm not like away from the business for creating content. And then on top of that, I do a lot of random like stories, videos during the pickup of the vehicle or during something else, you know, when I see a nice lineup of cars, I may like shoot it just randomly. And I actually see that people like when it's not staged, people like when it's just life, real, you know, real life example. And that really works out for me not to spend too much time in it and be more realistic into those contents. So we got the wash bay here, you guys are washing the cars. Can we go see where you guys repair the cars? Yes, absolutely. Let's do it. Speaking of repairs, I mean, who is doing their repairs early on for you? In the very early beginning, we went to a random shops to do different type of job until the moment we actually found people we can trust and we wanted to do more and more business with. Do you lease or finance your cars? And what in terms of business impact does that make? I have both leased and financed car at this moment. But the reason why I switched to leasing more and more is because I have commercial lines of leasing and that gives me more access to the capital in one financial institution. And as a result, I built relationship with them. Like I started with one of them, I started with $100,000, then increased to $200,000, $300,000, like a half a million, right? So now we have $2 million credit line with one of the leasing companies. So that's why I believe more strongly into financial institutions, not because they do financing or leasing, but considering can you develop relationship with them? Yes or no. If yes, that's the place to go. We're on your on-site repair shop now. Can we go check out your off-site body shop? Yeah, I'll be happy to show around over there. Let's do it. How much cash do you keep on hand for emergency repairs across 100 cars? I usually don't need to keep more than $10,000 because we wait for the insurance payout before we repair. So I'm not investing my own money into repairs unless I know that the claimants will be paid 100% and I just need to wait, but I want the car to be back on the road faster. In that case, I may invest my own money into the repairs. When you send a lot of business to partners like this, I mean, how do you negotiate better rates for yourself? I only negotiate for the first few deals, maybe one or two cars. And then once I see bills, I understand if it is a good bill or not because I already know what the rate's supposed to be. And I can actually feel, you know, how much this would approximately cost. And if I see that the person is giving me a good price, then we don't need to negotiate over and over again. Because if you think about it, at every point of time, I have at least 10 cars being repaired for the bodywork. I'm not talking about oil, brakes, all that. I'm talking about actually body repairs. That's why that's a lot of business. And once this car exits, another car is going to replace them. That's why this body shop, they really want to be, you know, in work with us. They really want me as the customers because I have constant flow, like non-stop flow of cars being repaired here. Give us your advertising playbook. How do you advertise without a huge marketing budget like Turo? When I was doing Turo, my marketing budget was about $1,500 a month. Everything on Google ads. Right now it ranges from $3,500 to $4,500. So by increase of the budget, I just increased the flow of the leads. As an immigrant with no to little credit, how did you get approved for car loans? There was not a little car. There was no credit. The first loan we got was no social security, even that bad. And it was possible because apparently there are banks who require higher down payment and very high interest rate, but they do give you a loan. It's not a big loan. It's probably, I believe the first one was like $20,000, but that's how I got approved. I submit my paperwork. I gave the down payment and I got the first car with no social security. Then after once I got social security, I was needed. I realized that actually getting the social security itself is not a solution. You actually need a credit and I had zero credit, but I started applying to different small loans as well. And I got approved because, again, with the high interest rate, they were able to approve it for a small car loans. And then lucky enough, I had my mom and that's not a secret that some of the cars were financed under my mom's name. And she is a citizen of the United States. So she was able to get approved much easier than I did. So you actually didn't start as a car rental business. Tell us what was your first business? My first business was fitness mobile application. It was called For Fitness Girls. I was coming out from fitness blogging on Instagram. That's how everything started. I invested $200,000 and that's not my personal investment. I did find investors into that mobile application. And we built amazing application, but the failed part where I failed completely was marketing. So I was working a lot on the product itself and I completely forgot at that time that I actually have to make a plan how to sell that mobile application. I was lucky enough to be in one of the incubators in California called Batchery and I was supported by a lot of investors out there as well. But unfortunately, it was a complete fail because I did not have enough budget to proceed with marketing of the application. So I just had to throw it away in the garbage, to be honest. How can someone get started with co-hosting as early as tomorrow? What are like three steps they should take? So to start tomorrow, you need to have a car already. If you don't have a car, that's more than tomorrow. Yes. But if you do have a car, maybe you bought it earlier, like a few years ago. You thought that you want to drive a car and you could afford it at that time, but now you don't afford it no more or you just don't want to sell it. Whatever the reason is, you just bring the car over here. We sign the paperwork and tomorrow your car is already on my website and have a potential to get booked even the day two. So that's the first step. Come here. The second step, sign the contract. And the third step, wait for the report and the monthly payment. That's it. There's no more extra work for the co-host, really, because we really take everything on our shoulders and we want to make sure that co-host doesn't even hear from us more than once a month for the monthly report. Obviously, there are some situations, you know, when the car got towed and a tow yard does not allow us to take the car out without the registered owner. But that's a really minimum effort that co-host is going to put into this business. How did you establish a reputation outside of Turo? Yeah, so how everything started outside of Turo is in Miami. And I'm sure it's not it's not just about Miami. There is a big web of brokers here and brokers bring you business. They don't have cars. They have social media pages. And I had none of that at the very early beginning. So they started bringing those clients to me. And that's how everything started on the private side. And I would say that, again, it's super beneficial that I started that way because I was thinking already of how to be not 100% dependent on Turo. After that, I built already my social media, my Google business listing, my website. And now people could start coming to our business outside of Turo more and more. Any secrets to getting 500 plus Google reviews? How do you handle negative reviews? Yes, we do have secrets. It's our charisma and a good service. When the customer is returning the car, we have these little cards with the QR code. We ask them to scan right away in front of us. And we actually hang around around them until they leave a review to us. We learned it with Turo because if you let the person go, they will forget to leave your review. That's why it's here on the spot. They do it with us next to them. We don't let them go before they do it. And to talking about the negative reviews. Obviously, it's not possible to avoid situations when you have a negative reviews and they're part of any business. We call customers. We try to offer, you know, discount or any additional service in return of fixing those reviews. And I'm being very transparent about that because it's just a part of the business. And another very funny story about the Google reviews, if you don't mind. So I have two kids and my son is nine years old and he spent $500 from my credit card without permission on Roblox, whatever coins that is. And I said, listen, you have to pay me back. Come to the office and work it out. I gave him this card for the Google reviews. And I said, now you have to actually collect Google reviews. And I paid him $5 for every review that was collected, including a review with the picture specifically. And he was like, he's very charismatic, charismatic, you know, kid. And that was so nice and sweet when he was reaching out to us like, hey, my mom actually said I need to pay her back the debt that I have for the Roblox. Can you please leave a review? And nobody could resist that. So he got a bunch of reviews to our Google business listing for real. And that was funny. That was really nice and cute. And that's a real life, you know, real life example of how you can also invite your kids into your business. Delegation is super important for you. How long were you doing everything yourself? How long did it take to delegate everything? First two years, I was doing everything myself and my husband. On top of that, I want to share a story about that, how we were delivering cars at night, day and night with kids at the back. If somebody books the car on Turo 11 p.m., we would throw the car seats at the back, sleeping kids, we carry them to the car and we go to Miami airport to deliver a car. You know, it sounds like a hustle and that's what it was. Then after two years, once we had over 25, over 30 cars, it became impossible to do everything ourselves. So we started to look for a proper place to be and a proper team to have. Now, the first people that we hired were delivery drivers. Very interesting part about that. If you go to my YouTube channel, you're going to see the blonde girl out there making videos. She was a driver. She's super hot and she was the first delivery driver. Now, it was actually a part of the strategy that I had in the past to hire only female drivers. But unfortunately, that didn't work out because they were dating guys that they were delivering to. So that completely failed and I stopped doing that. Yeah, it's just a funny, you know, story about that. And then after hiring delivery drivers, I started hiring people from Philippines for the back end work because the volume of messages from customers that needs to be absorbed and worked on is just huge. Everybody's asking, like it may be very simple question, like where at the airport is the car, but it needs an answer. And then you cannot be 24-7 on the phone. So I hired very first VA from Philippines. And at this point of time, I have four VAs from Philippines and I have six people working here on site, including the two car washes. What's your trick for reducing overhead costs? The big part of it is hiring my employees from Philippines and creating this hybrid model of the work being done in the U.S. and overseas as, you know, it's a lot more cost effective. And obviously, if you compare with the same work being done in the U.S., this would may cost you three, four thousand dollars easy. So it's a 10 times difference. And the same thing, the hybrid model for the repairs thing, because if I do more things in-house, then I save money on the cost of the repairs. So that's a hybrid model towards the hiring as well as the repair part. People are thinking right now, oh my gosh, if a car gets totaled, I lose everything. That might not be the case, maybe. But what's the biggest financial loss you've had with a car being totaled? That's not the case at all. I've been doing this, as I said, from 2018 and I've had a lot of total losses. I had total loss when the car was crashed and also when cars were stolen. And it's not just one time, two time, I had a lot of those. And some of them are going through normal standard procedure when we send information to the insurance company and some of them through the lawsuit. And we actually had a lawsuit through with the juries on site, you know, so a lot of different ways of how total losses may go. But I never had a loss on a total loss of the car because insurance company pays you actual cash value of the car at the specific point of time. And that value is even higher value that you can sell that car if it was not a total loss. That's why there's always enough money to cover whatever I had with the bank as the outstanding loan, as well as some of the portion of the money goes back to me. I can tell you that it is possible to have that problem. So the scenario looks like this. If you just bought the car and you paid, not even over the market price, just normal market price, and then a total loss happens too soon after the purchase, that's when you're going to be in situation of having a loss from the total loss because the value of the car drops substantially during that short period of time. And you will owe to the bank most likely more than the insurance company will pay you. Someone might be tuning in right now thinking, OK, is renting actually a good side hustle? Like, can I make money? What can I expect to make? Yeah, for the side hustle, it has to be specifically Turo. You will not open a car rental business with all the paperwork and stuff just for the side hustle. If you are sitting at home and you, let's say, housewife or whatever it is, you know, remote worker, then you do have time for that. But if you have a job that pays you more than public toll, you know, so it's very easy entry level, as I said. And I think as a side hustle, it's a great, great opportunity, especially if you have a car that you don't use or maybe you and your wife have, you know, two cars. Great, let's put them on the platform and they will be rented right away. What is that like number you could expect? I mean, obviously, it depends on the car, how many days it's rented. But like, what could you expect? You can expect a couple hundred dollars on top of the monthly payment and insurance. So, for example, if you have like a regular SUV type, that car will make around thirteen to fifteen hundred dollars on total gross, right? From that, you have to do monthly payments and you have to pay for your insurance, depending again of your interest rate and everything. But I would say altogether, it tops thousand dollars, not more than that, meaning that five hundred dollars you earned from doing total business. And that was utilization of, you know, 20 days per month. So the car will be running a lot, but you'll get those five hundred dollars per month. So, you know, side hustle. Important part of your story is you got banned from Turo, which I'm sure is really scary stuff. Tell us what happened. What's that story? Yeah, that's the scary stuff. And I wasn't ready for that. And I want to share that story as a part of this big story. As you know, a lot of people from Turo community know that I've been a face of Turo. I was a part of the community. And yes, with the shift of the strategy of the company, I can only guess, like I don't know exactly the strategy of Turo, but it seems like they're turning around towards to Uber and more economy stuff. They started banning accounts around two years ago. And I couldn't think that I would be one of those accounts. But unfortunately, in May, you see, I mean, I'm getting nervous. What happened? So in May 20, 24, 25, I'm sorry, this year, the account got banned. That was all of a sudden, like one single email. Hey, by the way, you were banned. Everything is over. Turo paid me all the earnings. I know for a fact they did not pay earnings to a lot of a lot of hosts, which I want to be transparent about, about them from information to a little bit alert people that this is what's happening when I'm talking that you need to have a plan B and you cannot rely all your efforts and business into the third party platform. Because this is a great example when something changes on platform and you may need to exit right away. And this is not happening just with Turo, with Airbnb or even Amazon. So all these platforms, you cannot depend on them 100%. Now, on top of that, what I want to share is because I thought that I have a good standing with Turo and I really don't know the reason. They never shared the reason why I was banned. And same with everybody else. They never shared the reason they have a right for that by their terms of policy. I thought, you know what? I'm going to fly to Phoenix, Arizona and go to their office, which I did the same day that everything happened. So the next morning I was over there and I was trying to just say, hey, you know, let's talk. Like what happened? Because I want to move on. But instead of talking to me, they called a security of the building and then they called police and I recorded everything. The level of how bad the conversation was with me. I couldn't believe that people are talking to me after so many years doing business together. And being on stage, on the panel, on Turo events, you know, and being so supportive, I couldn't believe. It was very, you know, very difficult emotionally. But yeah, and then the police wrote a trespassing warrant. So I cannot be near the building of Turo. So it's like from the success with Turo, with all the, you know, social media, to trespassing warrant from Turo. Hard to believe. But thanks God, I always was doing my private rentals and I shifted right away. I turned on my Google ads and I was prepared for that because I realized sooner or later something would happen. So imagine tomorrow comes, you lose everything, 100 plus cars, all the work relationships, all the money. What are the three steps you're doing to rebuild this business? I do not like to imagine those things, but if you ask me to, yes. So I would start again from one car. I would try to reinvest every single dollar that I'm getting from the rentals into the next car again and again. And I would start with co-hosting from the day one because that's the easiest way to get more cars. I would say that I probably would have higher percentage of co-hosts at the end if I started again, because that is a shorter shortcut to how to get into larger fleet. Yeah, so that's what I'm going to do. For you, what sacrifices did you have to make to build this business? And looking back, was it all worth it? Definitely time. I'm here almost 24-7. I can step away and I travel a lot. I travel at least five, six times a year, but the rest of the time I'm really here from the sunrise until sometimes midnight, you know? So my time, the time of my life and the time I took away from my kids as well is what I have as the sacrifice for this business. And to answer your question, if it's worth it, definitely yes. I'm happy to be an owner of this place. I'm happy to be who I am and the business itself, it makes me happy every single day. I'm always coming here, you know, I'm opening up, I'm seeing all these cars, I'm seeing all the customers that I serve and that makes me really happy. And then on the other side, you asked me about the co-hosting. So I help a lot of co-hosts to actually manage the fleets that they cannot manage no more. And that also something that makes me so happy when I see that I resolved an issue of a third party individual and they're not suffering no more, but they actually can handle the financial obligations that they took prior coming to me. So yeah, it's worth it. Absolutely. Do you want to turn your love for cars into a thriving business? Look no further than our episode with Alan who started a car mobile detailing business with just $500 and now makes $75,000 a month. Thanks for watching. Like and subscribe and we'll see you next time.