This is the gift of traditional vending. And this guy went from barely getting by to making 900,000 taking advantage of it. Not too long ago, I was literally only making $1,200 a month with my full-time job. How much do you need to start? My first machine payment was only $117 a month, and I didn't even have to pay for the first 90 days. How much can you make? Our best location does $17,000 a month. Some businesses will pay you to put your machines at their locations. And is the income as passive as they claim? Because of my setup, I only spend about an hour a week on my routes. That's it. That's it. I came to Eugene, Oregon to take Mike's stepby-step blueprint so that you and I can get in on this early. These machines didn't even exist a year ago. All right, Mike, tell us a little bit about your vending machine business and the inspiration that came. What's the story behind it? How did you get started? Yes. So, I was actually in the Denver airport one time and I went to a vending machine at 11:00 p.m. and I went to get this bottle of water that was like $8. And I knew that that bottle of water cost 20 cents at Costco. And I was like, I'm paying massive margins on this bottle of water and then someone is sleeping at home making money off of me while this machine does this. And there's it was just like an aha moment of like this is a fascinating business model. I got to learn about it. So, I just went down this path and just started diving into it. All right. Tell us about the scale of your operations as it is today and what makes you guys so different. Yeah, so we just installed two more machines this week and now I think we're up to over 80 machines. Our goal is to do about a,000 bucks a machine, but we're over 75,000 bucks a month just in in topline revenue. Yeah. And what makes us so different is we're all in on innovation. So we're doubling down on AI. We're, you know, the traditional vending word we don't even use. We like to use unattended retail cuz as you can see back here, we can do items that don't traditionally fit in a normal vending machine. It's all about what the consumers today want. And so that's what we're focused on is using these smart machines and AI that can ultimately put anything in one of these micro markets or smart machines. What about employees as far as operations? How many you got working on the team? Probably six employees. I don't care about the machine number as much as I care about the revenue. So, I I would love to get to 150 in the next 6 to 12 months. Yeah. So, we've done another interview with vending machines, and you guys should check that out. It's a great episode as well, but I've never heard of Smart AI Innovation when it comes to these vending machines. So, I want to help you restock the next machine that we're going to go check out. So, what are we grabbing before we head out of here? Yes. We're going to grab a couple of our top sellers. Chips, some candy, some energy drinks, and Gatorade. And then let's rock. All right. So, this is the first apartment complex, huh? Yeah. It's beautiful here. We got everything the students need, I guess. What is this? This is not a old school vending machine that I'm used to seeing. It looks like a bookshelf, doesn't it? Wow, this looks clean. Fun fact, traditional machines are dead. So, we actually had a traditional machine in one of our apartment complexes. It was doing at max sales $1,200 a month. We swapped it out with one of these bad boys. Right away, started hitting three grand a month. First impression, looks just like a fridge. Scan the card. We'll try this a little later. Open the door. Okay. Won't let you open until you got my money. Right. Yeah. Exactly. And then basically what? Pick whatever I want and walk away with it. Yeah. So, there's AI cameras in every single corner. And this is where we on the back end you'll see later, but we have planagrams that will actually outline where each product is and whatever you grab the AI cameras will charge you. So, we maximize all like you'll even see the Red Bulls in the corner and everything cuz we want to maximize as much space as possible to drive as much sales with our customers. Let's talk briefly, Mike, about startup cost and then how you secured your first location. What What's the story on that? Yeah, so startup cost with this machine is around uh $7 to $8,000. And we like to finance our machines over 60 months. So we'll take that 8K, spread that over 60 months, your machine payments around, let's say 150 bucks, $175, and then we'll use the cash flow to pay it off. Our goal is to pay off all our equipment within 18 months. And what was your first location? Our first location was an apartment complex. I actually walked into there right before CO. Didn't even know where to go find a machine. Didn't even have an LLC at the time. Didn't even have a business name. And I just went in and they were like, they don't want their residents going to the 7-Eleven when they're 11:00 p.m. They want to keep everything in house just for liability reasons and this beautiful space. It's all about luxury amenities. Hence why they would allow something like this, but not a traditional machine. So, you just went in and asked. Yeah. Did you have any prior experience? How did you learn on how to operate a vending machine business? So, I had no vending experience. Once I got that first Yes. I was like, thank God for YouTube cuz I just started watching YouTube videos on repeat. Everything from the best machines that people would do breakdowns of on YouTube, but also like how to set the prices, how to install the machine. The whole thing was self-taught. Wow. So nowadays, yeah, you could find anything and everything on YouTube. By the way, guys, did you know we have a complete stepby-step blueprint on how to start a profitable vending machine business? Check out the Upflip Academy. Let's switch things up a little bit. Let's see things in action. I want to try to buy one of the pieces here and see what it works like. Let's do it. Okay, so if you've never used a smart machine like this, certainly comes with instructions right here. Uh, I'm going to look up prices here on the screen. I'm going to tap the card. It's talking to the banks. There you go. Grab your items. There you go. Grab it all. Hey, since I'll be using your card, can I just grab all of it? Yeah, load it up. I'm joking. This is a new drink I've never tried. I love it. That's it, right? That's it. So, I just bought a couple of these energy drinks, you know, for x amount of dollars. Yeah. What did I spend, by the way? Yeah. Uh $3.75 per energy drink. So, let's just almost eight bucks or something. How much of it do you get to keep? I mean, I know every product's a little different margin, but that one specifically. Yeah. So, I think Aloney is around 135 a can. So, we're almost 2 and 1/2x what it costs us. Yeah, that's amazing. It seems like every product in these vending machines is going to be at least two to 2 and 1/2x. Yeah. Can actually get upwards of like this crystal geyser here. We get that for 16 cents and we probably sell that for $150 in this machine. Oh, wow. And also with drinks, they have way longer shelf life. So, the margins are always just a lot higher than um candy and snacks. The amount of money that I will pay for convenience, right? Cuz if you think about it, I have to get in my car to drive over to the store. I have to walk in the store, buy the darn water. It's like, you know what? Forget it. I'm going to spend two bucks on a bottle of water. So, when it comes to product selection, how do you go about in different locations or is it all the same? And then you tweak it, analyze it, etc. Yeah, it's definitely not all the same. The the key is like understanding your demographic. So, in this case, if this is a college apartment, one of the big things that college kids love these days is a lot of these sugar-free energy drinks. But also when we look at the candy side, these kids love these huge bags of candy to take ultimately that whole idea of I want bigger items and I want to like snack on it over time versus just like an initial rush of like a candy bar. So it's all about understanding the demographics of the location. So we have an apartment complex that has a lot older demographic and we have to stock it with Diet Cokes and Snickers because those people absolutely love the old school candy. And you'll see here we literally throw Snickers in one row in the corner where that other location will have three rows of Snickers because it'll sell out so quickly. Mhm. Take us through your yearover-year revenue and maybe any significant moments when you did something which then changed the trajectory of revenue. Yeah. So, every year we've been lucky enough to scale our our route with more locations, but where we've really kind of found the sweet spot is when you get in with a location that's really happy, always asking for intros to other properties. So like even this property here, they have three more of this property in Eugene and they have 200 other properties across the country. So a lot of the kind of our growth, we really try to take advantage of our current customers because these property managers like to move around. And so we're we're not afraid to ask for warm entras to their sister properties, whether it's a medical facility that's got six other urgent cares in town or an apartment like this that's got two sister properties across campus. In terms of numbers, what did what does that look like? Yeah. So, when I first started with the demands of RW2 kind of job, I had three locations and my goal was to do over a,000 bucks per month in revenue per location. My first machine I got up to 1,200 bucks. Second, third one right around the same thing. So, that's, you know, 3,600 * 12, you know, 40 grand a year. Then that first property again introed me to four of their sister properties. And then in year two, I just kept scaling my route. And the metric is we want 1,500 bucks per machine per month. So like now that we have uh we just installed those machines uh earlier this week. We're up to 80 machines. We want to be up over 100 grand here pretty soon on that. So you're pushing well over a million for 25, I guess. Oh yeah, we'll be well over that. What's the bare minimum that someone needs to get started in this business and how do they get started? Yeah. So, the first metric is always you want that first location to say yes before you commit to any investments on the capital or the product side. So, once you have that first yes from a property, the bare minimum to get started, I mean, you're talking less than a,000 bucks. Like this machine here costs $8,000, but you finance it, your upfront capital, you're looking at, you know, your monthly payment of $150, $175. And then when you talk about the product to stock that thing, $300 to $400 worth of inventory. So just to get started, let's say you insure it for 20 bucks. Let's say you get an LLC. Like upfront, you don't even need a,000 bucks to get this machine up and running if you finance them like we do. All right, Blitz Time with Mike. You ready, Mike? Let's do it. What's the weirdest item you sell or thought about selling in a vending machine? Probably makeup wipes. What's your personal favorite snack from your vending machines? Ooh, I love the protein bars with high protein, no carbs. High protein, no carbs. All right. What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received? Take action. What's the most money one of your vending machines has made in a single day? Probably $900. If you could sell only one product in your machines, what would it be? Zero calorie energy drink. Last one. What's your number rule number one rule for success? I mean, you got to wake up every day and at the end of the day, the people that are the that are the most consistent are the most successful. So, for me, it's all like two lessons are being professionally persistent. Humans buy it from humans and everything's about the art of the follow-up and and people don't follow up anymore. So, um I think about that a lot. Like even, you know, we were talking about cars earlier, like the cars I buy are from the sales reps that actually follow up with me and stay on me. So, I think about that a lot. Before the vending machines, the six-figure revenue, and financial freedom, Michael had to get his business set up the right way. Because building a passive income machine starts with one thing, a solid foundation. That's where Busy comes in. Busy has helped over a million entrepreneurs launch their businesses by laying the legal and structural groundwork right from the start. With zero LLC formation plus state fees, a free registered agent service for your first year, and ongoing support through Busy Tax, Bizzy makes starting a business simpler, faster, and more affordable. Founder led since 2004, Busy doesn't answer to investors, they answer to entrepreneurs. This means they pass the savings directly to you with one upfront fee for everything from compliance tracking to operating agreements. Strong businesses start with strong foundations. So, if you're ready to build your dream, tap the link in the description and let Busy help you get it right from day one. We are at another location. Yeah. In the gym. Yep. Taking a look at a different kind of machine. Certainly looks quite different from what we've seen previously. Can you introduce us to kind of micro mart? This one's refrigerated. Um, but we also will do like stack multiple next to each other and we'll have those turned off like a fridge and a pantry side. How much of a difference does a good location make versus a bad location in terms of revenue? And can you tell us a little bit about your driveby strategy? Oh, I mean it's huge. Like if you have a bad location, you're probably only doing a couple hundred bucks a month and we're just scraping by where like these good locations. I mean we have the location that does 17 grand and it's kind of like a unit 17,000. If you have a bad location, you either need to get them to market it more um and help send out flyers and things like that because like that 300 bucks a month type, it doesn't work. Okay. What about the driveby strategy? What is that all about? Oh, man. When looking for new locations, obviously. Yeah. So, even before you do a pop in or think like, oh, it's got to be an apartment complex or an urgent care. Like, one of the things I love to do is just go by the property and see if the parking lot's full. And like people don't understand this, but like when we get hit up by businesses that are like, "Hey, we want to put a microart in our employee break room." And they'll like say, "Oh yeah, people come in on Fridays." And it's like just drive by there on Friday at like 2:00 and see is the parking lot full. Cuz if it's not full, they're not going to really tell you the the honest truth on how full and how active that foot traffic's going to be for your machine. Mhm. How do you secure locations? I have a ton of questions there, so I'm going to throw a couple at you. Like, do you pay them? Is there profit sharing? When is that reasonable to bring up? Do you pay for the electricity to run this thing? Like, can you just highlight some of the important things? And what do we lead with when we're looking for a location? Yeah. So, the first step when when leading with securing a location is always you want to have a marketing player that has examples of these types of machines cuz a lot of these properties when they hear the word vending, they think of the old school motors. They think of the codes. They think of the big bulky eyesore looking machine. That's not what they want in their lobby or in their gym. Then when it comes to actually like locking in that location, we never lead with revenue share hardly ever. We actually lead with no cost to them. So this $6,000 machine, we lead with like, hey, we'll install this for you. We'll handle the stocking, the maintenance, all the repairs at no cost to you. But if they do ask about revenue share, that's when you can get really creative to scale your route. So, like one of the uh properties that asked us about revenue share recently, we just straight up said, "Hey, we're not going to give you revenue share until you enter us to four other sister properties." What needs to be at a property for that location to work? I'm guessing Wi-Fi. You got the payment system. Have you come across great locations where that wasn't available? And you're like, "Shoot, how do I fix that?" Yeah. So, one of the things I always recommend is like you want to actually not use their Wi-Fi cuz you don't want to be dependent on is this a dead spot in this gym? Is this actually good? So, we actually put there's a router on the back of this machine and we do our own cell tower router. So, this thing will go up to a cell tower and we like to do a router that will uh we'll plug in two SIM cards. So, we'll do like let's say Verizon and uh AT&T cuz different places have stronger signals and that way if it loses the Verizon signal, the router will actually kick over to the SIM card with AT&T cuz you want this thing connected at all times cuz that's how the transactions happen. If you could today start a business like this, what location would be an absolutely phenomenal location to secure? Yeah. So, when we started down this path, we kind of got down the apartment niche, but what I'm starting to realize is it's all about foot traffic. How often are people coming? Like I would rather have an urgent care with maybe 5 to 10 workers but 80 visitors that's open 24/7 all week than an office building that's got 300 employees but they work from home Monday and Fridays and they're only open 9 to5. So literally the only time you can do sales is 9 to5 Tuesday through Thursday and so you're basically just box yourself in at 3 days a week and then it's like you're off the rest of four. Have you ever had a machine totally fail on you? Why? What's the lesson that you've learned earlier? Oh man, this is like bringing me back to when I first got involved with vending in that property. Was like, "Hey, Mike, we're ready to move forward." I went and tried to save a dollar by buying a machine off Craigslist. I saved $2,000 by buying a used machine. I was like, "Sweet. I'm not instead of paying six, I'm only paying four grand." Literally, this machine shows up, everything's hunky dory. Within 6 months, the machine broke down and I had to go buy a brand new machine anyway. So, ever since then, I'm only buying new machines that are under warranty. No refunds on that one, obviously. Right. This one cost you 10 grand. Yeah, exactly. 10 grand instead of the Yeah, exactly. So, I'm curious to go check out one of your few remaining traditional machines, which you said is just across the street, right? Right across the street. Let's go check it out. Talk about maybe why you're replacing it and the benefits of doing that. Let's do it. Cool. All right. We're here's the It's not the not the very traditional one. I mean, it's a little modernized. a little modernized, but it's still traditional. You still got the codes and you still got to enter in your card every single time you want to buy something. Gotcha. What a weird location though. We're like in the basement. Wouldn't you say this would be better in the entrance of the apartment complex? Great thing about this location and why it does so well is everyone has to park in the parking garage and so everyone has to come through these doors to get on the elevator and this machine crushes it because of that. Let's just quickly touch on pricing again. um what's important when it comes to pricing the product correctly, especially for those who are just starting out. Yeah. So, the biggest trick when understanding pricing dynamics is actually thinking about what do these items cost at the local gas station. So, whether you live in the south or you live in the Northwest or anywhere in the country, the first thing I recommend is like, okay, this Starburst, I think it cost me a dollar. Maybe I'll charge $2. Well, what I'll do is I'll actually go by the gas station and see what does that Starburst actually cost? And maybe we'll even mark it up a quarter from the gas station's prices just because of the convenience of not having to go there. Is this business as passive as advertised? Like how many hours a week do you work? Yeah, I mean I spend probably an hour on this route a a week max. Um what? Yeah, I think you sure there's no zeros behind the one. 100%. systems are so crucial to making things passive. And like even we know every single week when our delivery driver is coming with all of our product to the warehouse. It's always Mondays between 9 and 11. We know when we need to go by each machine. So like this machine might be on like a Monday Thursday schedule. So we can actually build out systems before we just start trying to hire as much help as possible and throw literally throw dirt at the wall and see what sticks. Uh in terms of overhead, uh where are you at? Can you break it down for us? Yeah. So, a good margin when you're building these routes is you want to shoot for 50% profit. So, when you think of a route that's doing, let's say, let's just even break it down by the machine. So, this machine, let's say it's doing $1,500 a month. So, that's probably going to have 30% COGS. Let's just say 33% to shoot high. So, $9.99 for that credit card reader. Maybe your machine payments 120 bucks. And right there, if you're doing the stocking yourself, your margins are actually closer to 60 65%. But if you hire a an operator like me to make things passive, you're looking at around 50 to 45 to 50% margins on that. What if you could launch your own vending business in just 10 days? Inside Flip Academy, the vending expert Adam Hill, who brings in $58,000 a month, only working 2 days a week, shares his entire complete step-by-step blueprint. You'll learn how to pick the best locations, stock for maximum profits, and scale, and much, much more. Check out Upflip Academy or click the link in the description below to start your free trial and get instant access. All right. Well, let's get out of this tight space. Let's go check out uh the other locations, which as you said, a medical facility with a machine that I haven't seen yet. It's the other model. Uh what's unique about it? Give us a little something to look forward to. Yeah, so it's going to hold a lot of inventory. It's two of the micro marts that are side by side that are just going to hold her way more inventory than than you've seen so far. All right. So, this is actually a medical facility or is it like a full-on blown hospital? No, it's a medical facility. And these are the two. You call this a micro market. Yeah. Why does it have that title? Obviously, we have the drinks, we have the snacks. Yeah. It's more like a mini market that people can put whatever they want in here to ultimately get that feel of just a micro market brought to your your building. What makes a medical facility like this extremely ideal for a vending machine? And what other businesses did you find to do well as well? Well, the thing I love about these types of locations is even if you're coming in to see your heart doctor at cardiology or you're going up to the third floor for X-rays is you're coming through this main lobby. And so this main lobby has a ton of foot traffic. There's people coming in and out of here all times of the day for different reasons, but yet they're going to get the same access and visibility to this type of micro market. If you're inspired by Michael's story, don't forget to like this video and subscribe. Every bit of engagement helps us bring on more incredible guests like Michael. Thank you for watching. I got a question in terms of AI smart vending machines and how they're impacting the industry now and how do you see the future? Yeah. How can we take advantage of it moving forward? Yeah. So, the big thing with like micro markets, the number one concern has always been about theft. And now with these locked coolers, literally the AI cameras are just going to charge your card with whatever you grab. So if you try to ransack the fridge, you're going to get charged with that. But I think the next step too is there's such a revolution with unattended retail that you can start to take market share where places that already have vending machines are starting to get exposed to these micro markets and airports and stuff. So when you go to them, they want to swap out their current provider of the old school stuff with the new school stuff. Forbes just did a market analysis of unattended retail being a$40 billion dollar industry in two years. And think about that insane. Whoever takes advantage now and grabs that market share is going to be not regretting it in two years. Wow. So how much a system like that Mike would cost to set up? I mean delivery install. Yeah. So two machines we're looking at six grand a piece. Then you got the delivery is about a,000 bucks. And then the interesting thing here is there was actually no outlet there. And so we actually offer it ourselves to pay for the contractor to come in. So that was another 600 bucks and then you got let's say a,000 bucks of inventory cuz those two machines hold a lot of inventory. So right there you're looking at you know 14 $15,000. Whether you finance or not is going to be up to you if you could go back to any point in your journey and and change one thing or is there anything you changed? I wish I would have actually joined like an academy or a community to actually streamline the process of this. like I didn't know of any coaching to help these roadblocks and potholes that I drove through. Now I look back on it and I'm I'm a huge believer in in leveraging mentorships and leveraging things that can help speed up things. All right. Well, I'm excited to go see your office, especially the back end of the AI. So, let's go check it out. I love it. Let's do it. Cool. This is basically your office, right? This is the hub of operations. Yeah. We call it the whiteboard kingdom cuz I like to write a lot of ideas, make a few putts, and uh yeah, try to just kind of get all my thoughts written down and got to have this here. Yeah. So, let's specifically talk about how AI optimizes your vending machine business and what data is it tracking? I mean, there's probably a lot, but what do you want to highlight? Yeah. So, I think the first thing when you think of AI and ultimately that Coke you bought is like how do they know what to charge your card when you grab that Coke? Cuz it's not like you're scanning that bar code. That's where and so when you grab that Coke, the AI cameras will actually know, okay, the third row, third item from the left is what we should charge you. And so if we set that Coke in the planagram, the AI cameras will pull your activity from that machine and match it up with the Coke in the planagram and then what to charge you with that. I can see the machines, the stock levels. Yep. It's just traffic light, red, yellow, green. And then I can also see with our staff when we were just by there to stock. and we can go in and ultimately get ahead of that stocking. So before we even go to the property just from our phone or behind a computer, we can go in and see what exactly do we need to take there. Load up our cart. Exactly. And then we just restock it. It'll reset on the machine to show the stock levels from our dashboard. So like this machine here, we're there every other day as you can see with the restocks, but other machines we're there once a week or even once every two weeks if it's really slow. So that's the beauty of the analytics and being able to just see everything remotely before we actually have to go there and see what's empty. Wow. It's amazing because there's no way you can do any of this the old school way. No way. So this is certainly a game changer. Like I mentioned very first in the beginning. Wow. I'm I'm blown away. What's one thing or a couple things that AI specifically gave you insight into the business that helped increase profits? Maybe something you didn't know when you got started but you learned eventually. Yeah. So the beauty with these machines and the analytics is we can really like analyze the data any and chop it up any way we want. And so one of the things we've noticed with like some of these apartment complexes for example that are higherend is people want the premium product. We see that all the time now with the analytics where we can really dive into this marketing psychology of like how people purchase and then double down on what works. So drinks are selling like hot cakes. We might move some of the food shelves off and add more drinks to that type of location. Yeah. Keep it exciting. Exactly. Stay away from the boring. Yeah. And uses analytics we've never had before with the old school machines. So I heard you say this is not a get-rich quick scheme, right? And it isn't. What's your take on how fast anyone can get out of their 9 to5 and pursue this industry and start their own vending business? Yeah. So the first advice I like to give people is what you put into it is what you get out. It's very similar to baseball and that you know you might do 10 popins, you might go talk to 10 buildings and three might say yes. And that's like an allstar in baseball, right? batting 300. The more at bats and the more you actually get out there and start to speed this process up is ultimately what's going to accelerate you being able to leave that 9 to5 from a for me I started with just as a side hustle with two to three locations and then those two to three locations introed us to a couple other locations and then I was like holy cow we have something here and then that's what led me to being able to to make that jump from my 9 to5 full-time. So, it's not even this whole like, oh, the market's saturated. It's like you're bringing something to your market. There you go. That's key. Mike, what's a common business mistake that new vending machine business owners make that could easily be avoided? Oh my gosh, this drives me nuts, but people love to buy machines before they have locations where they're going to put them. And so, I'll get people reach out to me all the time. Hey, Mike, I got four machines. And the first question I ask is, hey, what's the revenue of those machines? They're sitting in my garage. I'm like, why did you go buy four machines and they're not even out making you any money right now? Like, the first thing you need to do is go find locations and then get the machines after the fact. Sign the deal. Right. Exactly. Sign the deal. How many popins do you have to do before you get a yes when you're looking for new locations? I would probably say like 5 to 10. If you're doing cold emails or cold calling, you're going to have less of a hit rate, but like popins and face to face just you can't beat it. It always creates more urgency than a than a cold email. Do you find sometimes you have to follow up? Follow up. You know, in sales that's a big thing, right? All the time. Because at the end of the day, like these decision makers, if you think of like a property manager or a head of HR at a a business, they're not waking up thinking about vending. They're waking up putting out fires with their current job. So, you constantly got to follow up in ways that are going to try to create some urgency. And that's why Poppins are so valuable because you can just go there. They always have a front desk person. It always just creates that urgency. Yeah. And it's not like it's costing them anything, right? It's creating a better experience for the tenant bases here as well. So, especially like if you look at this building, the thing they love about the machine in here is it creates foot traffic into the social lounge. So, it gets people wanting to come in here to grab an Alani and play some pool or play some video games or that whole experience of the amenity lounge. Are there any benefits to still use the old machines versus the new ones or are they just simply outdated and simply dead or will be? Yeah, it's a good question. So the problem with these new machines is just the technology and all the AI cameras and everything that's really sensitive with the sensors. So actually these would not hold up outside. Give it a couple years and it'll make this thing plexigrass proof and then we can throw it outside or something. Let's talk about competitors. Have you ever had somebody steal your location? What does that look sound like? And how do you handle it as a business person? Absolutely. I mean that's the paranoia of building a business. you're going to if you're successful, you got people that are they're coming to to ultimately take your route. So, I think for me it comes down to communication and customer service at the end of the day if you're overd delivering on service. Keeping this bad boy stocked, coming by to say hi to the property manager every time you're here or the, you know, the business owner if it's a business where you have a location is just comes down to overcommunication and providing great customer service like any business. Yeah. Just boils down to relationship. Exactly. be cool to see you show up with your daughters, say hi, and all those fun stuff. 100% humans buy from humans. Yep. Okay. Thank you for sharing. Are there any fees that owners don't expect and are surprised about? Um I don't think people will realize like these AI cameras, there's a software fee to those. So, I like to um budget around 50 to 60 bucks per machine on those type of fees. And then, you know, you also have data. We love to not relying on the building's Wi-Fi. So we we pay about 2 to 3% uh by providing our own data to these machines so they can connect to cell towers without relying on the building. It's just minimal cost but obviously yeah they're just unexpected and they're not like part of the hard cost like labor or cost of goods would be. Okay. What's a category for the vending machine business that you think is highly underrated but on the flip side very very profitable? Yeah. So we look at a category that we love to implement is is things like what we call incidentals. And when we think of incidentals, we think of those things that might not be everyday things like tide pods. I mean, we sell tide pods for 14 bucks and they cost us 275. But these people that need tide pods in their apartment, they're going to come down and get a bag. Anything like DayQuil, uh, tampons, condoms, makeup wipes, all these things that have high margins, but when people want them, they're willing to pay anything for them. They don't even look at the price. Phone chargers, any of those incidentals that are you don't really think about when you think of traditional vending. Wow. Yeah. The the whole world is open as far as vending machines and what you can put inside, especially when it comes to the tech that you're using. Oh, it's crazy. I mean, I I know you have kids and I have kids, but like when I go through the O'Hare airport in Chicago, I'm like, they have Lego machines that are vending machines that have nothing in the machine less than 75 bucks. But think about it. All these parents traveling are probably like, "Well, I'll pay 75 bucks for Legos for my kid to be occupied on a flight." Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. If I gave you $10,000 today to start a vending machine business from scratch, how would you spend it for the fastest growth? Yeah. So, this is going to be a little contrarian. Most people would think, oh, we'll use it on a machine or to buy product. I would actually go from it in a way of like what's going to get me the most locations the quickest. So, I'd actually build up an incentive structure and pay people to do poppins for me at the types of locations that I like to be in with our machines and create a commission structure that would be $1,000 for every property that they do a pop in that wants to move forward with us. That's a little rich. No, no, because I think like if you think about that property's value, I mean, this property here cash flows whatever it is 30 grand a year. I mean, there's some serious value in just land grabbing. Wow. So, get a bunch of college students and say, "Hey, execute on these properties. Here's the list." Give them a marketing flyer and say, use it as a leave behind. If they ask you about revenue share or they ask you a hard question, you can literally say, "My business partner handles that side of the business. Let's schedule a meeting." And then that's worth your time to come in and close it. Wow. I love it. Is it better to buy around if you have the cash or is it better just to start from scratch and kind of learn your way in the business? Oo, that's a good question. I think it's going to ultimately determine on the operator and what their kind of experience is. I I always recommend if you've had no vending experience before and you're just getting into the game, like get a couple locations, even if it's with your kids, just to understand like everything that goes into that because you're not just going to be able to like buy a route and delegate it. And so there's such a prime opportunity right now to buy routes at a discount from these baby boomers that are just trying to retire and get out from this business and then ultimately add value. So I think of it as just like flipping a home. You buy these routes that got old school machines with old school $150 Diet Coke that's never caught up with inflation because they've always been scared to increase prices. Well, when you buy that route, you have so many ways to increase the valuation of that route by just putting in smart machines, adding in newer products, adding on all these incidentals, all these other things that just don't exist with traditional vending machines that these routes are selling. How stressful is this business, would you say? Like out of all the industries out there? Not stressful at all. A lot of moving pieces, staff, headache here, refill here. If we run out of Snickers, they're just going to buy Twix. Like, at the end of the day, if the machine's down, it's not the end of the world. It's we're talking water and and a snack. So, from my side, it's like the most boring simple thing that if the machine breaks down, they're just going to have to pay extra or get in their car and go to 7-Eleven. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. So, if you're in a stressful environment at work and want to kind of shift gears a little bit and consider this, um, we've got everything you need in the FFL Academy step-by-step blueprints. Check it out. If you like this story, then make sure to check out another video we've done with Adam Hill, who brings in $58,000 a month, working only two days a week. Enjoy the video and make sure to like and subscribe. We'll see you next time.