New Side Hustle Breakdown

Author

Kriss Berg
August 19, 2023

Whattup Side Hustle Crew:

I’ll admit it: my business brain just never shuts off. So when it’s Saturday and I’m lounging around the house part of me is thinking: how could I make some money right now?

And more than once I’ve thought about bounce houses. We rent them a couple times of year and it seems like one of those ‘easy’ businesses. No real skill involved, easy sales process, fun industry.

But, in my experience, those can all be red flags too. So let’s dig into a couple.

First off, we rented this monstrosity for a party last weekend.

Let’s look at the economics of the rental:

We paid $325 after everything. I found the same model on Wayfair for $3600 before shipping. (Not gonna lie, seriously considering buying one, letting the kids bounce on it for a year and then renting it out or selling it to a bounce house dude.)

Anyhow, so need about 11-12 rentals to pay for this thing. Not bad. But how many times will this thing actually rent? Well according to the owner (who was working Saturday and that should tell you something) this particular one is rented almost every weekend but December through February.

So nice turn on your equipment costs. He also has a little trailer and a truck to pull it. And from his website I would guess he has probably 10-12 of these bounce houses.

That’s the micro view, what does the whole business look like? To be honest I was a little too tipsy to ask when he picked the thing up, so this week I found one for sale on BizBuySell, filled out some paperwork and got the lowdown.

Here’s the scoop:

Price: $95,000
Gross sales: $79,000
Profit: $46,000
Contract staff: 1

Hey sounds pretty good! Fat profit margins, nice multiple.

But let’s dig deeper. First off there’s no way one person can set up these bounce houses. Even the small ones are huge and heavy. So the owner must be helping in set-up and tear down.

That monster that we rented actually took 3 dudes to set up and take down. Granted that only took 1 hour on each side, but still its Saturday/Sunday morning and often Saturday/Sunday night where you have to work. And based on the two do-nothing bozos he had working for him, these folks are not easy to find.

The memo for this business I found for sale says:

“This Semi-Absentee-Operated Bounce Business is primed for exponential growth and is an ideal opportunity for a young-at-heart, social media savvy buyer to bring to the next level!”

Semi-absentee? Exponential growth?

First off if it really is absentee you can bet the dudes setting up those bounce houses will soon bounce away with your business and become competition. It’s just too easy to buy a few bounce houses and have a business in less than a week. And for that very reason the competition is probably pretty fierce.

The guy who dropped ours off says he gets probably 2-3 weekends off a year! He says Mondays are often spent cleaning and patching the houses. Woof.

So, what do we think? Personally I think this would be a great little business for someone with teenage or college-age kids. Get them invested in the business (mentally and financially) and get them working weekends to save money for cars and college.

But if you’re a busy parent with young kids and your weekends are full of soccer, birthday parties, and kids activities, the last thing you want is something else to do Saturday and Sunday.

I’ll give this Side hustle 3/5 stars for simplicity and low capital investment, but downgrading it for competition and staffing issues.

What do you think? Would you do this?

Let me know…

Kriss Berg