imagine buying a shipping container for 3,500 bucks and selling it 3 weeks later for $35,000 our man Bob thought he could use all the old recycled containers and turn them into profit and it looks like he did he did $1.5 million in his first year now 5 years later they're doing a whole lot more how much more they're doing 15 million this year and in this episode of Main Street millionaire Bob takes us through the unique opportunity he found in containers the nine things he does to differenti get himself from everybody else I also run some heavy equipment and most importantly how you can steal his homework let's get into it let's go so the thing is whether you want a small side hustle or a multi-million dollar business like Bob turns out you can do it with shipping containers which is wild yeah uh we use mostly new shipping containers and they're used once there's a huge supply of them because the us we import way more than we export so these sort of accumulate and they get used for several different things in a second life our particular Niche is that we use them to make really cool homes or bars or anything really Sky's a limit and you transform it into something like this which is a bar right yeah this is a container bar so like a lot of new venues and Hospitality you'll see them in like all over now they may not want to build a whole new building they might want a backyard bar or it's their first serving stations we can convert shipping container into that into kitchens this one's a walk-in cooler and a serving area kind of lowers the barrier to start a new business like Shar how fast can you make these things compared to most people compar toal construction we're about a third of the cost and time this takes weeks not months to build this particular one is about 6 weeks so this thing I order it online how much does this cost me this one's around 60k 60k for an entire bar and a walk-in fridge yes and it delivers to me in 6 weeks yes if you were going to build this how much do you think it would cost not to do it the container way stick frame or brick and mortar Take You 3 months and over 100k easily and you probably have a lot of delays that are unexpected and you have to really find people that you trust at every sense of the way as opposed to this you just have one person you go to for the entire thing so we fall into what's called offside construction where we can control the environment build really fast versus building onsite where you have Crews and materials Landing different times so it's a little more it's more than efficient so we're able to capitalize on moving fast so you might be thinking that I would love to buy a property for $30,000 and Airbnb it and get it in 6 to 10 weeks that would be pretty crazy but maybe you don't have 30k lying around or even up to some of your biggest models 250k can you mortgage these things yeah we have a lot of financing options commercial just lines of credit but mortgaging is the biggest breakthrough we've done people can now buy land and their first home put them together get you know some place to live at a really affordable price so let's say I'm I don't have a ton of money I would like to move into my first place and I want a one-bedroom you know nice is container home how much would that cost me from you guys not including the land but you're starting around 50 55,000 and then if I wanted a two-bedroom uh you're going up closer to 80 to 100 so 80 to 100K you get a cool container home you place it on a piece of land you Airbnb that bad boy or you live there instead of like an Amazon box like this on this channel we don't just cover Main Street millionaires who do the Dirty Work we do it too we own a bunch of businesses just like this so we're going to go get in there we're going to see how useful these guns are the answer is going to be not very useful but we're going to try we're going to try to help them out you also had Netflix here right yeah we got called on let's show queer ey we build one of our most popular model now the Joshua and so that was a great experience how much money do you make after you do something like going on Netflix that was great exposure I think at the first 48 hours we got over 2 million in sales what we we got like a 3 to four month backlog almost immediately we had to figure how to scale that up you know and build faster yeah that's what nobody tells you is that there's something called float which is when you get more people who want to buy your stuff you have to be able to buy the stuff to create the stuff to sell to the customer we learn quickly we have to take deposits we use that to buy materials to set up the labor and it helps us go faster so you take M up front of it use that to cover all your float you're never out of pocket and then they do not take actual possession of it until they've paid your final amount correct yeah so at least you don't have a problem which many Ecommerce companies do which is you got to buy inventory way in advance before you can ever ship it to somebody and you've avoided that entirely like I should be doing this part right I should be lifting stuff okay kenay NE you that What's Happening Here uh we're just getting some containers so we can start a project uh we're going to make these in the restrooms but every day we have one to two trucks dropping off containers and picking them up to go get delivered so do you ever find anything weird in there year one when we were building with anything and also just buying and selling containers which is a pretty lucrative business high volume commodity based you'd get all sorts of cool stuff in there like really tires forgotten cargo weird a lot of smells smells humans H never never humans no okay that's good these trailers that you see delivered on being pulled by pickups that was sort of a good timing and a key to our success we can move empty containers with a pickup truck and a trailer and not have to register a DOT super expensive Trucking because that truck and trailer combined are under a certain threshold call it the Amazon Prime loophole if you see those delivery Vans being driven by teenage kids they don't have CDLs or high-end driver's licenses because they're underweight we move a lot of containers that way especially in year one when all we didn't buy is sell those ah uh-huh this is complex work at this part they rot in the big guns for it as I get my oat milk in between TS so how many employees do you guys have now so most of our Builders are contractors um employees I have about 15 and that's our project managers quality control Logistics sales and support I learned quickly that you know cuz I didn't come from construction in order to align everyone they're getting paid to do the job so they get paid when they're done productivity went up Bill times went up and we just became really really efficient that way so one of the keys is making sure that people have a really direct deliverable in this industry where instead of just an hourly wage they get paid when it gets done yeah so one thing we're really big on is making sure everyone's interest to line we get a deposit from the customer we put our deposits for the labor materials they build as fast as they can or you know comfortable when it's all done it passes the all the quality control checks we send it to our customer they pay us and we pay labor and so it keeps overhead really low interesting a construction business like this can be very Capital intensive but we found little ways like that to keep cost low so we can grow sustainably and what else have you learned from a cost perspective I do not hold inventory as much as possible so I do a lot of Jus in time inventory which I learned in the past career so and I leverage uh a lot of the big box stores to hold all our parts you know Home Dep has like over 5,000 person procurement team we give them product list of everything we need to build a home home and we have them stock it and we just buy it and have it delivered when we need it w right cuz they have the the capital for that now what about equipment like this like are you buying these bad boards cuz these are expensive what would one of these run you a fork Cliff can run you anywhere from 25 to 100,000 depending on how big they are we lease some of our equipment or we'll buy it at auction we don't need anything pretty we just need to be functional so we do a lot with a very little I think other companies that have a different approach where they build inventory and sell it we do the opposite we have the orders and sales come in first and we build those We productize Them da to new sales and you know we're not inside a German style Factory we're outside in a gravel truck lot it's effective and it's uh it keeps us really lean and like efficient it's like the bottleneck wasn't having a fancy Factory it was having things figured out like a good price and financing love that it's out behind Ito yeah coming through should we help him with something does he need 2x4s all right you have to grab some too I think he already has pre-cut these are probably too long for him huh Too Short maybe good for the video now we should probably take them back yeah so starting a business that now does $15 million a year in 5 years is intimidating what's fascinating about you is you used to do this for a living and now you do this I work for a pretty large company and you know you just stuck in meetings all day you get a little disfranchise and there's a movie called War Dogs it put the idea of rfps in my head and my partner at the time she was really wanting to start a business the City of Austin put out a bid for a project to convert six shipping containers to offices for like a community park they were building having no experience the day before filled out as much as the paperwork as I could quickly and just made like call Cowboy guesses on what things should cost he interviewed me and I sold myself on the project and uh that's how it all started what did you say in that interview that sold them basically sold them and it's like hey this was a project for helping new businesses start they were going to give them office space and I said what better way to you know capture that vision is to get it give it to a new business as well and I also was at their budget which I could say I was at their budget cuz I had no idea what I was doing I wasn't accounting for my time on what that would cost or you know a lot of things to be honest that project got caught up in red tape but being stubborn we build a few put them online and someone bought them immediately so we saw there was immediate demand we had revenue and so this the wheel started turning from there how much money did this business take for you to start I probably cashed out about like 15K from a 41k I had at the time and my partner had a great credit so we used her credit card to get everything going so uh it didn't take too much to get going cuz of course not paying yourself did you quit your job before you started or did you kind of you know did you kind of monkey bar between the two for a minute no I definitely moonlighted and uh leveraged that so a lot of long nights had this going for about a year year and a half before I went fulltime how much money are you making in that first year so that first year we were pretty Break Even but we hit about a million and a half in Revenue the first year we're figuring out to do the hard part which is this value ad converting them I saw a huge opportunity just to buy and sell empty containers and the reason why is because when I tried to buy a container to start my project I got burned it's a very unregulated market and anyone can do it being pissed off and getting burned on buying containers never got delivered or when they get delivered they're poor quality I couldn't use them but I had to make commitments to buy and sell so many I ecomed them made a website put them online but simple things like here's the price delivered no hidden fees and the demand was there and it just took off from from that and something happened which was Co yeah two things happened uh the world shipping demand went through the roof so you couldn't get containers to buy and sell so a lot of companies had to sit on the sidelines or just go under we were already getting back into more modifications we made our first container home which was a a test and that's when everyone was stuck at home they needed more space we were one of the few websites where we had a container home or a container office online with the price delivered and example photos and so yeah just the the man went through the roof phone calls like crazy on the internet I know people right now are thinking well I could never do that because I don't know how to do construction well I could never do that he figured out because he was a software engineer but often none of us know what we're doing and the only difference is are we willing to be humble enough to ask the questions that show that we're willing to do the work we just need some Direction so I love owning my own businesses and I think you should have ownership too but let's be straight here it is hard life alone is Tough Enough then add making sales managing people running an action ual business you can't even underestimate how tough this is that's why I partnered with betterhelp the sponsor of today's video If you go to betterhelp site they'll ask you a couple questions and based on your answers they'll match you up with one of their therapists who they think can help you out the most the therapist they pick for you will have tons of experience dealing with whatever you're going through every single one of their therapists is licensed has a master's or doctorate degree and has spent over three years and a thousand hours working with people just like you and if the first match doesn't work that's okay because there are over 30,000 therapists in their Network that you can switch to at no additional cost anytime so you can find the right fit for you life is tough if you want a little help along the way go to betterhelp.com Cody Sanchez or select Cody Sanchez at signup and we've got a little discount to help you on your very first therapy session let's talk about transforming a container I want to get down to the nitty-gritty studs of uh what it takes we're in the middle of a container that's right in the middle of probably the framing stick uh uh face we're at um what's called me mechanical engineering Plumbing is almost done so this is about 50% complete rapid fire how do we transform a container in 60 seconds how many steps ready go there are 29 steps high level steps I'll go for the major ones you get structural steel uh your interior framing that's your uh Electrical Plumbing insulation then we'll she the walls we'll install the fixtures um clean lights windows and then do the final finish your trim what I took from this is it's fast but how much does it cost we operate on a 30 to 40% gross margin that's our goal what that looks like you know if it's a fancier 100K build we're trying to walk away within over 25 35k profit that'll take us anywhere from almost 4 weeks up to 8 weeks depending on what we're building so if I had to think about the costs and how they sit on a pie chart I go the container itself costs this container costs what this metal box cost you about 3,000 metal box $33,000 then we've got this next step right so all your me materials is going to cost you another let's say 5 to 6,000 okay and then what's next insulation is another 2 to 3,000 okay and then we're going into your fixtures will get you up to another 5,000 okay your glass is another 2 to three I don't know where this adding up right now public math we don't do it we'll have them do it later U then your final finish the labor that's the most intensive uh I mean high cost it takes the most time that's costing you another 10 amazing so yeah and all in we have this for your container what is your business model what exactly do you do here we run like an e-commerce business if you look on our website there's a set menu products with the pricing online and variance I try to keep it uh a slim In-N-Out menu where it's no more than four products and three variants and people can Mi mix and match half the business where it's like a self- served model and then the other half is a consultive where someone found Us online Instagram or website gave them a great idea they made a phone call they book an appointment on the phone or a video console and we build them a solution so we got two business models well the business model people think you guys do is I build containers but what you really would say is I am an e-commerce company that does a product ised service AK containers or I am an e-commerce company that does bespoke build outs correct those are my two business models it's all just wrapped in a steel box what we like to say is that we build Solutions right that's somewhat incidental it's a container but that's our medium and it we can do it really really well do you ever write little notes to people on here um sometimes you know should we write up a note yeah home go ahead this would be part of History if anybody wants an autographed container you can find them over at Bob's containers from Cody Sanchez marginal markup on it we'll talk about the royalties again on this thing later okay I can't this up can I no we'll just reweld it the guys are like great we'd love her to show up again the fascinating part about your background is that you run this business not like a typical construction business and let's let's break down some of your key Frameworks about that we call it agile construction so we follow sort of an Agile development where if you look out there it's not a build happening sequential order there's several steps happening concurrently and different builds happen concurrently as well so we're trying to optimize on supplies and vendors if I was to explain agile construction you have two different types right you have sequential and you have agile and in a sequential model you might have one house being built and all your dudes are sort of building the same house at the same time until the house is fully Done Right correct and then you have agile where you actually have in your case their containers so they might like look like this you have people in varying stages working on each house so that simultaneously you're more likely an assembly line then you are a vertical construction crew correct and the difference there is this could take months to complete one house the next one in the same amount of time you completed three so you have different trades going back and forth overlapping each other and it works out really really well and so basically the other thing that you have is the second that this guy's done here turning the light bulb on that's a light bulb you're welcome too uh he can then go over here and turn the lights on over here whatever the that kind of light bulb is and then uh when he's done doing the lights over here and like the kitchen or whatever is ready over here he goes here so you get the same guy on site for longer which means you don't have as much disruption waiting on people in between in the trades right exactly and say guys two and three they're over in the side prefabricating parts to go fast for the next one people are constantly moving so it's an assembly line except the human Machinery are moving around but you're also adding what sounds like an actual assembly in uh prefabricated doors windows Etc that they are inserting yeah any parts that we we can buy will prefabricate have stock UPS they can grab and go you know I think one of the hardest parts in a business is getting people to do Sops I don't know about you but it's always pulling teeth for me to get people to do Sops and and in my mind Sops equal freedom and until you have them you are stuck in a job you don't you can never be a leader you can never really hire other people because it's all in here talk to me about what do Sops mean to you how do you guys use them are they important oh they're super important for us it's our quality control so at various stages throughout any build there's a checklist of sometimes up to 100 things that they have to make sure correct so they can move on to the next stage and the way that we make sure they happen is that they're sometimes tied to Milestone payments to the contractors so if they get to 50% they have to pass their quality control to go to the next phase and they can't go to the next phase or get paid until it passes that so this is how we control the process and really the quality super important for us so that it go kind of L to what I mentioned earlier keep an interest the line you know everyone wants to go really really fast we don't want any cutting Corners because we are responsible we warranty everything we build here and we have to get them permitted with there's rules on so we make sure that they are adhering to our process even though they're not uh employees or contractors but all our interests are aligned to make sure this is built correctly well the other awesome part is for those 15 employees you have if one of them wants to go on vacation for a month somewhere they can actually do it because you have systems and processes in place maybe you're not going to pay for all of it but until you have you can have a great employee but they're not that great of an employee until they've actually optimize their Sops so that you could place somebody in in their absence I like to think that majority of people here can do my job if I have to cuz I document everything almost everyone can do everyone else's job because there's a process documented on how to do this I am nailing this by the way I also feel like we should upsell this one you know yeah so you've built a full e-commerce solution which is fascinating can you show it to us real quick biggest thing we found people calling us about is were the pricing so learn that pretty quickly to cck pricing in the header menu you'd be surprised how many people don't do that yeah they don't yeah so this is one of our standard menus and the one thing I chat about this is that you know we don't have engineers and Architects on staff you know we contracted out but we didn't design any of our products these were all consumer-driven this one was designed by Netflix this is a that's like our Flagship model because it has the the most Airbnb rentals consistently of anyone but what I'm trying to get out is here is that uh this is a consumer-driven menu someone brings us a design we'll build it we don't exactly know what we're going to get into you know we kind of quote a little higher we use a cowboy number now we have experience we'll build it you know hopefully we break even if we lose and we definitely keep it a little bit longer we Market the heck out of it we take lifestyle photos we get we bring in models Furniture as much as we can put that out on the social media on the website and we do the rule of Ecom if it get clicks it sticks and that's how we've built an entire menu a product we know people want to buy without having to put a lot of money up front you know everything's just really data driven we let the consumers the data tell us what they want and then we scale it up from there you have a checkout process that's frictionless they can go to your website they can select a model and then what happens so they can choose a few variants like this one we we will'll limit some variants depending on the model because we just know what people want uh they'll see the price up front they can go into financing options they can add to the cart or request a quote you know anything over 50k people are going to give us a call anyway you know they want to make sure they know who they're working with but it really filters out a lot of the leads and gets people the information they want right away and for us it helps me maintain a pretty lean sales team because they're not spending all day answering queries where people all they want is what's the price what's the price of the price it sounds like a small thing but it's kind of a big issue in any Construction and building homes that people want to know the price pretty quickly and they have to go through a whole set an appointment or you know get a call back how much money do you think this has made you this technology how important is it just even your purchase flow oh it's like you know several times the value of the company I we could white label this and use it in other Industries to be honest there's a lot of industries that if they simply did this I think they could grow faster you know or become more efficient if I look at your business model it seems to me like there are a couple key things that matter so first you've got e-commerce website leading you've got everything from pricing to oneclick options then you've got in my opinion one of the other really interesting things is like proof of concept with real images because a lot of them don't then you have very different than other people a productized service as opposed to straight only custom builds but you're really smart because you do custom builds but when you do them you turn those into future product eyes Services which is brilliant and then finally you have agile construction which allows you to decrease costs and overall you think about everything you're doing in this company like a mixture of Tech Plus Ecom as opposed to straight construction what do you think I missed um information we a lot of our internal wikis that information's already on the website oh yeah we're just giving it away because the consumer or customers they want to know they want to know how we build so I think one of our websites has some of the most like how to do it like repositories out there we get a lot of people want to do it themselves and they might buy from us in the future or they might just be really appreciative and give us a good review because we put it all out there so having a website that has a lot of information will save you a lot of time you'll keep your you know keep your leades very clean cuz they may you ask question but also you know it's helps us iterate faster dude so true so number eight is really share everything and content first and maybe in order to have eight you have to have nine which is Sops yeah correct love that so nine steps to a company that in five years does $15 million in revenue from a guy that started it with 15K and a keyboard what out the other side a little bit if you want to figure out how to make money off of shipping containers right now I think one of the most interesting ways is Airbnb you could have a shipping container that starts as low as $30,000 and start cash flowing on airbnbs but how do you know that and you know a particularly interesting way yeah so we got that question a lot so using some of my background we build a quick little widget tool that you can go to our website click investment choose a model you know somewhere pop on there quantity probably be one um you can feed in your address or you can put a statically how much you want to rent per day uh what you think occum can be and they'll give you your Roi so this one says your monthly income will be 4600 you'll get you return in 26 months it can vary by market so we have a couple versions of this app where we can dynamically pull in your address using some rental data that's out there and so it's we try to make it our slogan a no-brainer you know what you're getting into and when you're going to get your return so you can rinse and repeat so with one Airbnb you could basically make back your money in 2 years and 2 months if you use this model theoretically and these are using like pretty conservative estimates on an average you'd want to get really particular for where you live and what the land is and all of that particular but that's fascinating the other part that's really interesting on this is you guys Finance right so you could pretty quickly get into the money if you use this for financing you're going to cash flow pretty quickly I mean you've got to have people that are cash flowing in the first 3 months we've had some people who within the first month they're booked you know even pre-sold and they're profitable yeah yeah that's wild well it's not that hard I mean I'm no mathematician but if you buy a fully kitted out Airbnb plop it on and set it up and you're all in cost is somewhere between I don't know $80,000 and $200,000 and you can rent it out for somewhere between $150 to $200 you're cash flowing to the tune of a couple thousand a month yeah uh on top of your costs and some of our finance options are pretty aggressive they're zero interest and so they can be making money very very quickly I like zero interest I like this for us the five steps you would need to Airbnb on in a container home right now one you come to the site you pick your model two you go to the calculator you make sure that model makes sense for your physical address three you look at what the cost of land would be Andor additional buildout besides the uh containers for putting in the furniture that you need for it to outfit it then five whatever your residual monthly costs are then six the taxes and um you know percentage fees that Airbnb takes you put that all together you list it you take some photos and you're inside of a new Airbnb in 6 to 12 weeks which wouldn't even happen if you went out to buy a house right now it would take longer to close get financing and do all the furniture and fixings as opposed to do this that's wild I think the ones we're mortgaging now for clients they're taking about 3 months to close what is one of the biggest costs for any human uh before they've really hit Financial Freedom and it's where do you live and it's what your monthly rent or mortgagees and it's getting the financing to be able to do it it's really hard for people these days and it's more expensive than ever to live just live these days and so the idea that you could come up with creative ways for everyday humans to have ownership in their home and then add on income properties is incredibly important above and beyond you get you you little on there making a bunch of money on Airbnb which is cool too this one kind of freaks me out it's a nail gun I refuse to touch that at this stage of my career in construction you want to show us some of your favorite builds we have one here that's uh getting rid of the ship it's the Marvel Falls it's one of my favorite because one thing that we say is these are Legos you can add on to them later you need a starter home you can add a second floor or an addition pretty easily and this is like our best model exemplifying that here we have a 20ft container which is its own contain uh bedroom and above a 40ft container that it's a whole one bedroom with kitchen washer dryer everything and there's actually a bunch of really cool examples online of sick builds that you've had like this a lot of our menu is customer driven people bring us their Vision we build it we document and process it repr productize it and then we put it online and least some more sales we're kind of successful because of the customer's Creative Vision here we're walking into a 40ft shipping container this could be a small living room an office or a bedroom yeah so what you can see here is that we build them like an inal home so this is a drywall wood framed it's nothing we haven't Reed the wheel in construction we're just using a different structure the metal box is super strong I mean it holds 60,000 lbs holds itself up and we just made the interior look like a home so now we're walking into a nice kitchenet area you can cook clean everything there doesn't this make you want to go like a common question is like do these get hot or cold in the winter no not really we over insulated we over engineered that part of it so it's actually super energy efficient and you just probably lock this bad boy up and you're done with it if you Airbnb it piece of metal we cut out here we put on a hinge they can lock it up close bed in hatches also hurricane proof so uh makes it really easy to come and go this actually fits you know a fulls siiz bed comfortably a queen siiz wall to wall um but get your own private space here and then on this model we have it whole upstairs so what we find when he was to Airbnb they put the kids down here and the parents will sleep upstairs have their privacy so let's check it out so you see up here we have a rooftop deck so if you have a great view there's Austin over there or whereever you're placing this that's great for Airbnb guest and we have a whole another Suite up here yeah I can see some Lounge Furniture some plants like like that what's really popular is the rooftop hot tub so we find when we build these we'll get more dollars per nights is not fancy like cupboards and custom like that it's more space rooftop deck and things amities like hot tubs fireplaces things like that I accidentally told them that I've driven a fork Cliff before which is true there is picture proof but now he thinks that I could move his containers and I don't know about that so there's a likelihood I murder myself him and I ruined Bob's containers so we're just going to have to see in your business have you had moment where you're like oh my God we made a huge mistake and if so what are they so they can learn from our pain I mean to start off not taking risk right and you have to do that you know like strategically but anytime we get a little safe I feel like we sort of just you know things stagnate a bit so we're always looking to take on at least one unique portfolio project I call a quarter which means that something we've never built before and it seems risky but it helps us build a new product it helps get marketing attention and then um not listening to their customers so we try to take surveys like crazy that's how we figured out that hey you consumers they may want more model examples but maybe they don't what they really need they needed financing so we put a lot of time and effort hitting the phones finding the right lending Partners to get people financed be sure to constantly keep your ear to the ground figure out what the consumers Want U and scaling something like this I think we I told you we did a few Tech incubators we tried to scale up too quickly that was dangerous can't listen to the yeah yeah we definitely um had to scale that back and now we're doing it in a very sustainable way so sometimes you need to not take other people's advice who haven't done the thing that you're that they're advising you to do yeah take some advice of the grain of salt first of all Bob the Builder how do we not make a joke about this incredible second of all how rare is it to find humans who choose to build in a world of people who choose to just consume and take this is what America was built on people going out starting something new that's never been done employing a bunch of other humans to build something to better somebody's life and what's more American an American Dream than the house this was the core thing that all of us used to think that we had as Americans I am so inspired by Bob's story and what he built here and actually you guys do you think I should buy one of these containers from Bob and see how much we can make on Airbnb we could even give something away I don't know tell me in the comments
