The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - How to Start this $337k/Yr Service Business You’ve Never Heard Of⏐Ep. #139

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

I sat down with Marc Gaskins (https://x.com/OvenPusher) of Event Kitchens to discuss his $337k/year event rental business in Charleston, South Carolina. Marc noticed caterers needed quality equipment and turned that opportunity into a thriving business. We explored how a bar fire led to community support, becoming a turning point. We also discussed the value of patient growth versus rapid scaling. Marc explained the unit economics of renting convection ovens, the benefits of a niche focus on caterers, and his warehouse hacking real estate strategy. He also shared why he's relied on organic growth and his future interests. This episode offers actionable insights for starting an event rental business.Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Highlights 00:34 The Beginning of Squeeze Bar01:18 First Equipment Purchases02:18 The Bar Burns Down02:42 Community Support and Business Growth04:44 Competitor Exits the Market06:17 Slow and Steady Growth08:38 Unit Economics of Rental Items17:31 Equipment Insights and Investment Strategies18:21 Expanding Beyond Charleston19:22 Organic Marketing and Customer Relationships20:47 Catering to Caterers: Business Operations22:03 Scaling and Maintenance Opportunities24:11 Exploring New Business Ideas25:58 Starting Fresh in a New Market29:05 Challenges and Rewards of the Business30:45 Team and Facilities Overview34:24 Financials and Final Thoughts

What are you seeing just being in the space where like, oh, someone needs to start this? This idea could really work here. I get so many phone calls about how would you launch it? I would contact those caters. Also contact the festivals, but ask the caterers who's supplying your stuff and would you be up for using a different person? Finding a business in a niche, no matter how hard it is, can be very rewarding if you're just patient and put the time in. It's created a great salary for me and helped me fill up some retirement accounts. And at the end of the year, it spits out some really nice bonuses.

All right. 2013. Yeah, 2013. My brother had started a bar called Squeeze Bar in Charles and South Carolina. And some wedding planners came to us and said, hey, would you guys do like a bar service like for weddings? We said, yeah, sure. And as we started getting on site at these weddings, we noticed that the caters were complaining about the equipment that they were renting at the time. My brother actually had the idea.

He's like, well, what if we bought new stuff? would you guys rent that from us? We bought a couple sets of stuff right off the rip, but nobody's really using us because really there was only one other game in town and that guy had it locked down. Unfortunately, for him, he never put anything of quality out in the field and it actually ended up making it pretty easy for us

to end up kind of stealing business from them. What were the first pieces of equipment you bought and started trying to rent out? I believe that first order was two convection ovens. And at the time, and I bought Southbans, they're made just outside Raleigh, North Carolina. They were like $2,800. Wow. Each.

Each, correct. And then I brought a range for them at the time. And I think that was around like $1,800 and two friars. And those were around $900 a piece. So I don't know, like 10 grand all in maybe with some other ancillary pieces of equipment. So we're very small. I mean, it was super small. I mean, one oven and we were booked up, you know?

Yeah. We carry 15 ovens now. Jeez. 20 fryers. Let me make sure I got this origin story correct. your brother opened your brother had a bar and then someone asked if he could bring his bar to a wedding to caterer it yep he did started talking to the other caterers they were having a bad experience with the one guy in town that was renting them commercial kitchen equipment so you and

your brother thought let's compete let's buy our own stuff and you bought your own stuff and it was kind of slow going at first yeah 100% actually about two weeks after that we bought the equipment and started event kitchens the bar that we had downtown charleston burned down and that kind of was I mean, worst experience, that's a bad experience for sure. If anybody's been through it, it is awful. But they also say like the Phoenix arises from the ashes. And from that, the community kind of reached out and said, like, what can we do to help? And we said, just start booking our businesses, book the bar service and book the kitchen rentals.

And one of the top caters in town who is my number one client from year one until year 12 right now, they're still my number one client. They started booking us and it just kind of bailed me out. And essentially because they bailed me out, I did anything and everything they wanted. And we have a very, very good symbiotic relationship. Wow. Okay. So that was the big turnaround. The bar burnt down and people felt bad for you. Well, I guess you could say that. No, I don't say that to be critical. What an amazing story. If so. Oh, I mean, I owe this business to a guy named Chad Rhodes at crew catering because he, he reached hand out and said, I'll give you everything I got that I don't already have booked up. And it's

pretty incredible when somebody is willing to do that and take a chance on you because I was essentially, I didn't have a reputation in the event world. Yeah. So many lessons coming to mind already. Number one is I love that your story is you struggled at first because a lot of times I talk to people and they're like, we just found product market fit, right place, right time. And we just crushed it. But that's not representative of how business normally goes. So you're telling me, you spent 10 grand up front, which is a lot of money for most people. And it just didn't go well until the worst thing ever happened. You thought you were sunk, your bar burns down.

And that ended up being like you accidentally burnt the boats. You had no plan B at that point. It had to work. But it did work because of the fact that your bar burned down and people felt bad. So they started giving you jobs. And then you lived up to the faith that people were putting in you. And then you started getting jobs just because you were good. And you knew what you were doing and you had more of a footprint, right?

Sure, 100%. I mean, I guess when the opportunity arose, I took advantage of it and just executed properly. The guy who was my competitor in town, I mean, he had a stronghold. He was a retail shop that sold commercial kitchen equipment. And then he also started a rental side. And I mean, he dominated the market. And I guess the second kind of pivotal thing for this business was they stopped that business, cold turkey.

They were a very good retail shop and an okay rental. shop, but they did really well because there was nobody else in town competing with them. They're a nine to five Monday through Friday business. And our event world runs on the weekends. So he was having to pay all these guys double time and overtime to get them to go pick up equipment, drop equipment, do maintenance calls. And when they, it was, I just got a phone call like the first week of January, maybe six years ago.

And somebody said, I need an oven like tonight. And I'm like, what's going on? They said, well, you know, the other company's not doing rentals anymore. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, they just called me and said, we're not filling the order. That's call you ever got. Oh, it was 100%. I actually doubled my inventory overnight.

I was like, it's about to hit. And it did. I mean, I actually had to call them a couple months later and just tell them like, I went and bought equipment, but I can't fulfill all these orders that you guys just are not going to do. Like, I'm picking up a lot of them, but you guys are going to have to like step up to the plate for one or two of these weddings because you can't not do it. Like, yeah.

And they did. Rightfully so. They kind of came back into the game for a weekend or two when I couldn't cover their stuff. And then they just bowed out. He actually just sold that business and sold the real estate and did all right. So he's okay. He's doing fine. So let's talk timelines.

So they went out of business, so to speak. They went out of that line of business six years ago. How long ago did you start? Like how long were you competing with them before they shut down? We're in year 12. So it was about halfway through. So about six years in. And I got to be honest with you, like I did not give this business the attention.

that it probably deserved in the beginning. I was bartending with my brother. That was the majority of my income. I was kind of doing this with one oven and a couple of friars on the weekends. And I just kind of slowed it. You know, I didn't really take on any debt in the beginning. I just kind of bought everything with cash and just kind of cycled everything back in.

And I just kind of kept feeding the machine. And then all of a sudden the machine just like really started feeding me. You know, it just turned a corner where I didn't really take too much in the beginning. And now like, I guess I'm picking the fruits of that labor. Yeah, because you're a patient. Yeah. Some may say a little too patient, but, you know, I guess everybody's got their own path.

Are you familiar with the Lindy effect? I'm not sure. It basically says as long as a business has been around is the likelihood that it will be around in the future. So if you buy a 50-year-old plumbing business, statistically speaking, it will be around for at least another 50 years. Okay. If you're a three-month-old startup, statistically speaking, you've got three months of runway. And so every month that you make it, you've got another month to make. it, right? This isn't the same principle, but one thing that I've noticed that businesses that grow

super fast, maybe they just dial in their Facebook ads. They have an e-commerce store. They're able to acquire all the products they need from China without any, you know, issues. They dial in their Facebook ads and they are able to just double every month, double, double, double, double. There's a direct correlation between that business, how fast it goes up and how fast it can come down. Maybe Facebook changes their algorithm. Like, it doesn't always happen. Like Uber grew super fast. but grew super fast and they're doing great and they're still around, right? So there are exceptions. But I think most of the time, the faster you grow, the higher the likelihood you have of going out of business really fast. And I've experienced this firsthand. So when I hear about businesses that

do the harder way, the grow the slower way and they just, they're methodical and take their time and maybe it wasn't even intentional, right? I'm not even saying it was. Those businesses end up being the strongest and they have the longest lifespan as well. I hope that's true. I mean, we're 12, almost 13 years in, so hopefully I got 13 more to go. That'll put me right about 58. I mean, of the 10% of businesses that actually make it, how many of them make it to a decade? Less than half, I would, I would guess. So you beat the odds.

So I'm curious about unit economics. What is your most popular rental item? What does it cost? How much do you charge for it? And how long until you get paid back for that on average? Okay. So I kind of pulled some data here for you. So our most rented item is a convection oven.

We did about $140,000 last year in that, and that's about 41% of our sales. Roughly about $450 total for per rental. So that also includes the delivery. So it's like $375 plus delivery or $4.25 plus delivery. Slightly different pricing there because some caters bring their own propane and I account for that in a slight discount. Delivery and pickup, correct? Correct.

Yeah. So we do $75, $0 to $15,000 to $15,000. miles, 100 for 15 to 20 and 125 for 20 to 25. As I was saying, 75, $1,125 for like the circle away from our warehouse. If you're further than that, we basically charge $5 a mile. Okay. And then what is that convection oven cost you? So currently retail, those are going for about, I don't know, five grand that you can buy those off like a drop ship site. Again, these are made in just outside Raleigh, North Carolina. The range is, we're probably like 28 or 3 grand right now, but I've started to get a little bit more savvy and follow like Facebook marketplace and some restaurant

auctions and stuff like that because you can snipe one for pretty cheap. Like I bought one maybe six months ago from a Chinese restaurant. The guy bought it because he wanted to do baked wings, but baked wings take way longer than fried wings. And his ticket times were going way too long. So he's like, I just don't need the oven anymore. So he sold a five, thousand dollar oven for a thousand bucks and wow i mean an hours worth of cleaning and it looks shiny and brand new and it takes me two rentals to make my money back i mean i can do that on a friday night and a saturday night right one weekend geez one weekend and i could leave it at the same venue i could rent it to cater a at the museum and then the next night caterer b uses it and it's paid off oh man so

is it 5,000 new for the oven and the range or just the oven just the oven just the oven just the oven, just a like a 36 inch convection oven. I do have a custom frame that's built for them. They come with legs. You can use those if you want with casters, but I don't necessarily like that the way that that oven moves on those legs when you're going over bumpy sidewalks or tree roots or sand. I built a wider base. Those are kind of more like angled in, you know, and it just doesn't give it as good of a sturdy, I don't know, the ability to move it sturdily. Okay. So most people only rent the oven without the range then? Yes. Not many caters that I know of really do any sauteing or like, you know, pan cooking on site. Sometimes you have like a, I have some caters that are strictly those. That's all they use. They may, they must do like a lot of like a fresh pasta on site or I did a wedding two weeks ago. They had a pasta station that kind of inside the tent. So you could walk up to it, pick what you wanted. They'll saute it for you and put it on your plate. And what that's a little more. I don't want to say. higher-end cooking because I don't want to insult anybody who just uses an oven, but a lot of

caters are just kind of showing up with a big pan of mashed potatoes and mac and cheese and some tenderloins and reheating in the oven, boom, you know, serving it at stations out, out at the event. Okay. So on average, call it 400 bucks to rent it out. You pay these things off in 10 to 12 rentals? Correct. Yeah. And that's buying brand new retail. Okay. Yeah. How long does it take to rent it out 10 to 12 times? I know it depends on. the maturity of your business at any given time, but roughly speaking. So we're kind of broken down to seasons, a spring season and a fall season. It would probably take two seasons to get it paid off because if you consider it the last

oven that I bought, like the 15th oven, right? There's only like a couple weekends each season where I'm completely booked out. I don't ever completely book myself out because I always like to have one or two in my pocket for maintenance calls. I mean, we test fire every single piece of equipment. meant on site when we drop it. But you'd be surprised what happens between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. by the time those chefs come, come up.

We get phone calls left and right. And we're like, well, we know it works. Just be patient with us and we'll walk you through it. Or we'll just replace it. And sometimes we just have to replace it. So a few months to get your money back. Is that accurate? I'd say that that's accurate.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What a good business. Like, it just seems like a really good business. I'm comparing it to like a bounce house rental business where your rental price will be about the same. Your bounce house is going to cost about half as much, but you've got to clean that thing. I'm sure you clean it. We'll talk about that in a minute, but you have to clean it

every time. They're like, they just don't fold well. They're not like nice and square like yours are. You've got to set it up. Sometimes you have to pay someone to babysit it. You got to deflate it. You got to, like to me, this seems a lot more binary. You know, you put the thing on the truck. You drop it off. You pick it up. Am I oversimplifying it? You're not at all. I almost consider myself in like the moving business. I just move ovens from location to location and, you know, clean them in between so that, you know, cater A has a clean oven and so does cater or B the next day.

I talked about leaving it overnight at a museum, but we actually, our services, we will show back up the morning of to make sure that it's clean for the next cater because I believe that cater or B should have the same experience as cater A. I shouldn't just be trying to get by with hoping they're okay with it now. like they deserve the top service that the first guy got too. Yeah.

So you might save 75 bucks, but you kind of make up for that by needing to clean it in between uses, maybe. How often do you have to clean them on average, unless something goes crazy? I mean, so I carry, I keep a glass cleaner on the on the truck because stainless steel will wipe up pretty good. I mean, the only times that we really have to do deep cleans on these ovens are, let's say, we drop one off at like a music festival and it's there for like 12 days. And they're cooking for, you know, 200 staff on the back end.

And they'll have, like, you know, pork butt firing off in there for 12 days straight. And you'll just see the grease running down the legs of these frames. And you're like, all right, we got to kind of open this thing up and degrease it and clean it out. Some stuff you just can't get to from the way that the machines are built. But I would say the ovens are probably the easiest to keep clean. The insides will get a little sticky, you know, just like your oven at home does. You just clean it up. The outside are, it's just a solid stainless steel box.

I mean, it's nothing fancy in a glass door. So those are easy to clean off. I'd say the ranges and the friars are much, much more difficult. They're just open, you know, like you're cooking on top or you're cooking in the friar. And those friars, man, they just, I can tell by the smell of a five-day-old friar what was cooked in it. It is.

Yeah. It's powerful. How much would you charge for like a 12-day rental to a festival, for example? So I realize that I can't hit you nightly for that because you could just buy. brand new oven for that price. So we usually kind of do like a two and a half X our nightly fee. You know, 12 days may be on the way longer side. Honestly, I just try to make it fair and not ping them for there's no way they could, they would book us if they had to do that, you know, and I realize that. Some people say, well, why don't they just buy their own stuff? Well, they do

have their own stuff. You know, we're supplementing maybe the other half of the kitchen that they need. They may be bringing, actually the, the festival that I'm talking about, like where they're cooking Boston butts and stuff, they have two food trucks that they bring already. And we're bringing four more ovens, four more fryers and four more hot boxes to supplement just the firepower that they need. And they use it the whole time. I guess that is kind of a different dynamic if they're, they already are buying this stuff. They're much more price sensitive. Whereas you could say like, they're not in that business. Like they don't have a place to put them. They don't have a place to store them. But most of your customers do. They just need to supplement for a bigger event.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, our number. one cater that crew that I was telling you about, I call their order like the crew trio. They'll do an oven, range, and a friar almost every event. I mean, that's a, that's a full commercial kitchen. Some restaurants don't even have that, you know, and they're building it out in a parking lot every night. And they will have in the busy season, I mean, this weekend kind of with the seaweed festival starts our busy season.

And they'll have some weekends with four or five events. And that's just booking equipment through me. That doesn't include the multiple box trucks that they have going elsewhere. They just can't sustain it. They would need a fleet of trucks to support that. So video is cool, but you know what's better? Longform audio via podcast and my newsletter. TKOPod.com.

Go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week, very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast, three episodes a week, stuff like this. You're going to love it. All free. No sleazy sales bitch. TKO pod.com. Do the other items have better or worse unit economics than the convection?

What's next popular? Is it the friar, the range? It's the friars. The friars were doing about. just under 40 grand and then the ranges we're doing about 27 grand those numbers are probably higher for the friars because I'm seeing a bunch of like eight friar orders and they're just kind of quantified differently on my inventory list but they're a good return what's great about this equipment that's that I bought through south bend is I still have the original ranges I bought year one

and they look like brand new because we just take care of them I would say those friars you can buy a good one for 900 bucks oh wow we charge three 3,375 for delivery, so 375. So in three rentals, it's paid off. I don't really buy used friars. I wouldn't touch a used fryer. Yeah, it's gross. It's disgusting. I've bought one used range and I was okay with it, but I'm pretty picky about it. I mean, but I can tell just from looking at photos, whether or not, you know, how much use it's gotten. But ovens, I mean, you can buy good used ones for sure. Are you only serving Charleston or have you started branching out more? We have worked in North Carolina before.

We've worked in Georgia a lot. Actually, I'm going to Georgia next weekend for an event in Savannah area. Savannah's about two hours away from us. We have maybe some orders, a potential order down near Jacksonville, but it's in Georgia as well. I'll go where it makes sense. I mean, I kind of have a dollar per hour that I kind of look at. And if your event out of town doesn't really hit that dollar per hour, I don't really want to do it. I'd much rather stay here in town.

And, you know, like this weekend with the seaweed festival, we have a bunch of events, but they're all downtown on the peninsula of Charleston. So my driving distance is very low. I can be dropping off and picking up three or four events in like an hour and a half, you know, whereas Seattle and Georgia is four hours one way. And it's like, that's a 10 hour day round trip. And then we got to go back three days later to pick it up. Like, if you're going to take 20 hours of my time, I'm going to need to get, you know,

compensated for it and hope they understand it. You know, it's like, are you doing any like deliberate marketing or is it mostly inbound organic stuff referrals? 100% inbound organic from day one. Wow. You've never done any like paid ads or anything. I got some sweatshirts that we wear around town. Never done a paid ad.

I don't say that in a braggadocious attitude. I say it more so and maybe in an ignorant attitude where like I just never, I guess never really thought about it that way. I mean, I've just kind of let my customers kind of speak to me, if you will, and it's mainly and I kind of pulled the customer sales summary as well. And it's like, you know, the top eight customers that I use are all high in catering companies here in town. It's like, so I just, and honestly, I've kind of got them all.

So it's, I mean, like the next round of people is maybe some restaurants, but, you know, I mean, that's probably one, one area that I've ignored and I don't want to say failed at, but I just kind of taking the business. as it's come. And the few times that I've done some cold calling, I've kind of had the door shut in my face. And it's not that I stopped. I've reached back out multiple times. And eventually someday they come around, they're like, oh, were you that guy that called a couple times? And like, yeah, they're like, we need something this afternoon. Can you help us out? And you know, as soon as I say yes, I can be there in an hour, you're a customer for life. Yeah. And that's, that's kind of how I've always run it.

I mean, sometimes I've just, again, been patient with it. And I don't know. I kind of own the market. So you're mostly selling to caterers and event companies or primarily just caterers? Mainly catering companies, not so much individual, you know, just like you call me and be like, hey, we need a friar at the house. Like that doesn't really happen. And if it does, I'm usually by the time they hear the pricing, they're like, oh, we're good, man. Restaurants will use this. If they get like, the one we dropped off today, the friar was actually a restaurant group who's just participating in the festival out at the park. But I mean, I'm just looking at most of these names right quick. And You know, yeah, there's a few event planners that'll call me.

But even then, like the event planner is not the one using the equipment. So they don't necessarily know exactly what the chef needs. So it's just a lot easy for the catering company just to ping me. And what happens at this point, how our business, where we are now in the business is. So this weekend starts the spring season. For the last six weeks, caters have been emailing me their spring season list. And it'll just be an Excel spreadsheet of a date, a location, and the equipment they need.

And then I just start filling all my calendar full until I start hitting, you know, until my inventory starts to get a little peaked up, you know, to maxing out. And then I just start sending off emails like, hey, this date's filling up. Let me know what you need. And like, usually those slots just get filled.

Okay. If someone put a gun to your head and said, you had to double your business this year, you had to. Like you've got a good budget to do so, but how would you do that? Or do you think you've kind of like capped out your local market unless you add different products or services?

I don't know that the market's capped out. I am really curious, like, where the rest of it is, because like I said, I've kind of got, I'm the guy in town. There's a few other ovens that I know around town, but nobody's doing the volume that we're doing. I think if somebody was like, you need to double your business by the end of the year, what I haven't told you about is the maintenance side of our business. So over the last 12 years, it's not really a maintenance side to our business because I'm not making any money from it, but I've trained myself over the last 12 years. And I actually went to school last year for a week up in Rock Hill, South Carolina, a company called Safesa, C-F-E-S-A, they teach you how to work on commercial kitchen equipment.

And what I've been doing is like my top six or seven clients here. Sometimes they'll call me and be like, hey, we need a fryer at the shop. Something's not right with ours. And I'll just go over there with a friar to rent to them. But I'll say, let me take a look at your friar. And I'll look at it. And in 30 minutes, I've got their friar working. And I'll just, I won't, you know, I'm not charging them for that.

I mean, they're spending a ton of money with us in rentals. but now they don't have to spend the money to rent that fryer from me. And I know they're going to call me every single time going forward. But I say I was to say, I think I'm well versed enough to go into the maintenance game that I could start building business pretty quickly. And then probably build, you know, if I wanted to bring in people underneath. But I don't know, man. When our season kids kicked up, it is a kicker, man. You know, we used to have two off seasons, winter and summer.

Well, this winter, it was only 11 days. We've done an event every two days since January 11th. When it used to be, we didn't get phone calls in January. We're starting to pick up enough where it's nearly an event a day. So if you wanted to, you could get into the maintenance business, but you just don't want to. Rec, you're busy enough, right? Yeah, I almost feel bad saying it because it makes me sound like I'm being lazy, but it's not. No, you're focused.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just interesting. I always love asking people what tangential ideas they see in their industry. Maybe that's my next question is outside of maintenance. What are you seeing just being in the space where like, oh, someone needs to start this? Like, I don't want to do it. I'm too focused on this, but this idea could really work here.

Maybe local, maybe an internet or app idea or whatever. I think for like a small side hustle, what, you know, in warm weather climates, frozen drink machines. Now, I get so many phone calls about margarita machines during the summer. But, you know, I look at my truck as real estate. and I just don't know that I'd be able to make enough money. I don't know if I'd make enough money putting that machine on my truck because my equipment's just so much more expensive. But I think you can own a couple of them, you know,

and drop them off to the pool parties, you know, that are happening. Just do a week in rental, let them have a day so it'll freeze. And the next day is when they use it and you pick it up the third day. I have a friend here in town. She's like, what should I do in the business? She works in the event world. She works for a caterer. I'm like, you need to start renting these drink machines.

Every time I get a text message, I just forward it to her. I'm like, every, this is a sale you're missing every time. There was a guy that had a company called the Margarita Man, and he would basically rent those machines out. And I think COVID just kind of squashed his business. And I get a ton of phone calls for it. What would the unit economics look like for that? What could you charge and what do they cost?

I mean, I wouldn't move for less than like 350 bucks. I don't know. I mean, some of those machines are 1,000. Some of them can be, you know, five grand depending on what. I think you would need something like insulated. Especially because I mean, Charleston, the summertime, like it would have to be inside if you were going to do it in the summertime. You know, in a fall or spring. You could probably have it outdoors.

But I don't know. I wouldn't want to be in the direct sun in August. Like that's not. That wouldn't be great. You just have soup coming out of there. So here's another hypothetical. If you were to be forced to move to another market, different state entirely, but you had to start this business up again. Two part question.

A, how would you validate that that business is even viable? before you even bought an oven. B, how would you launch it? Like, how would, what would you do differently knowing everything you know today? I think I would find out one who the top caters are in that town. And I guess by top caters, I mean, like, who's the high in folks? Because high end, usually they're going to do a lot more cooking on site. Now, that person can't be too hard to find. I'd also look to see in your area, like, what kind of food festivals happen? Like, most towns have like a Greek festival or like a Latin festival and, you know, reach out to those. guys like say who are your vendor list and find it that way but i use blackstone griddles too and those

are used on the festival market and those are 450 bucks that lows and i think we charge 275 plus delivery i mean that's like a one and a half x return they can be not fun to clean up afterwards you know after a festival use i would contact those caters also contact the festivals but ask the caterers who's supplying your stuff and would you be up for using a different person and it's just trying to pick up crumbs that way. I think my other thought, because I'm not in different markets, Charleston's a unique market when it comes to the wedding industry. We serve, like, do a ton of marriage licenses here. And weddings, it's a huge destination spot. A lot of these weddings are happening at historic venues. And a lot of them don't have kitchens or don't want to install them because, you know, they don't want the liability

of burning these places down. So they, kitchens have to be brought in. Like, I don't know about you know what utah's like i mean they their venues may have kitchens built in like a you know like a church venue may have a kitchen built into it or a specifically wedding venue space may have one built in sometimes they only have prep kitchens where they don't have hood vints right so then they would still call us but i used to live in in bolder colorado and i'm just kind of thinking when i lived out there would i even have known there was a market for it and i don't i don't even know man like i kind of we i think we fell into this because most of our stuff most of our stuff most of Charleston's weddings are outdoors. It's just part of the package, really. I noticed

it in where I work along the coast too down towards Savannah, it's a lot of historic places. I don't work at like the hotel stuff. That's just not our market. There's always a supply and demand. Like you might go to Utah and people get married in churches and the churches have kitchens. And on the surface, it's like, oh, it's just not an opportunity here because the culture is different. But then it's like, well, you know, according to the population, if this were Charleston, it could support three competitors in mine. But there's only one guy here. So even if it's half as much of an opportunity, there's 75% less competition. So there's still space for one or two more guys, even though it's not as much of a culture needing kitchen rental stuff. You just never know

until you start like picking up the phone, right? Yeah. Is this a business that you would suggest others start or is it, you know, because a lot of times when you're in the industry, you're jaded, you see it too closely. You're not ignorant to the industry anymore or would you suggest someone try something different? Well, this is hard work. I mean, and I don't mean it's hard work. from like, everybody works hard. This is just, you're moving 600 pound ovens. And by the end of the busy season weekend, you're worn out physically. I mean, and I try to stay in shape so that I can keep, you know, physically fit enough to do this stuff.

I do have a guy who works with me part time on the weekends when we do all of our moving. And he also helps me on Mondays with cleaning. I would recommend getting a second person because it is nice to have a second set of hands because, like I said, it's just so grueling on the on the back. But I'll say this, though, like finding a business in a business. a niche, no matter how hard it is, can be very rewarding if you're just patient and put the time in. And do I love event kitchens? Absolutely not. I mean, this is not a dream job. Going elbow deep in a friar Monday morning is not my type of fun, but it's created a great salary for me, which is in turn helped me fill up some retirement accounts. And at the end of the year, it spits out some really

nice bonuses and I'll fight for that all day long. You know, could it be bigger? Sure. You know, could we have scaled faster? Maybe. I don't know. You know, I'm 45 and I'm, and at this moment in my life, I think I've just continued to grow, step over step, over step, and the business has too. And hopefully we're at that place where you kind of crest the hill with all the work and it starts to, like really pay off because you can kind of feel like I'm riding the top of that wave right now. And I'm like really excited about it. And like, yeah, yeah. Just being on this podcast. That's really cool too, man. It's cool to have people care about what you do. Of course.

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