Ben's Inflatable Empire: $5000 Monthly Earnings from Renting Bounce Houses

Ben bolin bounce house rentals sidestarters.co

Ben Bolin • Published January 5th, 2024

ABOUT

Ben Bolin

Owner, jumpcityrental.com

Bounce House Rentals

From Oakdale, CA

Side Hustle Started July, 2023

Full-Time Job

Power Generation Tech

Full-time Job Started July, 2022

SIDE-HUSTLE STATS

10-20

Hours Worked Per Week

$5000

Revenue Per Month

1

Founders

1

Employees

$14,800

Startup Cost

In Progress

Months Before Profit

Referrals

Main Growth Strategy

33%

Net Profit Margin

Table Of Contents

Working As A Power Generation Tech + Bounce House Rentals
Ben loves the nitty-gritty details of business. When he started noticing how much downtime he had at work, he decided he was going to start a side business.
 
One day, he rented a bounce house for his son’s birthday. After chatting with the man who set up the bouncer, Ben’s mind was blown when he discovered the earning potential of these bounce house rental businesses. This operator was on track to earn $100k+ in revenue, renting bounce houses as a part-time gig.
 
Little did he know, the seed had been planted in Ben’s brain. Less than one year later, he would be spending his weekends like this:
Coming Up With The Idea

Where did you get the idea to start a bounce house rental business?

My job is pretty lax. I was sitting in my cubicle, literally twiddling my thumbs, so I thought,” Why don’t I donewsletter?”

So I did, but it wasn’t producing enough cash flow. I don’t think I was patient enough. Then I was like,” You know what? I think I need something more hands-on that I could force to succeed.”

Then there was this UPS driver who we rented a bounce house from for my son’s birthday last year. When he came over, I was just out there shooting the shit with him, you know? And I was asking him questions because I love business. I like to know the nitty-gritty details that aren’t sexy, I guess.

So I asked questions like,” How much time does it take you to do this? How are you doing this? How busy are you?” And he told me that in his first year, after about half a year, he made $41,000 in revenue. Then in the second year, he got up to $80,000 or something. He was in his third year and was like,” Yeah, I should be over a hundred grand by the end of this year.”

But he was like,” Yeah, I’m getting out of it. I’m going to be a commercial driver, and I’m gonna have to just put all this on pause.” And I was like,” Well, why wouldn’t you sell it?” He’s like,” Well, I mean, I don’t think anybody would want it, you know?” And I was like,” Well, how much would you want?” And he’s like,” I don’t know, probably like 10 or 15 grand.” I was like,” Dude, I’ll go to the f*cking bank right now.”

He was like,” All right, well, hold on. Let me talk it over with my wife.” I think I kind of scared him a little bit because I was like,” Yeah, let’s f*cking go, dude. I’ll hop on this truck right now to the f*cking bank.”

Well, it turned out there were still more excuses. So come June, I’m like,” You know what? Dude, this is stupid. I shouldn’t be waiting for this guy.could fucking kill it. The competition is so weak, and I’m just driven.” That’s when I approached my brother-in-law with the idea to say,” Hey, dude, I’m thinking about doing this.”

First Steps To Starting

How did you start your bounce house rental business?

So I have a brother-in-law. He’s 21 and works at Walmart as a cart pusher. And I was like,” Hey, dude, I’m thinking about doing this bounce house thing, but if these things are too heavy, I’m going to need help. Would you want to work for me? Whatever I put into the business, I’ll let you match up to 30%, and you could actually own part of it.”

He was all for it. I think he put in five grand, and then we basically bought our first three used units. They were ones we found on Facebook Marketplace. It was the kind of bounce house I wanted to be our pride and joy, which is this shark waterslide, which is awesome. It’s an attention-grabber, you know? And nobody had it in our area.

BenBolin-Jumpcityrentals.com

Anyways, we bought that for three grand, and then we bought these two other mid-size bouncers, where one was a combo. A combo is a bounce house and a slide that can be used in dry or wet conditions. Then the other one’s just a regular bounce house. And so we bought all three of those for a total of five grand. 

Those combos have actually been our breadwinners in the wintertime. Those get rented out almost every weekend, consistently. They don’t make as much as the big boys, the waterslides, but at least they’re paying the bills.

I think I paid a bit more of a premium because, at the time I was buying it, I was thinking July 4th is like the Super Bowl of inflatables, you know? So I was like,” Hey, I need to be open and ready for business on July 4th.” That was my goal. And as a matter of fact, we did a rental on July 4th. We actually did our very first rental on that July 1st, I believe it was. Then, we had every single one of them rented out for July 4th.

On that day, we made $1900 in revenue and profited about $900. We got off to a great start.

Growing Your Side-Hustle

How did you grow your customer base? What's your main marketing strategy?

There’s a lot of low hanging fruit with the businesses in my area, whose online presence is pretty weak. I felt like I could exploit that pretty easily with Google ads and Facebook ads.

And then with SEO. I’m not proficient in SEO at all. But I could at least have the time to learn it to where I feel like I could jump ahead.

BenBolin-Jumpcityrentals.com
Revenue + Earnings

On average, how much do you earn from your side-hustle each month?

It’s been pretty consistent. Like I said, the bigger waterslides bring in higher revenue, so now that it’s wintertime, we have the smaller ones going out. Those don’t have as great profit margins as the big boys do, because the same amount of labor goes into the small ones as the big ones.
 
It does kind of fluctuate. We’re at about a 33% profit margin right now in the winter months. But right now, renting out tables and chairs is killing it. Those have a great profit margin on them. But they’re a little bit more labor-intensive because I don’t have an efficient way to properly move them.
Startup Costs + Tools

How much did it cost to start? What tools do you use?

Along with using my brother, I also never came out of pocket with anything. I started the business, and then I opened up two credit cards totaling ten grand. So I did 0%-interest credit cards for a year. And I was like,” I’ll buy three new ones to go along with our three used ones, and then we’ll have a mix of used and new ones. I’ll buy them with 0% interest, and then I could have a year to pay them off.”
 
I bought those three new ones up in Sacramento, CA for just shy of eight grand.
 
Then I had to buy a trailer so I bought a little utility trailer that was $900 from Tractor Supply. It’s a little guy, but I could fit three bouncers on there. And then there is the dolly because I had a chintzy dolly from Tractor Supply and, dude, some of these slides are huge. It’s 600 pounds at times when it’s wet. I quickly realized that after we got it home. I brought it into the garage, but I couldn’t get it out to my yard because I couldn’t fit it through the gate. So I was like,” F*ck, I got to get this in people’s backyards.can’t just be an only front yard type deal.”
 
So I ended up buying a six-wheeled dolly. It’s a monster. I paid 800 bucks for the dolly, which is actually a cheaper one. They have ones that are motorized and cost about $3500–$4000. And I would love to have one of those.
 
Total estimated startup cost: $14,800
Lessons & Advice

Do you recommend starting a bounce house rental business? Any tips for others?

It’s all about time efficiency. So I do online booking, and that differentiates me from other people. Customers don’t want to talk to you, you know? They just want to go through your website and book it, and you don’t have to worry about it.
 
Another thing is being able to roll the bouncers fast and knowing when to slow down so that you can make more space on your trailer efficiently. I’ve learned that a lot of times you’ll get stressed because you want to go to the next house, right? But if you don’t slow down and roll it tightly, you’re not going to be able to fit that next one on the trailer. So you’re going to have to unroll it and then do it all over again. It just adds that much more stress.
 
So it’s certainly knowing when to press the gas and when to press the brake, which is the biggest thing. The same kind of thing applies to the money side: knowing when to pour more gas on Facebook and Google ads and when to pull out because bouncers are seasonal.
 
Also, a good dolly is such a time saver because one of the problems I ran into was loading it onto the trailer because they’re so f*cking heavy. If my brother-in-law is unavailable, it’s hard to figure out how to do things efficiently. With a good dolly, you’re able to go to the next drop-off without spending over an hour at each drop-off. Time is money on a Saturday and Sunday, you know?
 
As far as buying bouncers, if you wanted to go cash, I would say have at least ten grand. You could probably buy four, maybe five bouncers, depending on the size of the units. Right now, I’m looking on Facebook marketplace and I wish I would have done this last winter. June is kind of peak season for everything, so now that it’s a winter time they’re going for as cheap as $700 all the way up to $2500 for a really nice one.
About Your Full-Time Job

What's your full-time job?

I work at a power plant. But we’re a peaker. And what that means is that we only turn on this power plant for the peak operating times, which is typically summer, which is when it’s really hot. We can produce up to 100 MW per hour. It’s a lot of sitting down and looking at a screen, monitoring numbers to make sure nothing’s spiking up because I live in California. Emissions is 80% of our job. It’s a big deal with emissions not exceeding, so that is a big part of it.
 
We’re literally clicking up and down, injecting water into the gas turbine, which will then cool it off and produce fewer emissions at the back end. And that is essentially our whole job.
 
We get a lot of downtime because it’s our whole job to make sure we have two units ready to roll at any given time.
Where Can People Find You?

Where can people rent your bouncers?

BenBolin-Jumpcityrentals.com

If you’re based in Oakdale, CA, or the surrounding area, and you want to book Ben’s bouncers, visit Jump House Rentals to book a jump house today.

Here’s what a couple of Ben’s customers had to say:

Fantastic service and affordable pricing! I can’t recommend this company enough! They were there on time, they had everything we needed, were super affordable, and the kids had a blast on their super spacious jump house! We will definitely be ordering from here now on! – Josh

Absolutely amazing!! We rented the large obstacle course for our son’s 5th birthday party and I cannot say enough good things about Jump House Rentals! They arrived earlier than expected to set up (very helpful to our busy day!) and made the entire process so easy. All the adults were impressed and asked where we rented from and the kids had a blast! Thank you! We will definitely be return customers.” – Lindsay

Read more of Ben’s customer testimonials here.