Uncategorized | New Stream Income

How She Built a $295,000 Kids Party Rental Side Hustle

Tayo Lanlehin from Bay Area Kids Rental

Buy it once, get paid for it over and over again — that’s a business model I never stop loving.

Tayo Lanlehin couldn’t find kid-sized tables and chairs for her son’s first birthday. So she ordered four styles from overseas, stashed them in her basement, and started an Instagram page(opens in new tab).

Four years later, BayAreaKidsRentals.com(opens in new tab) is a $295,000 business(opens in new tab) with ball pits, bounce houses, plushie-making stations, two 16-foot trucks, and a 3,500 square foot warehouse — and she still works a full-time job.

Here’s how she built it.

Tune in to Episode 755 of the Side Hustle Show to learn:

how to get your first rental clients through cold outreach
how to price rental items so they pay for themselves
how to build a team so the business runs without you

Download Your Free Bonus: 25 Other Unconventional Rental Ideas

25 Other Unconventional Rental Ideas

What else could you rent out for a profit? Here are some ideas!

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How She Started a Kids Rental Business

Tayo was planning her son’s first birthday. The theme was “First Trip Around the Sun.”

“Kids are very visual,” she said. “You want to immerse them into a world of the theme that you’re going for.”

But when she went looking for furniture to match, all she could find were plain white plastic chairs. Nothing kid-sized. Nothing that fit a theme.

So she asked herself the question that starts most good businesses: What if I brought this to the Bay Area?

Starting With a $2,000 Inventory Test

She didn’t buy a warehouse full of product. She bought chairs.

Four styles, 20 of each, ordered from overseas — roughly $2,000. Storage was the empty 1,000 square foot basement in her house.

Then she set up an Instagram page and started emailing local event planners.

The planners wrote back fast — and immediately asked for packages that included tables. But when she didn’t have any, she bought tables, plus a few custom styles.

How to Get Your First Rental Clients

Tayo didn’t wait for demand to find her. Three moves did most of the work.

1. Naming the business after the search

When she was hunting for items herself, she didn’t even know what to call them.

So she asked what a parent would type into Google — and named the company Bay Area Kids Rentals.

2. Going straight to the people her customers already hire

She built a list of every event planner she could find online, followed them, and sent photos, a price list “like a menu,” and a short intro to herself and the business.

3. Shooting her shot with a big name

She emailed the wife of an NBA player, noticed her daughter’s birthday was coming up, and attached what she had.

The reply came the same day: I’m going to put you in touch with our event planner.

Later, that planner told her something better than a booking: “You were actually already on our radar.”

Why Event Planners Are the Best Customer in a Rental Business

Planners in her market run events from $500 to $80,000 for a single kid’s birthday(opens in new tab).

And before Tayo existed, they had a problem: they had to buy these items for clients, then figure out how to get rid of them afterward.

“We’re so glad you’re here,” one told her, “because now it can be sustainable, we can rent, and you also have different types of styles and a variety.”

One planner books dozens of parties a year. One happy planner is a pipeline.

The Instagram Strategy That Drives Bookings

Instagram is still her biggest source of leads and visibility. A few things made it work:

Her first post was an unboxing – “Look, Bay Area — we have kids tables and chairs now.”
She filmed her first event herself – Setup, party, the whole thing. It got a lot of views, because nobody had seen it before.
She collaborated on styled shoots with planners and venues, which got her tagged by vendors with real followings — and a few shoots into magazines.
Then the tagging snowballed – Planners tag her. Guests tag her. Other vendors tag her. Eventually people want to be on her page.

At nearly 10,000 followers, the account has become something more useful than a portfolio: Bay Area parents use it as an inspiration board and a vendor directory(opens in new tab).

New followers show up already seeing that half their kid’s friends’ parents follow her.

She learned the content habit in an earlier business — a travel experience company running trips in Africa, where she always brought a photographer and videographer. “If you didn’t take videos and pictures, did it actually happen?”

She also invested in SEO(opens in new tab), which sends leads directly to the site, where parents can book themselves.

The Referral Engine Nobody Talks About

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss: the guests at the party are your ideal customers.

Do something spectacular and different, and every parent in the room is going to ask who supplied it.

Tayo sees it in the data. A booking comes in from parents who work in one particular industry — and that same evening, three more bookings arrive from that same industry or neighborhood.

Rental Pricing: How to Know If an Item Will Pay for Itself

Chairs rent for around $10 each, with pricing subject to change.

Kids Chair Rentals for Parties in Bay Area

Tayo’s goal is to earn back what she paid for an item in about six rentals. That’s before maintenance, which is a real cost when kids are involved.

Her items need to look Instagram-ready, so touch-up paint is an ongoing labor expense.

The good news is the shelf life. She says her garden bow chairs still look brand new after maybe 30 or 40 events.

Delivery: From Her Own Car to Two 16-Foot Trucks

Two events delivered in her own car — then, “okay, we need something else”
Hired a driver who had his own small truck
Added a transit van within a couple of months
Today: a transit van and two 16-foot trucks

She charges a delivery fee based on mileage, which covers running the vehicles and insuring them — and beats the hassle of renting a U-Haul(opens in new tab) every weekend.

Buying Inventory in Collections

Most of her inventory now gets released as collections. She studies trending party themes and color palettes, then buys tables and chairs to match.

Softplay packages kids party rental

At the time we talked, camping themes were hot (think Parent Trap), Toy Story was back thanks to the new movie, and back-to-school was in season. Carnival themes never die.

Her star-shaped purple ball pit? Inspired by Taylor Swift parties.

She also uses a smart risk-reducer: because people book up to six months out, she lists new items on the website before they arrive. Demand shows up first, inventory second.

Expanding From Chairs to a One-Stop Party Shop

Clients kept asking: do you have bounce houses(opens in new tab)? Ball pits?

Large Ball Pit Circle from Bay Area Kids Rentals — From https://www.bayareakidsrentals.com/items/large_ball_pit_circle/

She couldn’t buy everything, so she prioritized. Ball pits came first — partly because she wanted to break into corporate “bring your kids to work” events. The two grand ball pits are big: one 13 feet across, the other roughly 13 by 10.

Then more ball pits, bounce houses in multiple colors, and customized activity workshops. The newest is a plushie-making setup — essentially Build-A-Bear on site, backdrop and all, where kids stuff their own plushie and decorate a T-shirt.

The reason is simple: busy parents want one vendor and one delivery. Less coordination for them, more rentals per booking for her.

Average booking now runs $1,000 to $1,500. Big ones hit $8,000 — a plushie workshop for 40 kids, plus a ball pit, plus tables and chairs.

Storage, Insurance, and Overhead

Adding inflatables(opens in new tab) raised her insurance costs a lot.

Storage grew fast too. Tayo went from the basement to a 1,200-square-foot warehouse behind her house to a commercial space of about 3,500 square feet that she moved into recently.

Payment terms help with cash flow: a 50% deposit to reserve the items, then the remaining balance one week before the event.

How She Runs It Around a Full-Time Job

Tayo has a manager, drivers, admin, and customer service assistants, and a social media manager. The team runs the business. She owns it.

That’s what makes a multi-six-figure operation survivable alongside a full-time job — especially in a business where the work happens on evenings and weekends, which is family time.

Her hardest problem isn’t demand. It’s hiring. “It’s been very, very tough to find just the right talent” — people who understand the aesthetics, the design-forward standard, the level of perfection this clientele expects.

Tools/Tech

- Event Rental Systems>(opens in new tab)– booking software that tracks inventory, dates, and deliveries
- Connecteam(opens in new tab) – team communication, similar to Slack

Her husband is a CFO and handles payment processing.

What She’d Do Differently

Tayo would start with more items, sooner.

She began with only chairs, which meant guests could sit but couldn’t do anything else. If she started over, she’d go in with a one-stop-shop mindset from day one.

That doesn’t mean buying everything. A few chairs, a few tables, a few bounce houses, and a few ball pits would do it. People like packages, and they like dealing with one company.

Mistakes or Surprises?

Tayo shared two stories from opposite ends.

The good one: an early client’s grandfather was the CEO of Apple, and she got to meet him at his house. That’s when it hit her what kind of clientele the business was attracting.

The rough one: earlier this year, one of her trucks was stolen from her old warehouse. She walked in, saw the gate open, and the truck gone.

Insurance takes a while, so she bought a replacement truck to keep deliveries running. The original was eventually found. Now she has both, and she says she needs them.

What’s Next for Tayo?

Franchising(opens in new tab). She already has one franchise up and running and is vetting more operators.

Her take: if you find the right operator, you can grow much faster than trying to keep everything company-owned. She’d rather partner with people who are eager and ready to move than overthink the expansion.

“If you have the right operator as a franchise, you can really move much quicker.”

A brick-and-mortar party venue is also on the table, though that’s still in the analysis phase.

Tayo’s #1 Tip for Side Hustle Nation

“Try to understand the sector very well. Just start. Don’t overthink it. Bringing your own self into your work.”

25 Other Unconventional Rental Ideas

What else could you rent out for a profit? Here are some ideas!

Enter your email to download the full list now:

You’ll also receive my best side hustle tips and weekly-ish newsletter. Opt-out anytime.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized

This Coffee Bike Makes $275/Hour (70% Profit Margins)

Vlad Priadko from Coffee Bike

Want to start a mobile coffee business without the overhead of a brick-and-mortar café?

Vlad Priadko didn’t want to sign a lease, hire a staff, or take on the overhead of a coffee shop. He wanted the margins on coffee without the building.

So he built a coffee bike instead — an espresso setup mounted on an electric-assist cargo trike — and started riding it to the people.

Eight years later, Coffee Bike has sold more than 1 million cups of coffee and generated over $3 million in revenue.

Vlad has also built and sold 42 units to other entrepreneurs, and pitched the concept on Dragon’s Den.

Tune in to Episode 754 of the Side Hustle Show to learn:

how a mobile coffee business actually makes money
which events are the most profitable to serve
how to find your first paying customers

How Vlad’s Mobile Coffee Business Got Started

Vlad didn’t even drink coffee when he came up with the idea. He looked at the numbers instead.

A cup sold for about $5 and cost him about $1 in ingredients. Going mobile cut out nearly all the overhead, which put his margin as a solo operator in the 70-80% range — against 5-20% for a typical retail coffee shop.

So at 21, he ordered a cart from overseas without checking local rules.

The health department told him there was no way it would get approved, and it took a year of YouTube research and conversations with handymen to finally pass inspection.

The cart worked. It just wasn’t scalable.

Note: In Vancouver, his coffee bike requirements are similar to food truck’s. In the US, some counties treat smaller carts as their own category with lighter requirements. Either way, call your local health department first!

Turning the Cart Into a Coffee Bike

The approved cart was heavy, and the weight sat out in front of the rider. It blocked his view and made hills nearly impossible.

Mobile Coffee Bike — Vlad from coffeebike.ca

Setup alone took two hours every morning, hauling the espresso machine from his car to the cart piece by piece.

But after two to three months serving customers in Vancouver, Vlad had his answer. People loved it. The concept was right — the execution wasn’t.

Then he noticed the delivery trikes riding around the city, with a big cargo box behind the rider instead of in front. He sketched one in a notebook and tried to fit all his coffee equipment into that box.

That flip is where the coffee bike came from.

What It Costs to Start

If you want to put something together yourself, Vlad said you can work with a budget of around $10,000.

It won’t be perfect and you’ll be starting with a low-end espresso machine, but you can build something that works.

Coffee Bike World

For comparison, the bikes he now manufactures represent $20,000 to $25,000 worth of equipment. That gap is part of what he charges for at events.

Why Location Beats Foot Traffic

Vlad built his first unit for one specific location he was sure would work. It was a disaster.

The spot sat between a subway and a bus station — thousands of people crossing every few hours, all of them in a rush. Nobody wanted to stop between connections.

He put up a handwritten sign that said “slow down, enjoy the cup of coffee.” It didn’t matter.

So he moved two blocks, to the next subway station, where people were coming out and heading to their offices.

Sales went up 5x.

“Whatever you’re gonna plan before making a commitment, most likely the real life gonna be completely different.”

How to Build a Regular Office Route

Once Vlad found the right neighborhood, he walked into about 10 offices and pitched a schedule:

Office 1 – 10 to 11
Office 2 – 11 to 12
Office 3 – 12 to 1
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays only

That limited window created scarcity, and people got excited when he showed up.

Getting in was simple: be nice to the first person you see, then work out who’s in charge. Usually, it was the reception desk, and she’d blast the office Slack or Discord to let everyone know the coffee guy was coming.

He also spent his evenings hunting contacts through LinkedIn and Facebook.

And don’t forget to post your weekly schedule and daily location to your stories. It’s the cheapest way to build a customer base that keeps coming back.

What a Coffee Route Actually Pays

Coffee Bike Earnings Estimation

Vlad’s office run brought in about $150 per office, or roughly $450 to $500 per day across three stops.

That’s four to five hours of work, so call it about $100 an hour in sales — and he described that as a relatively slow pace. In a high-volume environment, a single bike can do up to $300 an hour.

After paying for beans, cups, and milk, a solo operator pockets around $70 an hour in profit. A barista working in a coffee shop makes closer to $15 or $20.

Do You Need Barista Experience?

Not much.

Before he touched a coffee machine, Vlad took a two-week course at a barista academy in Vancouver.

That gave him the basics — what a latte is, what a cappuccino is, how to steam milk, the difference between arabica and robusta beans.

How Private Events Became the Biggest Revenue Stream

Recognition from the office routes led to event invitations, and events now make up more than half of Vlad’s Vancouver revenue.

He charges $275 an hour for the experience, not per cup. One unit realistically serves about 50 cups an hour, so that’s roughly $5.50 a drink at full capacity, plus a delivery fee based on distance. Margins run 70% to 95%.

One VIP booking: five hours, $1,500, about 10 guests. They took maybe 30 drinks, costing him $30. Nearly all profit.

The range of events is wide:

Bridal and baby showers – around 25 people
Birthday parties – around 100
Weddings – around 200
Rock festivals – up to 5,000, where he brings four bikes and serves for eight hours

The Branded Event Contracts

Two or three times a year, a large brand pays to fully custom-wrap the coffee bikes in their own branding and give out free drinks in a space they pick. Those are prepaid and reach high six figures.

He’s done it with large AI companies and, recently, DoorDash.

For that one the bikes weren’t even serving coffee — they were wrapped in DoorDash branding and handing out FIFA merch. The marketing team just wanted the bikes.

They still paid him the coffee rate, since that was his opportunity cost. All of it from a business that costs about $20,000 to start.

Scaling to 10 Units and a Manufacturing Business

Vlad now runs four coffee bikes in Vancouver, down from a peak of eight, plus six smaller espresso bars for tighter spaces. That’s 10 units and a team of baristas.

But the bigger pivot was realizing he could sell the setup itself. Once he knew how to build the bikes, he started manufacturing them for aspiring entrepreneurs in other cities — a business-in-a-box version of what he’d built.

To date, he’s built 42 units across 28 owners.

He calls it Coffee Bike World, and it’s deliberately not a franchise:

No royalty, no marketing fee
Owners control their own logo, colors, menu, and prices
Full ownership of the unit
Optional upsells only — his beans, custom cups, website help
No territory contracts, just a gentleman’s agreement not to overlap

The long game is scale. With hundreds of owners, only a fraction need to buy anything for the recurring revenue to work.

What Happened on Dragon’s Den

Vlad grew up watching Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank, but never thought a local coffee cart was investable. What would he offer — a share of his park sales?

Manufacturing changed that. Once he was selling the concept to entrepreneurs worldwide, he had a pitch.

He filled out a couple of online questionnaires, got invited to audition, and landed a spot on the show’s season 20 anniversary. He rented a bike from an owner near Toronto, put a temporary vinyl wrap on it, and rode it onto the set.

Then, he got an on-screen deal from Arlene Dickinson, who later ordered three coffee bikes for Balzac’s, her coffee brand.

But the deal never closed. Both of them felt it was early, and Vlad realized he didn’t want to report to someone on every idea.

Tools and Tech

GoHighLevel – his CRM
AI agents – cold lead outreach and pre-qualifying leads before they book a call
ChatGPT and Claude – he rebuilt his website with Claude Code
Instagram and Facebook ads – $3,000 to $5,000 per month
Starlink – how he works from his car

The volume behind it is real. Vlad made more than 15,000 calls himself last year, and more than 5,000 people have left an inquiry on his site.

He estimated $50,000 in ad spend led to roughly 20 sales — $350,000 to $400,000 in hardware.

What Surprised Him Most?

Not a number. People.

Most are far more supportive and responsive than he expected. We make assumptions about someone before we’ve even spoken to them, but in his experience a lot of people are almost waiting for someone to talk to them.

His read is that we’ve lost some of our everyday socializing, and a coffee bike puts you right in the middle of it.

What’s Next for Vlad?

Vlad is finishing a cross-Canada trip on the coffee bike, five weeks in at the time of recording.

He’s towing a bike behind his car, has visited more than 50 cities, and plans to return to Vancouver by a different route to hit another 50. It’s all documented on YouTube at CoffeeBike TV.

After that, he’s moving to Asia for a year. He signed off his Vancouver apartment lease before the trip, and his wife and kids are already there waiting for him.

He wants to live up to the last word in Coffee Bike World.

There are units in Canada, the U.S., and one in Peru, with inquiries coming from Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia — and his Vancouver team keeps things running while he’s away.

Vlad’s #1 Tip for Side Hustle Nation

“Just execute.”

Episode Links

Looking for More Side Hustle Help?

Start Your Free $500 Challenge. My free 5-day email course shows you how to add $500 to your bottom line.
Join the free Side Hustle Nation Community. The free Facebook group is the best place to connect with other side hustlers and get your questions answered.
Download The Side Hustle Show. My free podcast shares how to make extra money with actionable weekly episodes.