Thank you all for joining us. My name is Steve Grubbs, and Patti Glover, our sales director, is with us today. I am the founder of VictoryStore.com. And we’re so thankful that all of you joined us here today. We had a couple of technical glitches as we got started here. But we’re going to talk today about how to build your own yard card rental business. And there’s a lot of talk now about the gig economy; driving for Uber, driving for Lyft, Airbnb, that type of thing. But one of the great things is how to become your own boss. And this is one of the ways that we have a lot of customers who started yard card rental businesses. And we’re going to talk to you about a business model for it, how you can make money, how you can market it and build a steady clientele. So, let’s go ahead and start with the first slide.
So, this is how it works. The yard card business is pretty simple. Yard card greeting rentals are a great fit for working with your own time schedule and you can rent to businesses and families and schools and churches. And so essentially, what we’re talking about here are congratulatory messages that might be for birthdays, new birth, retirement, or it could be some other more significant message about an event. So, continuing on, on how it works, the second piece is, you need a starter kit. If you haven’t done this before, you get a starter kit. And we have themes that accommodate most major events, you can buy custom-themed packages, you can have us create something, or you can buy packages that we have online and just put a combination of letters, numbers, or characters together. Each kit and package come with pretty much everything you need. It’ll include stakes, and if you have other designs that you want, we can include those as well.
There are a lot of advantages of starting a lawn greeting business. And we’re going to just talk about a few of those now. So, one of those is you can work out of your house, be your own boss and create a flexible schedule. So, I know there’s a period of time when I had kids and a lot of activities. And because of that, we were looking to have a flexible schedule. And this is one of those things that allows you to do so. Second of all, unlike a lot of businesses, this has a low startup cost. If you’re going to open a McDonald’s franchise, it’s a million dollars, but a yard card greeting business can, you know, our starter kit $999. There are packages that are less than that, but it has fairly low startup costs to get started. And the nice thing is that it doesn’t really matter what size your vehicle is, you don’t have to have a truck to deliver a lawn greeting, you can use pretty much any car. And for most people, they find that it’s fairly easy income. And I don’t want to say it’s easy, because anytime you’re starting a new business, it’s not easy. There’s a lot to it.
But, having said that, most people find that through their natural social connections, and by promoting these through various social media accounts, they’re able to pick up clients pretty quickly. People who are having events, graduations, weddings, birthdays, that type of thing. And most people don’t want to buy one permanently, because they’re just going to use it one time. So, this is a great way that they can rent it, they can pay you to set it up and take it away. The other great thing about this is it really has unlimited potential. So, you might work for someone, or you might have some jobs where your potential is somewhat limited. And in this, you can grow it as big as you want it to be, and you can hire people to put them out for you. And to the extent that your social media reach keeps growing and you get more recommendations from friends, that potential just keeps moving forward. And so that’s pretty exciting for people.
The other thing is most people will make back their initial investment in the first few weeks of operation. You know, for some it’s within the first month and others it might take two to three months. But if you are very active with this, and you are renting two to five times a week, you’re going to make that investment back within the first month. So, sometimes it might take a little while to get off the ground, but a lot of people find it takes off pretty quickly. And finally, it’s great that you can deliver smiles daily and love what you do. It’s a great way to bring happiness to the world. And, you know, you’re not Mother Teresa, but you’re still bringing happiness to your neighborhood. So, that’s a pretty great thing.
Let’s talk about a sample business model. So, in thinking about how you put this together, let’s say that you just dip your toe in the water, and you’re able to get one yard greeting rental a week, just one a week for a month, and you charge $75 for a 24-hour rental. Well, over a span of the year, you’re going to gross $3,900, you’re certainly not going to put your kids through college on that, but it can be decent spending money.
Let’s say that you go to the next step, and you’re hitting your stride, getting some momentum, and you have 10-yard greeting rentals a week, and you’re charging $75 for that 24-hour rental. Well, now, over the span of a year, you’ve grossed $39,000 in revenue, and your cost for your products is significantly less than that.
Let’s go one step further and let’s say that this is really humming now. And you’ve got 25-yard greeting rentals a week. And you’re going to take orders and you’re spending about 20 to 25 hours a week putting these up. Well, over the span of a year, you can gross, almost $100,000. And so suddenly, it starts to look like more than just a hobby business. It starts to look like a business where you can really begin to make some significant revenue.
So, we guesstimate -- this is different for everybody. You know, if you’re doing this in a town where traffic is not a big challenge, then it probably takes 20 to 30 minutes to drive and set this up in a yard and then go back and pick it up, it can be pretty quick. But if you’re in a larger area, maybe driving a little further, it might take an hour. And I’m sure there are some people it might take a little bit more than an hour. But we guesstimate that it takes about an hour to drive and install a yard greeting and get it picked up. And so, you’ve got that time investment in it.
So, let’s talk about a potential initial investment. So, with the starter kit, and the starter kit has over 150 individual lawn decoration pieces. You can go on the website, VictoryStore.com, we’ll show you a link a little bit later. But you’ll find that the starter kit for $999 has everything you need to have a robust lawn greeting business. And the cool thing is that there are so many different themes. We have over 100 different lawn greeting designs, so pretty much everything you can imagine. They’re fun birthday greetings and fun retirement greetings and so much more. So, for $1,000, it gets you a pretty good distance along.
So, now we’re moving on to marketing and advertising. So, let’s think in terms of social media, for marketing, and advertising, we use this a lot. If you’ve run across VictoryStore.com, you’ve probably run across us through Facebook or Instagram. And it’s a great model. So, we’re going to move on to slide number 11. And this talks about how to create a business Facebook page, because that’s the first thing you need. So, we have seven steps here. And you can find this, if you go to Google and you just type in setting up a business page on Facebook, you’ll find the same information. So, you don’t have to memorize or write down what we have here.
But essentially, it’s pretty easy. You go to Facebook, you register for a business page, you enter your business information, upload your initial photos, your profile pic, cover photo, that kind of thing. And we would recommend using potentially one of our photos. We’ll give you -- if you’re our customer, you certainly have permission to use our lawn decoration photo. So, that gets you a long way there. And then you start inviting your friends to like your page, it’s pretty easy. Once they see what you’re doing, suddenly, they’re pretty excited about calling you and saying, “Hey, would you bring over a birthday greeting for my daughter’s sweet 16?” Or retirement greeting and that type of thing. So, you want to, ideally, invite as many friends as possible to like your page because that’s a really fast way to grow your business.
And they’re going to ask you for some additional business details, hours of operation, that type of thing. You know, they’ll ask you to add a button to your page and you can figure all this out pretty quickly or use some of the resources they have. But make sure you get your business page set up on Facebook. Now, we’re going to moving on to the next slide, and we’ll talk about the optional marketing investment. And if you look at the weekly advertising budget that you can use on Facebook, it can be any amount of money. But let’s say that you’re boosting $50 on a post. So, you put up a post that says, “This is our birthday lawn greeting.” And you can see an example of it down at the bottom of the slide where it says happy birthday.
And let’s say you spend $50 a week; you are probably going to reach 2,500 to 5,000 people for $50 a week. And the more people that like your page, the greater reach you’re going to have. So, suddenly, a lot of people are seeing what you’re doing. And even though they may not pick up the phone and order, the very first day they see it. Remember, in marketing, you want to touch people, six to 10 times with your message before they’ll finally take action. But let’s say that you do that week in, week out, $50 a week, you just stick to a budget on that. At the end of the year, you’re going to have spent $2,600. But you should get dozens or hundreds of inquiries and orders by spending that amount of money.
So, let’s look at the next slide and understand the business model here. So, your total investment, potentially, for the first year, might be more than this, might be less than that. But this is an example, could be $999 for the starter package that includes the more than 150 items. And then $5,200 in marketing or excuse me $2,600 in marketing. And you add that together, and it’s 3,599 -- basically $3,600. Now, the other option is just to go for a full $100 a week, but start it at 60 at the $2,600 level, and then test larger amounts and see if that brings you in even more business. You know, if you think about it, if you spend $50 and you get two clients, well, you paid for your marketing budget. If you spend $100 and get four clients, not only have you paid for your marketing budget, but you’ve also made a decent amount of money that week. So, that’s what you want to constantly be testing.
So, let’s go on to the next slide and look at how the business model plays out. So, your revenue if you’re renting 10 times a week and you’re bringing in $39,000 a year, you subtract out your startup cost and your budget of $3,600, and you have a net of $35,401. Which, for a side gig, isn’t too bad. That’ll pay for something out there, almost pay for college, a year of college these days. So, that’s a good way to think of how you might get a business like this off the ground.
Let’s look at some of the really just great designs that we have. Moving on to the next slide. So, you can use the photos from our site. And that’s why we have them on here if you’re our customers. So, we have a lot of different Happy Birthday greetings. We have more than 25 different Happy Birthday Greetings. Not all of them are up on our site at the same time, but you can check in with our sales team and they’ll make sure that whatever you’re looking for, we probably have it, and they can guide you in the right direction. People really love it when you don’t just put up like a generic Happy Birthday sign but when it’s personalized. And that’s why in our starter packet, you’ll find some individualized letters and you can add additional letters, that type of thing.
Some people will say okay, for $75 we will put up a lawn greeting, but for $100 we’ll personalize it with the year and the name. So, there’s some add-ons that you can charge to make a little bit extra money. But when somebody comes home and they see something like this Happy Birthday yard greeting, ‘Happy Birthday Jack’. That’s a pretty cool thing, something that they never forget. We also have birthday party yard greetings. So, in this next slide, you see Hannah and Emma had a joint birthday party. So, this is one that they recognize that their friends showed up and it looked pretty cool, ‘Happy 13th birthday’. This just gives you a sense on the level of customization that you can do with names and that’s a big deal.
Moving on to the next slide, the Fall Festival yard greetings. So, this is just an example of a festival. Now, there’s two ways to do this some of our stock items will be for a particular event. So, you can have stock items that are in your inventory, or what a lot of people do is they just buy two or three different sets of letters. And then they can spell out whatever it is that their customer wants. And so, this one requires, other than the pumpkins, everything else would be standard, and maybe the doll in the middle. And it might be something that you’ve got a big client who’s willing to spend $300 to $500 on a customized greeting. And you know, you work with our team and have something made, and you can do something really, really cool and still make some decent money.
Let’s move on to the special events yard greetings. You know this is one that we did for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure and it was so cool. It is a place that if you’re starting the race or ending the race that tells people not only at the beginning or end of the race. But if it’s up for a week or two in advance, then it helps to advertise that the race is occurring. And that helps to drive more participation. And if you think of it, a road like the one you see in front of you is probably getting around 5,000 to 10,000 drive-byes a day. So, let’s say, for easy math 10,000, well over 10 days, that’s 100,000 eyeballs, over a month, it’s 300,000 eyeballs. So, that’s a lot of visibility for a fairly inexpensive product that you’re able to provide for customers. So, there are a lot more examples of this if you can think about it. And if you go to our VictoryStore site, VictoryStore.com, and search for yard decorations, you’ll find a lot of different options out there.
You know, moving on to our last slide, a lot of people make this sort of a family adventure. So, if you’re like me, your kids needed money when they were growing up, they wanted to go out and have fun with friends or they had activities at school, this is a way that kids can be a part of and learn some valuable lessons about money and work and the values that will help build them into strong adults. And so this is one of those great things.
