As you may know, I have been spending a lot of time over the past few months on getting into the Bulk Candy Vending business, expanding my business, and getting it all running properly and optimized.
When I was getting into the business, I did as much research as possible. I talked to people in the business and people that were selling routes. I didn’t know many of these people very well in the beginning. It was difficult to tell what information was real and what was a sales pitch. I read several eBooks that I purchased online about the Bulk Candy Vending business. I found some blogs associated with vending and read all the posts on them. I devoured all the information that I could. I wanted to make sure that I knew what I was getting myself into.
Then, I started buying. I bought half a dozen preexisting routes as small as 6 machines up to the largest being 165 machines. I bought all the Vendstar 3000 machines that I could find for sale on Craigslist. Even if people were asking $100 or $150 each, in the end I never paid more than $50 for a machine. I stopped buying when I got to 500 machines. Based on my initial research, servicing a route of 500 machines would basically be a full time job.
Even after all the reading and research that I did, there was still a lot that I had to learn the hard way. Most of the books that I read about the business were horribly inadequate, double spaced and filled with “fluff” without much real useful information. I didn’t realize it at the time, because I didn’t know anything about the business. Now that I have been running and optimizing my vending route, I realize that the authors of those books don’t know much about the business or how to run it successfully.
Many books that I read promoted the vending business as “a great way to earn passive income!” I even referred to the vending business as passive income in a previous blog post. Now, I know better. It sounds like a great concept, but the vending business is a lot of work. Especially in the beginning, I worked many 12+ hour days and 7 day weeks. This type of thing doesn’t bother me. Part of being an entrepreneur is willing to put in the work necessary to get a new venture off the ground.
A few months into it, I was really getting the hang of it. I realized that most people, including other people I know that have been in the vending business for years, don’t really know what they are doing. Within a few months, I had my route optimized to the point of where it is only taking me 2 weeks every month to service a route with 500 machines. I am at the point now where the business is generating a substantial (equivalent to a good full time job) income and I am exploring the possibility of hiring someone to service the route for me so that I can dedicate my time to other things.
One of those things that I have been working on in my free time is writing a book called “The Sweet Truth: Confessions and Strategies from a Vending Insider” about everything I learned about the Bulk Candy Vending business. It explains how to get started buying machines cheap and negotiating the purchase of preexisting routes. It goes into extreme detail about how to optimize your route so you are making the most money possible for a small time investment. I’ve seen the other books out there, and this covers much more ground and goes into much more detail. I’ve finished that book and I’ve started selling it as an eBook.
I have a few other big things happening right now, both in my personal and my business life, but I don’t want to let any secrets out just yet. Bis später.
Tags: book review, busines, vending
December 11th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Hey man great title and the books looks great.