Matthew Wilhite is the owner of Kingdom Strollers LLC, a successful stroller rental company based out of Orlando, FL. I sent an email to the company website asking for a few moments of their time. Matthew called me less than 10 minutes later and provided 40 minutes of wisdom. Continue reading to experience his awesome insight into entrepreneurship.
Q. Tell me a little about your business.
A. Well we rent out baby equipment to tourists in Orlando Fl. Primary high end strollers to folks visiting Walt Disney World.
Q. How did you get started?
A. Well a friend of ours (my wife and I) was buying these used high end strollers, fixing and cleaning them up and reselling them for $80-100 a pop. So after talking it over, we purchased a small fleet of strollers unfortunately we weren’t able to resell them as of our friend did. We then decided to rent them out.
Q. Were you also working full time?
A. yes, I was a general manager of a restaurant making 80K per year. I ended up quitting that job 4 months later. The stroller rental business was picking up and I was missing calls (rental opportunities) and wasn’t able to follow up.
Q. you stated business picked up so much that you quit your job. Were you making a huge profit right away?
A. That fourth month that I quit my job, we actually made 10K. That’s when I realized that I had to dedicate full time to this. So yes, that month we made 10K. However, the month after that it was 6K, then the month after that it was like 4K. We had to figure out the seasonal patterns and so forth.
Q. Those months were your profit dropped, what kept you motivated to continue?
A. The fact that I quit my job and I had nowhere else to go.
Q. You mentioned that when you started renting, there were other people out there renting strollers as well. What made you decide to do that as well, even though there were 15 other people doing the same thing? Wasn’t that intimidating?
A. It was intimidating but how else could we make a profit off these strollers? We spent 10K in equipment and a website so we had to try.
Q. You seem to be doing quite well, what set you apart from the others in the same industry?
A. We decided to let them keep the equipment longer, didn’t charge for certain things, and we also deliver and pick up. Eventually we were one of the 3 companies that Disney decided to go into business with.
Q. you have a contract with Disney?
A. Yes we do. Disney gets more than 10% profit on each sale they refer.
Q. May I ask how much did your company earn last year?
A. We made 2.3 million in 2015.
Q. That’s impressive! May I ask how much of that was yours to keep, how much was profit.
A. 10%.
Q. so out of 2.3 million, you only get 230K?
A. Yes, this is something you must be aware of when going into business for yourself. You have insurance, employees, advertising etc. to pay. All of that adds up. For instance I pay 15K a year for liability insurance because we are based in a litigious state where people like to sue a lot. Therefore my insurance is quite high compared to someone in Illinois may not be so high. Also advertising through google, bing, and other search engines isn’t cheap either. We pay google 6K per month for advertising alone. We also pay the ad company 3K per month to manage our website.
Q. How many employees do you have?
A. I have 10 drivers, 25 cleaners, 3 admin, and a seamstress, so roughly 40 people.
Q. How many strollers do you have?
A. 1600 strollers, 5 drivers and 6700 sq ft of warehouse space we use to conduct the entire operation.
Q. Impressive. Do you see yourself delving into any other business?
A. Oh yes, I’ve been playing around with the idea of golf clubs. Golf is big here and I think I can do something with that in the near future.
Q. You’ve given me a lot to think about that I never even considered. Any last words of advice or wisdom for someone like me?
A. It’s a lot of hard work. When someone calls out I have to fill in. My 12 hour day just turned into an 18-24 hour work day. But it’s worth it. Don’t get scared. It’s a lot but don’t give up on your dreams. God Bless.
https://www.kingdomstrollers.com/
