What may not come to mind when you’re first developing your portable restroom start-up is how many portable restrooms are needed to start a rental business. Depending on your strategies, you could conceivably launch a portable restroom start-up with a single unit. Let’s look at what other factors should be considered before building your inventory.
Who Will Be Your Clients?
The type of business you want to cater to will determine how much inventory you need. For example, venues such as concerts, festivals, and outdoor gatherings require more units than construction sites, which only need one restroom for every 10 workers. Our estimator can easily calculate your usage requirements.
Construction Sites
One way to start small is to get started with construction sites. You will need to purchase a few portable restrooms, a slide-in module, and a truck to transport the restrooms. As your business grows, you can purchase additional portable restrooms and expand your service area.
Little League/Adult League Sporting Events
When supplying portable restrooms for sporting events, there are several factors to consider. These include:
- The age of the attendees
- The number of games
- The average number of attendees
- Whether or not food and beverage services are available
- The length of the season
It is important to carefully consider these factors in order to provide adequate restroom facilities for all attendees. Family-sized and handicapped-accessible units are essential for events like this, and a bare minimum of two units should be in your inventory. Our event calculator suggests that if an event has a duration of six hours with 50% women and an average of 250 attendees, three portable restrooms should be put in place. Suppose your contract is for an entire season. You must also consider the cost of pumping the units at least twice a week, or daily during tournaments and all weekend events plus the chemicals, deodorizers, and toilet tissue required to maintain healthy standards.
Festivals and Fairs
The inventory to start a rental business will look quite different if you plan a portable restroom start-up directed towards festivals, livestock shows, or local fairs. For example, a small horse show lasting 10 hours per day with a maximum of 500 people in attendance, and 50% of those attendees are women, requires a minimum of five portable restrooms.
Change the venue to a local fair where the attendance rises to 1,000 per day and alcohol is available, then the units rise to a minimum of ten. A festival with 5,000 attendees where alcohol is served raises the minimum number of portable restrooms to 39 units. With this number of attendees, you will need the staff to service and pump the units daily.
Initial Inventory
An excellent way to determine a good starting inventory is to develop a checklist:
- Initial budget
- Cost of Marketing
- Cost calculations and quotes
- The average number of attendees or workers per client that your business can service
- Scheduling
Nothing would be worse for your business than to market to clients, obtain service requests, and then be unable to fulfill them due to a lack of inventory or mismanaged booking.
Types of Portable Restrooms
The choices are highly customizable, from the basic portable restroom, such as the Global unit, to the deluxe wheelchair-accessible or family-sized Freedom. Additional amenities like enhanced flush capabilities, hand sanitizers, handwashing stations, and baby changing stations will be welcomed. For a more luxurious user experience, a restroom trailer, like a Satellite Suite, delivers comfort, atmosphere, and privacy that you can add to your fleet to diversify your business’s offerings and stand out.
Stocked Consumables
Have you ever stepped into or walked by a portable restroom, and thought, hey, that smells good! It’s a portable restroom operators number one job to keep units stocked with paper and smelling fresh and clean. Luckily, Satellite now offers consumable products like toilet paper, paper towels, Deodorizers, and cleaning products to keep operations running smoothly.
Vacuum Trucks, Unit Haulers, and Slide-Ins
Another important question is how will you empty, clean, and transport your units out in the field. Satellite Industries offers different sizes of trucks and trailers ranging from a one-unit hauler to a P&D style truck capable of hauling up to 10 units plus whatever you can fit on a trailer. Already have a great pickup truck? A Slide-in can fit right in the back with enough room left for your cleaning supplies. Satellite’s Truck division makes P&D trucks in various sizes that have vacuum tanks as well room to carry several standard restrooms.
So, How Many Portable Restrooms Do You Need To Start a Rental Business?
The answer is as variable as the clients you seek to serve. A simple start-up can be done with a single portable restroom, delivered to a construction site for the duration of the job. With weekly cleaning and regularly scheduled pumping, an entrepreneur can develop an idea for the work involved while marketing to other clients. As your business grows or if you start with clients with larger needs, your inventory will also grow. Imagine starting with a single portable restroom and growing to a hundred or more executive, multi-capacity units with interior handwashing stations, customized vacuum trucks, and trailers built to carry your investment into the future. Ready to start? Contact us for more information or to start a quote – we’re here every step of the way.
If you missed our first installment of Getting Into the Portable Sanitation Industry, Top Things to Know, you can read the first installment, Buyer Beware: A Used Equipment Checklist, here. Stay tuned for our next installment, Essential Equipment for Your Sanitation Startup, soon.