PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Running a Porta Potty Business

How to Start a Porta Potty Business: The First Year, Step by Step

Starting a portable toilet rental business is not complicated, but it is heavy. You need a truck that can pump, units to rent, a place to keep them, somewhere to dump the waste, and customers who will pay every month. This article walks through the first year in the order most owners actually face it.

Before You Buy Anything

Start with the guide that covers the whole business, Running a Porta Potty Business: The Complete Guide to Software, Systems and Growth, and then come back here for the first-year details.

Before you spend money on units, spend a week learning your local market. Drive the construction sites in your area and note whose units are standing there. Look at the event calendar for your county: fairs, festivals, races, weddings, and sports. Call your local waste water authority and find out where you are allowed to dump, what it costs, and what permits a pumper truck needs. Rules vary by state and county, and they decide where you can work.

The Starting Kit

Most owners start with a used service truck with a waste tank and a fresh water tank, a trailer for hauling units, and a modest number of standard units. Add a couple of hand wash stations and at least one ADA accessible unit, because many construction jobs and events will ask for one. Deluxe flushing units and restroom trailers can wait until you have customers asking for them.

Buy what you can keep rented. A unit sitting in the yard earns nothing and still costs you the money you paid for it. It is better to be short a few units in the first busy month and buy more than to have half your fleet sitting idle all winter.

Set Your Prices Before the First Call

The first time a contractor calls and asks what you charge, you need an answer. Work out what a standard monthly rental with weekly service will cost you to deliver: fuel, dump fees, chemicals, paper, your time, and wear on the truck. Then add what you need to pay back the unit and make a profit. Do the same for event rentals, extra pump-outs and extra rental days.

Write these rates down in one place. When you set up software, they go into your service list so every quote uses the same numbers. Pricing Porta Potty Rentals: How Operators Set Monthly and Event Rates goes deeper on this.

Landing the First Accounts

Your first steady customers will most likely be small builders, remodelers, landscapers and farms. These customers want a unit delivered on time, serviced every week without fail, and picked up when they call. That is the whole pitch. Visit job sites, leave a card with the super, and follow up. A builder who has a bad week with their current provider is a builder ready to switch.

Events come next. Churches, schools, little leagues and wedding venues all need units a few times a year. They book ahead and they talk to each other. A good first event often leads to two more.

Keep Records From Day One

Most new owners keep the first customers in their head or on a sheet of paper. That works until you have more sites than you can remember. The things you need to track from the first rental are simple:

• Which customer, which job site, and who the site contact is
• How many units and which type, and where they are placed on the site
• The date they were delivered and how many days the rental includes
• When each weekly service is due and when it was done
• What was billed and what was paid

In PortaPottyBossPro, each client can have many job sites, each site carries units with type, quantity, unit numbers and placement notes, and the rental tracking records delivered and picked-up dates. Setting this up at five customers is easy. Setting it up at fifty, from memory, is not. If you are already past that point, see Getting a Portable Toilet Business Off Paper and Spreadsheets.

Get Paid Without Chasing

New owners often wait until the end of the month to bill, and then spend a week chasing checks. Take a card on file at the start of every rental when you can. Bill weekly services on a schedule, and bill events when the pickup is done. For contractors with several sites, one monthly statement per account keeps them happy and keeps you from sending ten separate invoices.

The Rest of the First Year

By the end of the first year you will know which customers are worth keeping, which months are slow, and whether you need a second truck. Keep notes on what went wrong and fix it while the business is still small. The habits you build now are the ones your first employee will learn from you.

For the tools that support each of these steps, see the Porta Potty Business Software page and the other guides in this series.