So I was surfing along on Craigslist, and came across a few vending companies for sale. One in particular listed a bunch of equipment in several Nashville locations. After talking with the guy, it turns out that he had acquired a bunch of drink and snack locations at warehouses belonging to the Tennessean newspaper. He sent me an income statement to show me the performance of the locations, and agreed to owner finance a portion of the purchase. He was asking $8000 for 7 locations, a total of 13 machines. I paid him $4000 down, and agreed to make payments each month for a year. He also agreed that if I could take care of the entire amount within a month or two, he would let it all go for $7000. This is actually what I wound up doing in the end.

I went hunting for a van… and finally found one for $1500 here in Murfreesboro. A 1995 Dodge RAM V6 cargo with about 250,000 miles on it. Strong like bull, and about as bad on gas!
I had a friend of mine who wanted to get in on the deal… so he agreed to pick up another route that was also for sale on Craigslist here in Murfreesboro… and we combined the routes. Within about 60 days, we were cashflow positive.

The Nashville route was really a Saturday only deal, and the distributor was only open on weekdays… so we would have to go and pick up stock during the week, and run the route on Saturday for about 6 to 8 hours. We finally managed to figure out how to reduce it to a bi-weekly route by making sure to overstock the busy locations.

I had picked up a bill counter and a change counter to save time counting all the money…

It was right at the point when we were cashflow positive that the partnership went south. I decided to sell the Nashville locations owner financed to one of the guys who was helping to run it and i got out. It’s apparently still doing well, and he’s looking at adding another 20 locations coming up here pretty soon.

Vending seems like it could be a good business to be in, but with gas prices where they are today… and it being a delivery business… there’s quite a bit of risk involved. I really liked the fact that it was a cash business, but didn’t like that the only time we could service the locations was on Saturdays. I like my weekends, and we did not grow enough to justify hiring anyone to manage it. I would think that getting good help that you can trust would always be an issue.

If I was to do it again… I think I would have spent more time concentrating on trying to find additional locations to place.