Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
From Side Hustle to $10K/Month: Inside the Rental Car Business with George Madden and Car Rental Coach
20 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What insights does George Madden share about the rental car business?
We do a market analysis in every single area because it can change, but if we're looking at just the United States in general, what I've seen become the most profitable and how I've built my business, we're talking economy cars here that are older, higher miles, and we're trying to find them for about under $12,000 with everything said and done to have the car ready to go.
Because these $10,000 to $12,000 cars are renting for the same amount of money as a $25,000 or $30,000 car.
This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.
Hello and welcome. It's 2026. It is right about now. This is Ryan Offord, your host. I hope everyone's doing good. We're getting into the year. We've been doing some of our best of series, but hey, it's all about legendary people doing legendary things and legendary business advice.
We cover things that you've heard of and legendary people doing something that you probably know what it is and you're like, damn, how did they do that? And then there's stuff that you're like, I've heard of that. Seems like an interesting side thing. What the hell? It We're talking to car rental coach, he is George Madden. What's up, George? Hey, how's it going? Great to be here.
Hey, man, I'm curious. This is an interesting thing. If you've seen the app Turo, which I have, I always thought that was a brilliant idea. It was right when they first started. I was like, someone should have done this, where you've got your car, you're not using it, you're in a big city, or you've got an extra car. Hey, rent your car, do all that. It made a ton of sense to me.
And then I noticed there was these people that had multiple cars, fleet if you want. okay, I see what's happening here. And then I got busy with the million other things that I'm doing. And that's about where I left off with it. I have rented a couple of Toros in big city, but that's why we went to the expert here. George Madden is going to tell us all about it.
George, what the hell exactly is a car rental coach? Everybody knows that people beat the hell out of rental cars. Are you going to teach me how not to beat the hell out of one? What are you doing? Car rental coach, I ended up creating this business with my partner about two years ago. This was after I was already renting cars out for about five years.
What happened one night, I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw my business partner's ad come up saying, hey, if you have a car and want to put it in our fleet, we rent them out at the airport. And he was taking on investors and growing his fleet. This was in the evening time. I may or may not have had a glass of wine or to.
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Chapter 2: Why are economy cars more profitable than luxury rentals?
We're able to get this car back as fast as possible and put it back on the road making money. Because time on the road being rented in this business is number one. We have to keep these cars consistently rented to keep the cash flow up. And we help with funding, financing, and anything our clients need, we're there for them. We have two lessons here that George is teaching the audience.
I'm always building something. And right now, I'm in the middle of launching a card shop, which means making a lot of decisions fast. Platform, payments, fulfillment, all of it. For me, it wasn't about whether to launch. It was choosing the right system to build on. That's why I'm using Shopify.
It handles the back end so I can stay focused on the product, the brand, and actually growing the business. That's also why I've been saying this, 2026 is the year you launch. Not because you need permission, but because the tools finally make it simple to move fast. Shopify is everything you need to sell online, in person, or wherever your customers are. And you're not doing this alone.
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Email and social campaigns ready to go. And when things get rocking and rolling, Shopify grows with you, all from one dashboard. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Cha-ching! In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today. It's Shopify.com slash Ryan. Go to Shopify.com slash Ryan. That's Shopify.com slash Ryan.
Hear your first cha-ching this year with Shopify by your side. You know, every new year I try to clean things up a bit. Systems, processes, the stuff that gets messy when you're running multiple businesses and juggling a million things at once. One area that always sneaks up on me is communication. Missed calls, text going to the wrong place, customers slipping through the cracks.
And the truth is, every missed call is money walking out the door. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, the smart way to run your business communications. What I like about Quo is it just works the way modern teams actually work. One shared business number, calls and texts all in one place. Everyone on the same page. No more, who talked to this customer last?
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Chapter 3: How can a small fleet generate steady monthly income?
They've wanted to start with a couple million dollars and just buy hundreds of cars to start right off the bat. And I always like to realign expectations and tell them that's not a good idea. I want to see them scale. I want them to do well. But I always say start. with under five cars.
One to five cars really isn't that much different to manage, but don't buy a bunch of fixer-uppers and not have any of them ready and then they all sit there and not being rented. Get one car, put it on the road, learn the system, see if you like it, and then start to scale from there. That's good advice. I know it probably depends on the market. Yeah, I'm sure it does.
Don't go buy Ferraris if you're in Greenville, South Carolina. They're probably going to sit on the shelf. Greenville's up and coming, but it's not LA. I've always wondered what the sweet spot is. You want it to be practical. You want it to be affordable, but you want it to be reliable. But then those cars also only get $30 or $40 a day. How do you find these sweet spots of what cars to get?
We do a market analysis in every single area because it can change. But if we're looking at just the United States in general, what I've seen become the most profitable and how I've built my business. We're talking economy cars here that are older, higher miles, and we're trying to find them for about under $12,000 with everything said and done to have the car ready to go.
Because these $10,000 to $12,000 cars are renting for the same amount of money as a $25,000 or $30,000 car. For example, a killer car for me last year, this car brought in over $15,000 in revenue. This was a 2017 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport that I got for $8,300. Hey, double what you paid for the car. Plus the tax write-off on it too, because depreciation in this business is huge.
So a lot of this can be, don't want to say tax-free, you have to speak with your CPA on that and everybody's situation's different, but there are great deductions with depreciation. But But besides that, so my fleet's built out of 2018 to 2022 Hyundai Elantras, Mitsubishi Mirages, Kia Souls, all these cheaper economy cars. I'm hearing all the secondary cars. I'm not hearing Honda.
I'm not hearing Ford. I'm not hearing Chevy. I'm not hearing Toyota because those carry too much value. I do have two Honda Accords, but I'll only buy them if I can buy them at a deal. Usually they're 30 to 40% more than an Elantra. And the thing is they go for around the same amount of money.
And I'm all just looking at return on investment because we're not putting these on there to rent for the next 10 years. Realistically, somebody is going to total this thing in the first three years of it being on the platform. And then you're going to get your money back. And then you're going to rinse and repeat as long as you bought it right by another car and keep it cash flowing.
and sometimes profit off the difference from what you bought it and what insurance pays you. So if I was looking to say these cars are never going to get in an accident ever, sure, I might invest more into buying Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys and things like that, but the case is they're all going to be dead before the wear and tear actually matters.
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Chapter 4: What common misconceptions exist about insurance and liability in car rentals?
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All these one-offs that manage the whole thing for you and you still end up making money, might make a little less, but they manage it all. With this, I'm thinking, OK, I've got a fleet of five cars. If I make it in my primary, I probably can manage it all. But maybe I'm a lawyer, a dentist or a doctor that's listening to this and going, well, I ain't washing five cars every week.
So is this similar to the Airbnb thing? You find a manager and you still make money. Talk to me about how you keep up with all this. If you were somebody that wanted to invest in car rentals and you wanted to have nothing to do with it and you didn't want to build out all the systems and employees yourself, we actually offer a service that's called co-hosting.
What we do, we will match you with people in our car rental coach community that have built very large fleets. We have one partner we refer a lot of people to that have over 50 cars themselves and run a very, very tight ship in Tennessee. They're absolutely killing it. Some of the best numbers I've seen in the United States. people will ship their cars to them.
They'll manage the whole thing, I believe for about 25% of revenue. And then the person that invests just simply gets the check and the tax write-off for it. And they do every single thing for them. That's an option too. So just to give people listening realistic math, One of these $10,000 cars can bring in about $1,000 a month revenue. Now let's say you pay them 25%. So let's just say 250.
Insurance, that's 100. So now we're at 350, just some wear and tear. Let's talk like one or 200 extra bucks. So maybe your bill with them is around 500. You're still getting maybe 400 to $500 a month on a $10,000 investment plus the tax write-off. So it Makes a lot of sense. You'll hear a lot of these guys online. They're saying, oh, you can make $3,000 a month on an economy car. That's BS.
You can bring in about $1,000 a month revenue. There's $30 to $40 price points. That's where we get at the end of the month, which is still great, great money when you're talking about something that costs this much. Do you help coach people on how you keep your costs low, but you keep your cars reliable?
When it comes to expenses with these cars, there's two things that are going to always be expenses. That's going to be tires and oil changes. Obviously, there's mechanical things that go wrong, but those are the consistent things. We'll look at discount tires around them. We'll look at used tire shops. It makes a lot of sense to buy used tires. People don't realize that.
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