My Turo Story

From Hobby to Hustle to Main Gig to Bridge

In 2017 I made up my mind to retire in two years.

I had spent thirty years in the corporate world and was a business development executive in the media industry when I was recruited by a company and moved to Metro Detroit in June, 2017. I was offered the highest compensation I’d ever earned and my plan, from day one, was to pay off everything I owed, bank a lot of cash, start a business, and retire before I turned 51. I had no idea what business I would start.

It was Christmas of that year and I was at my mom’s house for the holidays. I wanted to buy another convertible. Earlier in life I’d owned a Mazda Miata and a Saturn Sky. Now I leased a Scion TC coupe, the lease was about to end, and I had my eye on a Fiat Spider 124. But I live in Michigan where a rear-wheel convertible will sit in the garage four months out of the year and you need a backup vehicle. I didn’t want two payments/insurance, so wasn’t sure how I would get my convertible.

And then I saw a commercial on television.

I think Mom and I were watching The Polar Express when a commercial came on television. It was for a company that helped you rent your vehicle out to strangers and make money doing it. Yep, Turo, on the television, at my mother’s house out in the country. Immediately the light went on. That’s how I would get my convertible. I’d list my Scion on the platform to make money to cover the payment and insurance, and be my backup when the roads were bad. I immediately signed up for an account, that evening, and spent the next month researching, studying, and planning.

I studied the business and Terms of Service.

I think I read every single article in the Turo Terms of Service, some of them twice. I wanted to understand exactly how this would work before I ever started doing it. I didn’t want to make any mistakes.

I studied my market.

I learned everything I didn’t already know about mobility challenges in Detroit. Who rents cars in Detroit and why? I learned it generally wasn’t tourists, it was locals. I learned about the economic realities, the insurance realities, the public transportation challenges. I discovered that there is a very large percentage of people in my metro area who don’t even own vehicles but rely solely on Uber, Lyft, and…yep…Turo for their daily transportation.

I studied the Turo landscape in Detroit.

At that time there were fewer than 400 vehicles on Turo in Detroit, a metro area of 4.3 million people. That’s one Turo vehicle for every 10,000ish people. In an area with significant economic and mobility challenges, I saw a huge opportunity to keep my Scion booked.

I looked at every host and every vehicle on the platform. I looked at their pictures, read their listings, and read their reviews. I noticed there were a lot of small players with one or two vehicles and about three big players with sizable fleets. Most of the vehicles in those fleets were older “shooters” with high mileage, kind of ugly, and a lot of negative reviews about mechanical issues. And a lot of the “positive” reviews said things like, “The car smelled bad, the check engine light was on, it pulled to the right, the heat didn’t work, but it got me from point A to point B…five stars.” I knew with the bar set that low, my pristine 2015 Scion TC would do just fine!

I built my own Excel workbook to do a market analysis to find out what vehicles did well, which didn’t, and about how much I could expect to earn. The numbers seemed to indicate I could make a lot more than I expected. I would have been happy with about $350/month to cover my expenses.

After a month of research I bought my convertible and listed my Scion.

I wasn’t sure what to expect the evening I sat at home, with my new convertible in the garage, building my Turo listing. I sure didn’t expect to get a booking within a couple of hours! But that’s exactly what happened.

The next morning I did my very first handoff. She was a very nice, professional type person who didn’t have her own vehicle but relied on Turo for her daily commute. She had been renting from one of my “shooter” competitors but had a really bad experience, saw my vehicle, and booked. Sarah picked the vehicle up from me at my office, and the handoff was perfect. And she kept the car for a month, and booked with me monthly for over a year!

Now, I would have been happy with about $350/month. My first month I made closer to $800. And that’s when I knew I had found the business I would start.

Turo went from a hobby to a hustle.

The very next month I got my second vehicle, a brand new 2018 Jeep Compass Limited. My market research had shown me that I needed to focus on economical daily commuter vehicles, newer models would generally attract better guests and higher daily rates, and SUVs would do better than cars. This vehicle booked as soon as I listed it, and then the third person to book it kept it five months! The Compass consistently brought in over $1,000/month with a $230 payment.

The very next month I got a brand new 2018 Buick Encore and named her “Ruby.” The booking pattern repeated itself with this vehicle and she became one of the favorites in the fleet.

This is where I went a little nuts, and started getting a brand new vehicle, every month, for the next several months.

And then, from hustle to main gig.

I built a fleet of 20 vehicles in 15 months. Most were leased. One was financed, a couple were cash paid, and five of them were owned by other people who sent them to me to manage for them. I co-hosted vehicles from Texas, Illinois, and Indiana. For me, co-hosting seemed like a great opportunity to add incremental revenue with no expenses and financial risk.

Although the Turo business I had built didn’t quite replace my entire high salary, it did cross the six-figure mark which was good enough for me to make that other part of my plan a reality. A few days shy of my 51st birthday I retired from the media industry, walked out of my office for the last time, crossed the street to my lot, and began prepping vehicles. Damn that felt good!

In 15 months I had built a six-figure Turo business that ended up being featured in Turo’s corporate blog, the Detroit Free Press, and Business Insider. The relationship with Turo was amazing. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience, over and over again. I dealt with a lot of crappy guests, over 90 damage claims, two totaled vehicles, and at every turn Turo took care of me. Not a single damage claim was denied, I never paid a dollar above the deductible, and my two total losses ended up with payment higher than what I owed on the vehicle and expected to be paid.

Turo became my bridge from the life I had to the life I wanted.

Now, as great as this experience was, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life managing rental vehicles, especially in Michigan winters. This is why I didn’t scale to dozens or hundreds of vehicles like some other successful hosts have. I had other things in mind. My dream scenario was to spend my remaining years traveling and helping people. And Turo gave me the flexibility, freedom, and financial backing to begin preparing to do just that. My fleet is down to nine vehicles now as I work on the rest of my dream.

Three months after I retired from the media industry I bought a travel agency that got off to an amazing start before the pandemic and is now rebounding. I joined the Tony Robbins organization and am working through the training and certification process as a Strategic Intervention Coach. Both of these moves to position me to fulfill the dream of doing “coaching at sea” and “coaching in paradise” events, taking groups of people away together to experience life and career transformation in beautiful places.

The disruption of my travel agency and the rental car shortage/Turo boom both caused by the pandemic led to the creation of the Carshare Academy which I founded in May, 2021 to help new and aspiring hosts build Turo businesses with the right vehicles, in the right markets, with the right business practices to be successful, profitable, and go the distance. Over 800 new and aspiring hosts have been helped in one way or another either through our membership plans or our market research.

And now in 2022 I’ve been able to launch a new travel company called Signature Escapes, a cooperative network of travel professionals across the country working together to rebuild their businesses, and help travelers navigate the complexity of travel in a post-Covid world.

This will be the year that my long-term goal of spending my life traveling and helping people will fully become reality. And it all began with a Turo commercial.

I’m telling you all of this to show you what is possible!

Whether your goal with Turo is to do this as a hobby to cover some expenses, a hustle to create some supplemental income, a full-time business, or a bridge to something else, it’s completely possible.

What it requires of you is to enter the game the right way by learning the business and how Turo works, understanding your market and how to succeed in your specific city, which is different from every other city, and approaching your business with an impeccable commitment to customer service and set of business ethics and practices.

You can build a successful Turo business on your own, with no help, the way I did. But If you need help getting started. I’m here for you! Join our Facebook group. Check out the membership plans at the Carshare Academy. And let’s work together to build a Turo business that will go the distance!