How Austin Rent Fence Hit $3M and Took an $800K Loan With a $6M Buyout Option

Austin Rent Fence and portable restrooms do exactly what you think they do. If you need a bathroom or a fence, they'll rent it to you. So how many of these do you have out in the wild today?

We have over a thousand of these out in the wild.

Wow, okay.

In 2025, 90% of the revenue was fencing based, 10% was portable restrooms. In 2026, it's running even pretty close on each division.

Holy mackerel, so that's a massive growth rate.

Massive.

And how much do you think you'll do in 2026?

We should hit 5,000,000 in revenue.

So now I need to listen very carefully and see if there's a way I can get involved in the business. If I see an opening, I'll offer to invest immediately. I'll edit my offer. You gotta give me the right to buy the whole company for 6,000,000 all cash upfront anytime in the next twelve months.

Wow. We might be getting somewhere.

I'm Nathan. Nathan, James Gill.

James, really good to meet you man.

Nice to meet you too.

We, I heard about the business because we're part of a same community downtown, the Red Fridge Society. Yes. I don't know if you remember, we sat down, I reached out to my production. I said, gotta get this guy. It's a cool business. Tell us where we're standing today. What is this business?

So this is Austin Rent Fence, our home base. So we provide construction site services. We run temporary fencing. We do posting ground fencing. We do dumpsters. We do portable restrooms. We also do luxury restrooms. We do silt, erosion control. Anything that goes with the job site, commercial, residential, or a special event, music festivals, we do it all.

Interesting. What year did you launch the business?

So the idea came in 2007, but I did not officially start the company until 04/02/2008. The reason I remember that is the anniversary of my grandfather's birthday. This was a side project for me originally. I also run and operate a large, law practice here in town, and this was for something for fun to do. Over the years, it's turned into more of a main thing than a side project.

That's interesting. Most lawyers watching, they're going, man, I charge $5,600 an hour. You couldn't pay me to go install fences and porta johns. How do these two things connect?

I was raised to work hard. I don't sit around much and I do enjoy being a lawyer, but there's only so much in a day that I can deal with people in suits, and I like to deal with some other people too.

That's fair enough. Yeah. Alright. So what... 2008 was your first year in business. Did you have all products available on day one, did you launch with one product?

We launched with one product, actually one container, which is basically a shipping container full of fence that I had shipped all the way from China to California, railed to Texas, and then after my law practice at night, I would go set up fencing.

Interesting. Okay. So what are like all in costs to launch a business like this?

Within the first thirty days, we were in just under $100,000 on the project.

And break that down for me. How much was the stuff from China versus other costs?

So a container at that time ran around 25,000, a few less. So we had one container ordered in the first month. Within thirty days of that first order, we put in three additional orders. And then with trailers and websites, we were in about $100,000 at the time.

Take me in that first year of full sales, which I think would have been 2009. Do you remember what all in revenue was that year?

Yes. It was not impressive. But remember, this was a side project back in 2009. I believe we were somewhere in the neighborhood of 88 to 110,000.

I don't know, guys on YouTube, tell me first year in business, $88,000 is a side project feels pretty good to me. What was your time allocation between lawyer and installing fences?

So for the first eight years of the fencing company, so around two thousand and eight ish to twenty sixteen ish, it was pretty much an entirely side project. So I'm in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen hours a week, forty plus hours of wall practice week during that time. Around 2016, it changed to over a forty hour week for the fencing with all the help and people that I brought in.

Are you full time now today?

Yes, I now work full time in this business.

You can make more money installing porta johns and fences than being a lawyer today?

I didn't say I can make more money.

You just enjoy this more.

There's certainly no question I make more hourly being a lawyer. The problem with being a lawyer, I shouldn't say a problem, lawyers have caps. You're selling time, you're selling whatever, but there's only so much you can work. When you're building a business, there is no limit to what's possible. So for example, there's three or four people that work for the law firm at this point, and there's about 40 people that work for the fence company.

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We have an office staff or what we call our executive team of about eight people. There's a couple people that we use as liaisons for either finances or marketing that are in there as well. And then the labor staff is somewhere in the high twenties.

When it was still a side project? Yes. What was your best year all in of sales? 250,000. 250,000?

I realized that we were nowhere near scratching the surface of what this company could become. Right after 2008, Austin went through a very big boom on the high end home building cycle. A lot of money came into Austin. There's a lot of tech money. Most of the original volume of work we did was on high end residential work here in the Austin, Texas area. So what did an average job look like? Not that large in terms

of dollar amounts. You're talking maybe 1,000 to $3,000 per job. Okay. But we were setting up somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 of these a week.

Wow. When you price a job site, do you give the customer a breakdown price per panel?

We have a $500 minimum fee to even mess with anything. But other than that, it's priced per foot and then it's priced for the length of time that you'd like it.

Okay, so what is that pricing today?

Simplest answer is you're running somewhere between $3 and $4 a foot. We'll sell you the privacy screen on top of it for an additional $3 a foot. We can also have whatever you want put on there in monogram. Again, that's customized. So depending on the colors and all that, it's going to cost you a little extra.

But if I go for all the upgrades, what's the most expensive per foot?

You could probably get up to about $8 a foot.

This looks like the scrap pile. Some vandal breaks them and you have some turnover on your fences,

So this was one of the most complicated parts of the business to figure out in the beginning because on construction sites, people damage our equipment. As you can see, we don't bill for any damages on any job sites. We give you the option upfront to either self insure your product or we will insure your product for a price based on the number of linear feet you do rent.

So how do you not lose money on that? I don't understand. You have an insurer that reimburses you.

We are the insurance. Okay. We will sell you insurance on your job site for our materials that go out there.

Oh, interesting. Yes. So last year in 2025, what was the total revenue on your insurance product?

It was in the hundreds of thousands.

That's a pretty big deal. Yes. That's a high, high margin product.

Well, until you look at the back end, yes.

Yeah. But do you have some sophisticated PhD in the background doing sort of the insurance, you know, the payouts versus the quotes and will it be covered or not? You're looking at him. You're doing it all.

You're looking at him.

Lawyer, PhD, fence installer, what else do you do?

My main role here at the company is the vision and making sure the money's correct.

If you look at your total revenue last year on a percent basis, how much is what we just described, the fence product?

In 2025, 90% of the revenue was fencing based, 10% was portable restrooms.

That's surprising to me. There's so many concert venues constructions that I imagine that the toilets would be a bigger part of the business.

In 2026, it's running even pretty close on each division.

Holy mackerel. So that's a massive growth rate.

Massive. You can see over here, these are our luxury units. These are the ones that are air conditioned, have sink stalls, etcetera. These go out to movie sets. These go out to VIP rooms. These go out to the high end concert stuff. Okay. The larger ones over here, these are our disability units, also mostly for special events, festivals, etcetera. These are standard units that go out to construction sites, residential home building sites, etc.

Help me understand the growth because you said last year this business was only 10% and now it's growing fast. Why?

So the fencing business at the end of twenty twenty five did just over 3,000,000 in revenue last year.

Wow.

Included in that was the portable restroom number of 10%. At the end of twenty twenty five, I acquired one of our competitors who was a restroom company, which was a 7 figure business. So that's how our restroom division caught up.

And it's split fifty fifty.

At this rate, I'm really surprised at the growth of the restrooms. We may end up sixty forty by the end of this year on the restrooms. Wow. Austin has all kinds of events from your marathons to your South by Southwest to your ACL. So these things go out consistently.

Tell me this product. What does this cost? Just this one unit.

You're looking at around 2,000 for this unit plus the cost of our stickers.

Okay, and non handicapped version, how much?

600 to 700.

How many of these do you own?

We're close to 2,000 units.

What do you rent it for?

So if we're talking like a special event, you're looking at around $100 a day. The commercial side restrooms run on four week cycles. So that means we clean them weekly at a minimum. Some people want twice a week service, some people want three times a week service. Simple math, if you want it cleaned once a week on a four week cycle, you're looking at around $130 per unit for that service.

Per week? Per month. So how many of these do you have out in the wild today?

We have over a thousand of these out in the wild.

Wow, okay. This is the only inventory that's not being used?

In this yard, we have a separate yard about 45 miles from here, which has a whole another section of all these restrooms that services the Hill Country area. As far as utilization capacity, both divisions, the fencing and the restrooms are somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 80% currently utilized. 90 plus percent is the goal. Yeah. So we're not at full utilization, but we're nowhere near anywhere that I find concerning.

Do you have any other investors on the cap table today? No. You're 100%. You and the team are 100%.

That is correct.

Is there any debt on the balance sheet?

There is some debt. I mean, own quite a few vehicles. I think we have 25 in our inventory. So there's obviously some debt on some of the vehicles. We funded a lot of the growth in the expansion with the government money from COVID.

Yep. Yeah. There's a lot of folks obviously that took advantage of that. So that's that's a great program that why not? Right? Everyone's taking advantage of that. 23 trucks and 40 employees is a lot of coordination. Walk us through the software.

What you're looking at is our routes for the portable restrooms and the drivers that are assigned to this. They're color coded by my request to make this thing simpler. So I know who's doing what on what day. What you'll also notice is that they're grouped in an area.

That's one driver, one service truck, one human being servicing all the purple dots or all the orange dots. That's exactly right.

We have about a 100 mile radius we'll service them. We turn work away all over the place if they want one or two units somewhere outside of our main area. It has to work into the math for the optimization. What you're looking at is around 1,200 services. That means units or pieces of plastic that are touched, cleaned, refilled a week. The fencing routing is much simpler because you're talking about a job to three getting set up

or picked up a day as opposed to 1,200 things a day.

You mentioned you have 2,000 portable restrooms on your balance sheet today at about 80% to 85% utilization. Same question on the fence side of the business. You mentioned 500,000, it sounds like installed that you're servicing. What's the total inventory?

It's around half a million feet. Okay. So as far as mileage, you could start the temporary fencing here in Austin and run it past San Antonio halfway down to Corpus Christi with how much fencing we have. Sales come in all the time and we have outbound sales. So when we look at new markets or what we want to call a new route, what we're trying to do is figure out where's the next area of Central Texas

that we can get enough routes in to build an entire separate route with a new driver that adds onto this map. Route density is the key and you just...

And James, just so you know that this voice of God coming into this idea, why don't you just introduce him? We'll keep him off camera, but who is this? So this is Eric Giffin.

He is my director operations for the Portable Sanitation Division and a wealth of knowledge. Just over thirty years of experience in the industry. We don't want our driver pulling windshield time.

What is that?

Just driving along

without If the

he's going to Killeen, you know, we better make it worth it. Until the route gets a certain density, it's just not profitable. But it took all of last year to even get it profitable.

Yeah, okay, so that's one of reasons you were able to buy it from the other owner is it was losing money.

This one went for a couple strategic reasons. One, their service area overlapped with ours, but in a small way. So we added an entire new geographical market with ours that allowed density to be added to our market while keeping theirs.

What do you hope 2027 looks like? How do you double this business to 10,000,000 of revenue?

With the utilization getting to over 90%, which would be our goal by the end of this, that should put us on a run rate of 7,000,000 for next year. Okay. To get to 10,000,000, we're gonna have to have additional inventory or another large CapEx purchase.

Are there other companies you can buy in Austin?

Well, of course there are. I will say there are several people that we are speaking with.

What is the total market? How many portable restrooms do you believe are installed right now in Austin, Texas?

If you want to know what percentage we have, I'd put it at 5% of the work.

So small?

Small. I mean, 10 at this point we've grown, but we're nowhere near one of the bigger players on the portable restroom side.

Just the portable restroom business is 2,500,000 business this year? That's correct.

Yes. It's on a 2,500,000 run rate this year.

And so if that represents 5% of your estimation of the total market, we can multiply by 20. Yes. So you think it's a... You think the whole portable restroom business in Austin, Texas within a 100 miles is a $40,000,000 per year business?

That might be low. Okay.

So how do we go build a $50,000,000 per year portable restroom business? Can you throw money at this problem or no?

You can throw money at this problem and it would help. We don't have private equity resources. This is a company funded and bootstrapped by me entirely. So we have to work smarter to keep up. We're now competing against much larger companies with much deeper pockets, although we do now offer all the same services.

Have any of them offered to acquire you?

Two national companies and I'm not trying to boast on anything, but more private equity groups than I can count.

What's the largest offer you've turned down and why?

I've turned down an offer of 5X with 90% of the money upfront in thirty days. The other 10% paid at six months once everything was turned over incorrectly. And I said, well, how long do I have to work here? And they're like, you're fired day one. And I was like, that's the offer I'm looking for.

So why did you take the deal that you liked?

Really liked the guy. Younger than me. Sharp guy.

Yeah.

I'm not that old, but he was younger than me. But anyway, at the very end of it, was like, Hey, no pressure. What do you think? And I said, You know, I'm just not ready at this time. And he said, No problem. This is the best offer you're ever going to get. And I kind of laughed. Was like, You don't understand how many people are calling me. It's still the best offer I've ever gotten. 5x EBITDA. With 90% upfront.

Yeah. What is EBITDA today? Do you have any or are you reinvesting everything?

No, the EBITDA is still very strong. This year it should be in the low 7 figures.

If someone comes and offers you today that same exact deal, five x, so $5,000,000, 90% cash upfront, you're fired day one, 10% in escrow, so the other $500,000 coming in in thirty to sixty days, you would take that deal?

Not at the size of the company is currently. No, you need to be closer to six x. I would toy with numbers around six x.

But is there anything else, right? I mean, I do this show again to make deals like on the spot I can. Yeah. Is there some capital request that you have or ask for me that's sort of really clear and for a specific use case?

If trucks we've borrowed money on, we've got potentially a credit line here and there is, for lack of a better term, just too many people with their hand in the pie. If there was a debt consolidation at a favorable rate and you wanted to take on all of that, I might be interested in something like that.

If you're going to put all the debt in one bucket today, what's the total dollar value?

Probably in the high 6 figure numbers with the vehicles and all the other CapEx stuff?

800,000?

Something like that. Some things may be at 7.8%, and some things may be at 7%, and some things may be at 8.3% interest. Like if there was just one simple number, I think that would make things easier for me to forecast.

What would that be?

Well, it have to be better than our current credit line number because otherwise I just use that for all of it. What is that? I think we pay 6.25 on that or maybe it's 6.5 because it's floating.

That's just so cheap. I wouldn't be able to do that deal because I can get a better return on my money elsewhere. So I'm trying to think if there's any other juice I can add to deal that that would enable me to give you a cheap rate like that. If I did an $800,000 deal, how quick could you pay it back? Three to five? Three to five years at something like six to 7% interest Something

like that. Okay. I understand it's probably pretty skinny for you guys.

Super skinny. I mean, I can put my money. I can make more than that in a lot of places, but I'm trying to think I'm going to make you an offer. Oh, I'll make an offer. This is going to be a YouTube. This is be a tough one. I've never negotiated directly with a lawyer before, but we'll see where this goes. Okay? It'll be for $800,000 at a 7% interest rate. Paid back over four years.

Okay.

But I want the option to buy the whole company for $6,000,000 all cash upfront anytime during that maturity before the maturity.

I like your carrot. The big kicker is you want an exclusive option during that period.

We call it a roofer, right of first refusal, however you want to structure it.

Okay.

But if I decide I want to buy the whole thing for 6,000,000 all cash up front, I want to be able to pull that trigger anytime over however long we have the debt outstanding.

What if I get a higher offer during that period of time? You want first right to match?

I would do first right to match or we could set a cap on my return and say you could buy out my ROFR, but the buyer or whoever's taking it would have to pay me an effective rate of something much higher.

The way I would look at it is if we can agree on a multiple of what the EBIT it is, that that is the running number for this period of time.

Yeah. So it's going to go up in three years. That's why I put the cap of 6,000,000 specifically. Oh, there's a cap on 6? Yeah. It's 6... I want the ability to buy it for 6,000,000 all cash. Oh. Yeah. So if you double the business in twelve months and now your EBITDA is 2,000,000. Ah. I still have the right to buy it for 6. That's where my unlock happens.

I knew you're a sharp guy.

Yeah. Yeah. That's where my Okay.

Okay. No, I'm not going to do that. I would consider as long as you'd be willing to match whatever the other offer that is that came through.

I want to match the term of that the debt is out standing with the term of my option to purchase. So if you want to pay back all the interest over two years I want to... Exactly. If you want a longer payback, then you got to give me a longer time to pay the $6

The only thing that I certainly don't want to do is get boxed in on limiting the upside on this because that's the whole point on this is I'm trying to get as big as it can. There just can't be an exclusive that you can have it at the $6,000,000 for the full five five years.

Because you're worried about someone else bidding 10,000,000 and you can't sell to them because I've got a blocker.

Well, I'm betting on myself that when we have this conversation in 2027, the EBITDA is closer to 1,600,000 and then we're closer to a 7 to 8,000,000 valuation.

I'll edit my offer. I'll offer you $800,000 at a higher interest rate. 8% interest rate. It's a 2.52 points higher. $800,000 at 8% interest rate paid back over three years. Tighter payback period. But I'll loosen up my row for a little bit. You got to give me the right to buy the whole company for 6,000,000 all cash upfront anytime in the next twelve months.

And then? Do whatever you want. So we're only talking a one year lock in then? Correct. And I'm assuming you want me to answer, don't you? Of course.

And this is also with the understanding that you're going to loan me the full 800 upfront? Correct. And I'm going to pay you 8% and pay all that back in three years.

Exactly. My collateral will be all of your fencing and all of your toilets. So I have plenty of collateral coverage.

That is a damn good collateral Yeah.

Have plenty of coverage. Okay. That's what enables me to give you a low rate.

Okay. We're talking 6,000,000 and I get 90% upfront?

Yeah. I'll do a 100. Yes. 590%. You're now you're negotiating against yourself.

Sorry. I don't...

We'll do 90% upfronts. Great.

I heard a 100. Fantastic. 100% upfront. And how long would you want me to stick around?

What would you be willing to stick around for considering all the other terms?

Am I paid?

What would you want to be paid?

I think a standard consulting fee to hang around wouldn't be that inappropriate. Somewhere if you want me to hang around for a year in the neighborhood of 10,000 a month.

I think that's fine. Okay.

I'd like to know what happens to the force of God.

Eric wants in on the action.

I'm certainly interested in that. That's actually something that I could probably potentially say yes to.

What's still going through your head?

What about my people?

Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't. That's why I want the rope. That's why I want twelve months is after we're done filming. What I would do is spend more time understanding who is the up and coming star that will run this business. I wouldn't let anybody go. I'd let I want to keep running basically exactly as is. My concern and the reason I wouldn't exercise the 6,000,000 is if I thought the business would fall apart if you weren't here. Fair enough. Then I wouldn't exercise. Totally agree. And you just pay me back my money, the 800 ks.

But I would certainly like to negotiate two year employment contracts for my top people.

I think that's fine. There we go, voice of... Do we have a deal?

I think we have a preliminary deal.

We got a deal?

I think we have a deal.

Alright. Let's get to work, man. I'm excited. It's

it's a great business.

Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Eric, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You bet. You bet. If you guys like that deal, remember, new episodes drop every Wednesday. Click here to subscribe so you don't miss out. Also, wanna see more deals like this one? Click here to see the next deal immediately.