Girl Dad, Husband, Serial Entrepreneur, Investor. | Built a nationwide vending business while working a W-2 | Helping others do the same.
Oregon, USA
Joined May 2022
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I've been on X since 2022.
I've never properly introduced myself.
I'm Mike, 36, from Eugene, Oregon.
Here's the short version of how I got here.
2012: Strength coach for a college football program back in the Midwest.
60 hours a week, $1,200 a month.
Bought my first rental anyway with my Emergency Fund: a $70K Midwest house, $14K down, $280/month in cash flow.
2014: Took a sales role at a Bay Area health tech startup. $60K all-in salary. Living below the Palo Alto poverty line.
Three weeks a month on the road implementing tech with NFL teams, special ops units, rugby programs.
Living out of a carry-on.
2020: Wife pregnant.
11pm in Denver airport, buying a $4 bottle of water out of the vending machine
I knew the owner paid $0.25 for it.
He made the sale while sleeping at home while I was dealing with flight delays while chasing a quota.
That gap bothered me more than the price of the water.
2021: Placed my first AI-vending machine at an apartment complex that had turned away every traditional operator.
Built it on the side, kept my W-2.
2022: Left the W2 job. 18 months after starting, not before.
I also bought a used machine that died at month six and paid for it twice.
Lost money on Bitcoin Mining. Amazon FBA, Meta Drop Shipping
Tried to figure it out Vending alone for way too long before building a community of help.
Now: National AI-Vending Company with over 10,000 machines in the wild. Me personally, have over 300+ machines myself, $100K+ profit per month, run by hired operators and systems.
Built the VendHub platform to help vending operators find leads, operationalize their route, and make ad revenue off their screens.
We have an Airbnb investment close enough so we can use it when we want.
Other alternative investments we've had success with outside of real estate and vending include our Amazon eBooks and land flipping, most recent one with a 270K capital gain after 18 months.
The calendar is mostly empty these days. Only filled with things I want to do.
Dinner's at home with my family.
I'm not here to sell you on quitting your job.
My whole point is the opposite: Entrepreneurship is hard. You're not alone. Also, don't quit your job.
The W-2 funds the side project until the side project can replace it.
I was a performance coach who spent a decade training elite athletes.
Then I trained my money to work the same way, so my time could belong to me and my family.
That's what I write about now: building ownership that buys back time, not just income.
Vending is an unsexy, low-capital place to start. That's why I love it. KISS
That's exactly why it works for people with a full-time job and no extra Saturdays.
If you're a W-2 worker, especially a parent, who's starting to feel how fragile a single paycheck is, I'd like to hear where you're at.
MH
PS - Being a Girl Dad of 3 girls 5 & under is the best 😎
The Doritos sold. The Ruffles sat. They came in the same variety pack.
I was looking at the price per bag. I should have been looking at what my customers actually bought.
The slower flavors piled up, then expired. One month, spoilage cost me $280.
Before you buy another variety pack, check:
- How many of each flavor are inside?
- Can you reorder the popular ones separately?
- What are the minimum order and delivery costs?
A lower price per bag doesn’t help if you’re paying for stock you can’t sell.
Learning Vending the Hard Way · Episode 2
Monday delivery!
Everytime our @VendhubAI delivery comes I always think back to 2022 when we would block off 6 hrs on Wednesday to hit up @Costco @USFoods and others.
Wtf were we doing 😂🤷♂️
She gave Walmart 44 years. They thanked her with flowers.
I’m not here to bash Walmart. That’s just how a job works: you trade your hours, and someone else decides what they’re worth. Your raise. Your schedule. Even the perks. Walmart used to offer employees profit sharing, and ended it in 2011.
The deal can change anytime. And it’s never your call.
I don’t want that for my girls, and I don’t want it for you. If you’re going to give something decades, make sure some of it belongs to you.
100 orders through their first cooler in its opening week.
One member shared $1,003.86 in first-week sales. Those orders gave them real customer purchases to learn from.
If you’ve been wondering what it would feel like to see people using a machine you own, your first location is the milestone to work toward.
Begin by figuring out who would buy from it, what they need and how you’d keep it stocked.
We have a vendingpreneur selling his route for north of $600,000.
He started at the beginning of 2025 building his route from the ground up
Fun exit for him 👇
Hire before it feels affordable.
If you wait until hiring feels comfortable, you'll be doing every job yourself for another year. The first hire is what frees you up to grow enough to pay for them.
What's the first task you'd hand off?
About a year of follow-up for one yes.
This member stayed in touch with a 400-unit property, following up monthly before it agreed to change vendors.
If you’re still working toward your first yes, you can start with finding the decision-maker, understanding what the property needs and learning how to follow up respectfully.
Book a call with my team: vendingpreneurs.com/contact
We’ll analyze the market in your area, discuss your goals and build a plan for finding and approaching potential first locations.
I built my business around my girls, not a boss’s calendar.
For years, someone else decided when I flew, when I worked late, and which moments I missed.
So I built something different. One location at a time, beside the job. It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t easy. Building it was the work.
But every location I added had to follow one rule: it had to fit our family, not the other way around.
Now my day has two things nobody can move. My workout in the morning. And being home for dinner and bedtime at night.
A business can be built to fit your life. Most people just never build it that way on purpose.
Want to see what that could look like where you live? Book a free market analysis for your area: vendingpreneurs.com/contact
White Castle’s next expansion fits inside a vending machine.
The chain announced a rollout targeting 1,000 slider kiosks, headed to hospitals, college campuses, and workplaces.
Think about an overnight worker whose cafeteria closed hours ago. Plenty of chips nearby. Nowhere to buy dinner.
That’s a problem hot-food vending can solve.
“But isn’t vending saturated?”
Vending is evolving. The opportunity starts with noticing what’s missing.
Look at where people are stuck without a real meal:
- A nurse on a 12-hour night shift.
- A student after the dining hall closes.
- A warehouse crew on third shift.
- A family waiting in a hospital lobby at midnight.
Before counting machines, ask what people still leave the building to buy.
Photo: Restaurant Dive
My AI reads every email before I do. That’s not even the craziest part.
Here’s what my setup does for my business every week:
It reads my inbox before I do. Every morning, Claude reviews all my emails and sends me a brief with only the things that actually move the business.
It logs in for me. A Grok Bot signs into the paid tools and apps I use, reviews what happened, and briefs me. That includes our Vendingpreneurs community app, so I see which posts and questions need me.
It helps me talk to property managers. A Grok Bot engages properties that need vending, then drafts personal replies that handle their objections. I review them and send them.
It turns my dog walks into memos. I talk into my phone with Wispr Flow, and it turns my rambling into a clean brief for my team.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Most people are readers, not listeners. I’d rather talk. My team would rather read. Now we both win.
None of this does the work for me. It clears out the noise so my hours go to the stuff only I can do.
The best tool I ever bought wasn’t software. It was my time back.
Your boss gets your best years. Your kids get what’s left.
Nobody tells you that between 30 and 45, your kids and your career peak at the same time.
These are the years your job asks the most of you. More travel. More late calls. More “just get through this quarter.”
They’re also the years your kids want the most of you. And they won’t ask forever.
Here’s the part nobody says out loud: someone else decides what those years are worth. Your raise, your schedule, your days off. All set by people who will never sit at your kitchen table.
I lived that. I spent years in airports for a job that paid well and cost me time at home. When my wife Chelsea and I found out our first daughter was on the way, my question changed. I stopped asking “how do I earn more?” and started asking “what do I own?”
So I built something one location at a time. Beside the job. Boring on purpose.
It wasn’t fast. Building it was the work. But now I decide what my years are worth.
You only get them once. Go hug your kids.
I write about this every week: what it really takes to build something you own beside a job and a family. Subscribe free: vendingpreneurs.com/newslett…
