You can’t have a wedding or event without having enough bathrooms for the guests. But no one wants to have porta-potties in sight, no less to use. David Sauers realized this when he was at a concert in a park with his two young daughters, and like any good entrepreneur, he went about solving the problem. Royal Restrooms has luxury mobile bathrooms that are a great option for any event where there aren’t enough facilities. They now have locations across the country and are growing.
Listen to this new episode to hear more about David’s growth story from idea to empire! Maybe you’ll be inspired to bring your next idea to life!
About David Sauers:
David is the co-founder of Royal Restrooms Nationwide and Director of Nationwide Franchise Sales. Royal Restrooms has 50 franchised offices, making the company able to service the entire US. He also founded Airy Transit, a specialty trailer design company, with his wife. The two also operate Savannah Bar Carts.
David is a Board Member of Southeastern Festivals and Events Association, a Brand Ambassador for Airskirts and recently participated in the Go Global Georgia and Export Georgia trade certification programs.
For more information about Royal Restrooms: www.royalrestrooms.com
- David Sauers: Social Media Links
- Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsauers/
- Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/LuxuryPortableRestrooms/
- Instagram – https: https://www.instagram.com/royal_restrooms/?hl=en
If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com
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– How about a niche that nobody really wants to talk about? Listen to this episode. See where we’re going. Hey, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions Podcast. I have a guest on that I met recently at an event in Savannah, and he has a niche that people don’t want to talk about, but we need to talk about. So, David, Royal Restrooms, David, welcome.
– Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.
– Well, thank you for coming on, and thank you to Jamie for introducing us at the Savannah Wedding Vendors event because you have a unique niche called Royal Restrooms. Tell me what is Royal Restrooms?
– Royal Restrooms was founded in 2004, and what we provide is upscale luxury restroom facilities for events, festivals, grand openings, any type of outside activity.
– So you said luxury outdoor restrooms. So when people think of going to an event and they think of an outdoor restroom, we know what we all think about this plastic box that nobody wants to go into. So this is not that at all but was probably the spark for this, right, is the fact that nobody wants to use those. So what is a luxury outdoor restroom?
– Absolutely. So luxury is kind of how we had to brand it 20 years ago. Nobody understood when you said portable bathroom, we didn’t know how to phrase it. We didn’t know how to introduce it. We didn’t, you know, so the only thing that we come up with was luxury, and luxury, really, we just put a fully functioning restroom that we’re used to on a trailer. We came up with private individual stalls that made it so that people could go to the bathroom the way they’re used to. So when we say luxury, it’s the same bathroom that you’re used to. It’s just a huge upgrade over the traditional portalets.
– All right. So where did this idea come from, and how did you get started with this?
– Back in 2003, I was at a Shakespeare in the Park festival in Forsyth Park here in Savannah. And I took both my little girls to the Porta John, and one of them was potty training, the other one was on my hip, and it was a disastrous experience. I had to hand one of them out to another patron out there. And I’ve got my foot propping up the door, and I’ve got the other one looking in the hole and like, what is this? You know, why are we going in a bucket? There’s no lights on. And as I’m watching one child out the door to make sure somebody doesn’t run off with Cici, the other one as I’m holding up literally pees on my leg. And at that point, I went home, drew it up on a legal pad, a little bathroom to put on a trailer. I measured my half bath in my house and literally the confined space and just put it on a trailer. And that’s where we went. My partner Robert, I talked to him about the idea and we kicked it around and next thing you know, we have created Royal Restrooms. And it was a struggle to explain to people what we were doing. People didn’t understand it. It was bucking the industry norms. And, you know, here we are 20 years later, got 50 offices nationwide, still going strong. And we’re kind of changing the industry again.
– Okay. So we we’re going to get to the whole 50 offices nationwide thing, but what were you doing at the time? What was your work, your business, whatever, at the time where you had that incident? And by the way, Forsyth Park is beautiful. I was just over there, got some great pictures, but what were you doing that you said, you know, my partner Robert, we did this. What what was your business?
– I was a commercial lender. I was vice president of the local bank here in Savannah. And Robert and I were fraternity brothers. He was an environmental engineer, so his company did a lot of my Phase 1’s on my commercial real estate. And so he was just a really good friend, you know, business associate that I trusted, I like working with, I like doing things with, and that we just kind of put this all together.
– Okay. Right. So you were not in the porta potty business and said let’s make this better. You just saw a need, which is one of the best things, you know, people, you see a need, but you also had to kind of create the industry. Was anybody else doing this at the time?
– So, not on the scale that we were doing it. Typically these, what what we put on a trailer was reserved for very large events. You know, very large golf courses. They were massive trailers, you know, 50 foot trailers that were traditionally piped like a home. In other words, you know, it wasn’t low flushing toilets. They didn’t have waste tanks. Kohler was doing some stuff, I believe. But one of the first companies was American and then Black Tie, but they were not building small trailers. They were building large event-style trailers. And so the concept that we came up with was small, you know, private parties, small function, didn’t have an enormous price tag. Anybody could afford this. And it was much more of a platform that kind of revolutionized all the different events, you know?
– Yeah. I remember my son’s girlfriend, her parents have like 13, 14 acres at their house. And one of her cousins was thinking about getting married there. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. Now, you know, you want to get married at, you know, your aunt’s house because you have these childhood memories or whatever, that’s one thing. But they have an old farmhouse that has one bathroom and you’re going to invite a hundred people, 150 people, 200 people. Forget about the fact that you don’t have tables, chairs, tents, parking, or any of that other stuff. You don’t have these facilities. And I think it’s something that I kind of teased in the opening. It’s something nobody wants to talk about, but you have to talk about because you have to accommodate that for health reasons. You have to have these available. So you say these are smaller, and I’m picturing the big ones you’re talking about. I’ve seen those massive 50 foot trailers. How big is yours? How many stalls are on yours?
– Well, the stalls range. We start out with a single stall that is just one private stall. But our most common ones are two stalls, which is one men, one female, or a three stall. And then we go to a four stall. And the bigger ones.
– And what is the recommendation for people listening in here? So if you’re having a wedding ’cause a lot of people listening are doing weddings. They’re doing events and things like that. So let’s say you’re having a wedding and you’re having a five hour event. How many stalls per person per hour or whatever, how do you figure that out?
– Well, there’s a couple different ways. Typically rule of thumb is one stall for every a hundred people. That typically been the rule of thumb. However, when you look at weddings and stuff like that, it takes an average person three to five minutes to go to the bathroom. So if you’re assuming that a 200 person wedding, you need at least three stalls. You know, anything under a hundred, I would go with two. But for a 200, 250 person wedding, I’m going to tell you, you know, if you want it to be really comfortable, you need four stalls, at a minimum four stalls. ’cause you don’t want people waiting.
– Right, yeah. A couple of places you don’t want people waiting, the buffet, the bar, and the bathroom, right?
– That’s right. Exactly.
– All right. So you can use that now. That’s your three Bs. There you go. The buffet, the bar and the bathroom. You don’t want people waiting over there. Okay. So you started doing this 20 years ago, but now you have you’re a franchisor and you have these franchises in 50 locations around the country. You have, I think you said about 28 or so people that own these 50 something franchises. When did you get to the point, because you cross into two of the groups of people I generally have on as guests which is nicheing and scaling. Tell me about the growth, right, so you started this, you and Robert started this probably with one trailer, right?
– Yes, we built we built two trailers to begin with actually ’cause we didn’t know what we were really looking for and how it was going to be accepted into the market. But we grew fairly rapidly at the very beginning. It was new. So a lot of my, I would say, over half of my offices had been with me for at least 15 years, 15, 16 years.
– Wow. Okay. So when did the franchising start ’cause obviously you grew locally first, and then did somebody come to you and say, Hey, I want to do this elsewhere, or did you go looking for franchisees?
– No, I did not look for anybody. They came to me and they wanted to basically mimic the the idea, and so we basically formed a franchise company in 2008. The first couple offices that we sold, we sold under license so that they could use the name and so forth. But we franchised it in 2008. And we really did not focus on expansion. Expansion has really never been a huge motivator for us because we are such a niche business. We tend to focus more on the events industries, more on long term, more I guess to the clientele rather than expansion. It’s really been in the last year that we really ramped up expansion. And it’s not because anything that we did. It’s just because I think people are looking for new businesses and new opportunities, and they’re wanting to get out of the corporate world and work for themselves, and, you know, we offer a great solution.
– So other than the product itself, right, the trailer itself, because I’ve had other people on that have done franchising and licensing and stuff like that. So the franchise, and I’ve owned two franchises in the past so I understand, franchise is about the system, right? It’s not just about the product, it’s about the system. So what is the Royal Restrooms system besides the product itself?
– Well, one, we were fortunate kind of first to market, first, okay, so have our name branded in. It’s really nice to see when you get government works or our proposals and the way that they list a portable restroom is you need a Royal Restroom. So it’s almost like the toothpick, you know, or the Q-tip. A lot of people associate the portable restrooms or the restroom trailers as a Royal Restroom. But one of the things that we did is we incorporated a lot from a corporate side on exposing or offering solutions to construction companies for business remodels staying handicapped compliant as well to to be within OSHA standards. But the other thing that makes us different is we’re able to go to the hurricane conference, we’re able to go to the fire conference, we’re able to go do the wedding NBA show out in Las Vegas, which typically in our business it’s very small. There’s not a lot of corporate run companies. It’s a lot of family owned. And so we’re able to pool our resources and really hit a much larger target market. But the other thing is, you know, with our system you’re not going through the headaches of learning. I can tell you that owning a restroom company there are lots of hiccups and mistakes that you do not want to make. The cost of trailers are expensive and they can be messy and catastrophic. So it’s that learning curve that we offer. We offer the support, but we have the ability to mass maneuver different offices together to pool our resources at a much lesser cost. So somebody doing something in Birmingham, Alabama, I can pull from Mobile, I can pull from Atlanta, I can pull from Columbus, Georgia, I can pull from Nashville, and we can make all that happen. Whereas maybe a smaller event company in Birmingham, they don’t have those resources to bid on that big of a job. They can’t pool it all together. And so that’s a unique opportunity for us to do.
– Right. So again, it’s the scale, it’s the system, and what you said, again having owned franchises, your learning curve, you get there a lot quicker than if you’re trying to figure this out yourself. You’ve made the mistakes clearly early on. You made those mistakes. It’s the mistakes not to make, you teach people stuff like that. So you’re at a point now you have 50 different locations, 27, 28 different owners there. Are you looking to expand or people just keep coming to you?
– We are looking to expand. I mean we’re rolling into our 20th year, and you know, we do want to expand, and we’re exploring new opportunities within our rental fleet, not just restrooms. We’ve always had showers, but now we’re offering some sink trailers. We’re looking at some beverage trailers, what we call bar bar carts. We’re also looking at some LED screen TVs, which are all event organized and event focused. So no longer we just, you know, restrooms. We offer multiple things that enhance your event. And it really doesn’t affect our business model because it’s not changing the equipment. We have the same trucks, we have the same people, and we’re already going to the events. So it just gives us another opportunity.
– You know, I saw the other day I’ve seen a few of these, the the gaming trailers. Have you seen those?
– I have seen them.
– Yeah, I saw this one going by with all the graphics on the outside, about all the gaming there, and they pull those up and the kids go in and do their stuff there. So, all right. So what would you say is most misunderstood about what you do?
– I think that the, you know, it kind of goes back to what you said about the whole sheesh, you know, people have this theory that bathrooms are dirty. They need to be put out of the way, they need to be hidden. They, you know, it’s something that I think that the, you know, sometimes, and I hate to say it, but the event organizer places that in the mindset and they kind of plan for the restrooms to be out of sight when the the restrooms really, you know, they affect the whole flow of your event. And I’m not saying a restroom needs to be front and center, but, you know, that’s a huge thing. Everybody goes to the bathroom.
– Well, again, but you’re talking about an outdoor event and if people are dressed up for this outdoor event, which means, you know, potentially a lot of people in heels and things, how far do you want to walk to go to the bathroom? You don’t want to walk far, right?
– Exactly. And what, I mean, how many times does your wife, the first thing she’s at, where do you think the bathroom is? Where’s the bathroom? People, you know, you’ve got the terrain, you’ve got lighting, you’ve got grandma with the cane. You know, you want these things close. And that’s one of the things that I believe that most people have put our restrooms or restroom trailers out is because it’s a big white box, you know, it is a little bit of, you know, it looks like a cargo trailer in this beautiful setting that you’ve created, which goes back to what we’re rolling out with our vintage restroom trailers. It is a slick, you know, mirrored stainless steel exterior that truly blends into the background. You don’t even necessarily know that the restroom is there now. So it’s not just pretty and nice and comfortable on the inside, but the exterior almost mirrors the surrounding. So it can almost be a focal point because it’s a gathering spot just like your buffet and your bar.
– Right, so these are fully self-contained. I guess they’re own power sources and everything, right? You can just drop these anywhere.
– They do not have their own power source. We can provide a generator, but typically because they’re climate controlled, they have air condition or heat or something like that, it generates a little more power than what solar can provide. Although we are experimenting with battery generators as well for like when we’re using the movie industry. And so that’s becoming more and more popular.
– Nice, nice. So who is typically hiring you? Is it the client, is it the event planner, who’s hiring you?
– You know, it depends upon which industry you’re talking about. If it’s from a corporate standpoint, 9 times out of 10 it’s from some type of construction management company. But for weddings and stuff, I would probably say it’s about 60% the event coordinator and 40% is usually the bride or the groom, you know, where they’re planning their own. But most of the event planners are the ones that really put everything together. And from a festival standpoint to any other type of a, you know, major event or organization that’s going along.
– So what’s the difference between the event planners that get it and the event planners that don’t get it, that if they’re listening you’d like them to understand?
– One, that we don’t necessarily have to be hidden. You know, a lot of event planners, they want to push us way off to the corner. And it goes back to they have this image that a bathroom is dirty. Well, if you’ve rented restrooms and they smell, then that company is doing something wrong. These should not, you know, these should not be, I guess, unpleasant.
– Right. Well, you said it, you modeled it after a bathroom. So if I was to go into stall at a Royal Restroom, is it just like a white box in there or is there any decor?
– Yeah, so there’s decor. Different models have different things. A lot of our trailers have white interior, but we have pictures on the wall. We actually have our butter mints on the countertop. We have some flowers as well, but it’s solid surface countertops, you know, raised sink bowls, you know, but some of our trailers are all decked out. I mean, you know, we have some of them have golden interior. Some of them, even a few of our trailers have little fireplaces in them. So you can scale it out as high tech as you want, but the bulk of people, they just want something comfortable. They want to be comfortable, they want to be able to move in it, you know, they want to be able to see themself in the mirror and go to the bathroom in kind of comfort.
– Right. And then you can just leave and all of that goes with it. And like I said, there there you go. So we’re going to put this into the show notes. If somebody wanted to get a hold of you, somebody’s listening and going, Ooh, there’s a business idea for me. Or if there are a planner or somebody and thinking, Hey, wait a minute, I need this for an event that’s coming up. So I’m going to put it into the show notes, but what would be a way for people to find out more? Is there a website?
– Sure. You can go to royalrestrooms.com or you can email us at [email protected]. But our websites have all of our office locations with direct email links and phone numbers to each office in each area. From a franchise standpoint, you know, you can get the information right there as well on royalrestrooms.com or you can email at [email protected].
– There we go. And we’ll put all that into the show notes as well. If anybody didn’t write that down, you’ll be able to go and click right on the link over there. So if somebody’s looking for a business idea or somebody needs this for an event coming up, those are the two ways to do that. But I love stories like this where you saw the need. I’m sorry it had to be your daughter peeing on your leg, but you saw the need and there was the impetus for this and then you just ran with it. And I’ve always said the people that succeed are not the people with ideas. It’s the people that take action on those ideas. So David, thank you so much for joining me on this. I really appreciate it. I hope people got some ideas here for either their own business or for maybe picking up one of these, so.
– Absolutely. Happy to help, and I appreciate everything and you having me on Alan.
– Terrific. Thanks.
– Okay.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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