From Zero to $18,000/Month at One Hotel Location (Here's Exactly How He Did It)
Tom Canterino ran a digital marketing agency and worried AI would erode his income. He joined Vendingpreneurs and built a hotel location worth $18,000 a month.
$18K/mo
Best Location
$15-25K
Portfolio Monthly Revenue
17
Machines
60 days
Time to First Locations
If I didn't have vending right now, I would have lost a pretty substantial portion of my regular ordinary income from my agency... I could have really just lost everything, and instead it's kept me completely status quo.
Background
Tom Canterino had run a digital marketing agency for five to seven years and was already active in wealth-building mastermind groups, diversifying into passive income where he could. Watching AI reshape his industry, he wanted a recession-resistant, tangible source of income as a backup — something that also offered tax benefits and could be moved if a location didn't work out. He found Mike Hoffman through a Wealth Without Wall Street podcast and joined Vendingpreneurs in January 2025.
"Just because of AI and what's been happening in the past few years, I wanted to make sure that I had something that could potentially supplement that income... I was just reading the tea leaves."
The Challenge
He spent months watching Mike's content before he committed, looking for something with a low barrier to entry that could scale at his own pace. As he puts it, the vending industry "is not sexy, but it gets the job done."
"I really wanted something that was lower barrier to entry... also something that was, what I like to call, recession resistance — everyone's always going to need to put something in their mouth."
The Turning Point
Coaching and community were the deciding factor over trying to figure it out alone.
"I'm in the camp of, the more coaches you can have the better — people that have been in your shoes, been in your space, learn from them what they've done right and wrong, and then lean on a community."
Where They Are Now
He had several locations running within his first 60 days, largely from cold pop-ins and taking over machines other operators had stopped servicing. About a year and a half later, he has 17 machines out and three more on order, averaging $15,000 to $25,000 a month gross across the portfolio. His biggest win took nearly a year of persistence to close: a 400-bed franchise hotel that now nets more than $1,000 a day on launch weekends and $500 to $700 a day even in its slow season, with on-site storage and a 15% revenue share to the hotel. Toothbrush and toothpaste sets alone sell more than 20 a day.
