Today we’d like to introduce you to Ron Hadri.
Ron, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My wife and I started a party rental business for kids’ birthday parties. One day in the spring of 2023, my wife, Cynthia, was scrolling on her phone searching for birthday party ideas for our first born daughter’s first birthday party that we were going to host in a few months time when she came across a TikTok of a beautiful softplay setup in Houston. When she told me about this, I loved the idea of having a softplay area and a bounce house for our daughter’s birthday but it was very expensive to rent. In some cases, it was about half the price of just buying the thing yourself! Having recently talked about starting our own business one day, we decided that this was worth pursuing so we bought a softplay set and a bounce house as well as some backdrops. Our plan was to use everything for our daughter’s birthday, take some great photos, and use that to launch our business of renting these out across Austin. Fast forward a few years later, and we have learned so much about running a small party rental business. We started out renting u-hauls, eventually buying a car big enough to put everything in. We came up with efficient systems of cleaning our equipment and tried out several different marketing techniques. We would have quiet seasons (like cold months) and very busy seasons (like Autumn and Spring) but after about 2.5 years of being busy most weekends due to birthday party bookings, we finally decided to sell our birthday party equipment and focus on a more digital approach. Now we run a Facebook group helping parents plan out their little one’s birthday parties. We have just under 300,000 members and we are exploring different digital income streams. I’d say we’re still a long way off of taking a victory lap for a successful business but we are continuing to learn about marketing, advertising, and making money through digital means instead of giving up our weekends driving around Austin and sweating in the hot Texas heat.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t think it’s ever a smooth road for small businesses. For us in particular, it was hard to start a local rental business from scratch. Driving traffic to your website is the biggest challenge if you don’t come from a marketing background. Luckily, Facebook marketplace and ads helped us get some traffic to our site and then word of mouth did the rest. We tried knocking on doors and leaving business cards everywhere we went but those efforts seemed pointless when compared to the ROI on digital marketing. Google ads were always too expensive for our budget so Facebook and organic marketing is what we mostly relied on. Other than that, paying for transporting our equipment was another challenge. Using u-hauls was fine for the first couple times but it started to become a hassle after some time knowing that the profit of a sale wasn’t worth it sometimes because of the cost of the rental and gas that you had to put into the u-haul truck. Then of course, the time. I (the dad) was doing the labor so giving up my weekends with my family to make some extra money renting out equipment in the hot Texas sun was not something I envisioned doing for a long time. But I think we had to go through those experiments to learn that it wasn’t the direction we wanted to keep heading down in the long run.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Party Planning PaRENTS runs a Facebook group of over 285,000 members focused on everything to do with kids birthday party themes and ideas. We have a very supportive (pre-dominantly female) community that shares their most intimate and exciting days with each other so that other members can plan the best birthday parties for their kids / grandkids as well. We also run a newsletter called the Party Savings Newsletter, which is a curated weekly email reaching a highly engaged audience of parents within our 285,000+ member Facebook community, one of the largest online groups dedicated to kids’ birthday planning and family events. We actively promote trusted recommendations, exclusive discounts, and premium products to make our subscribers children’s celebrations memorable. And then we also sell birthday party packages through our Etsy page and on our website. In the packages we include things like invites, milestone posters, cake toppers, high chair banners, and more!
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
It is only my wife and I behind the scenes of this business and it’s hard to manage such a big Facebook group community with only two people who both work full time jobs. We also have two kids so between being parents ourselves and working our full time jobs, it’s very hard sometimes to find the time to tend to, what feels like, our third child – Party Planning PaRENTS.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.partyplanningparents.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/partyplanningparents
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/partyplanningparents
- LinkedIn: https://www.tiktok.com/@partyplanningparents
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@PartyPlanningPaRENTS
- Other: https://www.facebook.com/groups/kidsbirthdayparty
