Six documents that turn “find a location” from a thing you dread into a loop you can run this Saturday. You do the walking. Nobody bills you per placement, and nobody sells the same lead to five other operators in your county.
Here is the part nobody mentions about paying a locator: you never find out what they said.
They send you an address and an invoice. You learn nothing you can repeat. Machine number two costs you the same fee all over again, and you are still exactly as good at this as you were the day you started. Going rates, if you have not priced it lately: $400 to $1,500 per signed placement for a per-placement locator, $39 to $99 a month for marketplace leads that went out to everyone in your area, $1,500 to $5,000 a month for a full-service shop. We wrote up that whole market here: the honest locator review.
The operators who get past machine number three almost all did the same unglamorous thing instead. They learned the conversation. It takes somewhere around fifteen to twenty pop-ins to land one placement — that is the real math, and it does not change based on who you pay.
So the only question that matters is whether you know what to say when the door opens. This is that conversation, written down.
Six PDFs. Emailed to you about a minute after checkout. Nothing ships, nothing recurs, nothing to cancel.
Every lane you can buy a machine through: the national sellers that freight to all 50 states, the refurb dealers worth calling first, specialty equipment (ice, claw, combo), and the local channels that exist in every single state — marketplace listings, liquidation auctions, and operators retiring routes. Ends with which lane to use for which situation.
LLC, EIN, business bank account, sales tax permit, city license, the liability limits property managers ask for, and the web presence that makes you lookupable when someone checks you out. In order, with typical costs, and flagged where you should never pay a third party.
Twenty-plus terms so you can read a listing, talk to a distributor, and negotiate a commission without sounding brand new. MDB, DEX, par level, stales, cashless rate, planogram, shrink, refurb.
The 45-second version, word for word. The opener you use on whoever is at the front desk to find out who actually decides. The pitch itself. The three answers you will hear most — "we had one before and it was always empty", "how much do we get?", "send me something" — and exactly what to say back to each. Then the close that puts an install date on the calendar. Plus the hours to walk in and the hours never to.
The seven things to have on you before you push the door open: the one-pager, two printed copies of the agreement, your certificate of insurance, machine photos on your phone, a product list with the healthy options marked, a specific spot you scouted on the way in, and your calendar.
A plain-English single-machine agreement in seven numbered sections: placement, term and termination, what you are on the hook for, what they are, commission (including the wording for a zero-commission deal), liability, and the signature block. Bracketed fields you fill in. Print two copies and it is signable on the spot.
Email [email protected] inside 30 days and we refund the whole thing. Keep the files. We will not ask you why, and we will not make you prove you tried. If the script does not sound like something you would actually say out loud, that is a good enough reason and we would rather have your goodwill than your $47.
The price does not jump at midnight and no fake timer is going to reset when you reload. The only real clock is the boring one: it takes fifteen to twenty pop-ins to get a yes, and you cannot start burning through those until you know what you are going to say. A machine sitting in your garage earns nothing while you think about it.
VendBuddy sells documents and software. We make no representation about the income, profit, or number of placements any operator will achieve — results depend on your market, your effort, and factors outside anyone’s control. Nothing here is legal advice; have a local attorney review any agreement before you rely on it.