There’s no question that a pickup truck is a huge investment, especially these days when the prices on the most expensive trims can push toward six digits. But a pickup truck owner finds it to be a tool first and foremost, and those who buy them generally find a price point that gives value for their money. This is often best proven not through the amount pickup truck owners use their trucks themselves but by how often the people around them ask for a helping hand.
How to Make Money with Your Pickup Truck
- Hauling Construction or Landscaping Materials
- Furniture or Appliance Delivery Services
- Moving Services
- Recreational Vehicle Delivery Services
- Towing Services
- Snow Plowing
- Food Delivery
- Ride-hailing
- Advertise on Your Truck
- Rent Out Your Truck
Put two and two together, and you may be on to something: what if you could create a legit part-time side hustle and offer that help to even more people while earning extra cash, making good money back on what you spent on your truck in the first place? There are plenty of people out there who don’t need or want a truck themselves but are willing to pay extra money to have access to one occasionally, especially if they can establish a relationship with someone they trust and turn into a repeat customer base. Who knows? Maybe you’d even enjoy these side hustles enough to turn them into full-time work.
Here are some ideas for how pickup truck owners can use their vehicles to earn extra money. A word to the wise, though: make sure your insurance will cover anything you plan to undertake before you get started. It’s better to negotiate a more thorough insurance policy up front than to have something happen and find out you’re on the hook for any damages.
Hauling Construction or Landscaping Materials
This is one of the main reasons to buy a truck in the first place: a lot of gardening and home improvement materials can get things really dirty, and hosing out a truck bed is far easier than cleaning upholstery. There are plenty of people who would be happy to let you make money to save themselves the inconvenience, especially if you can be available on short notice and will undercut the truck rental costs at big box stores. Consider connecting with local construction companies or advertising your services on an online classifieds site like Kijiji or Craigslist, on social media such as in neighbourhood Facebook groups, or even on websites that connect local handyman services with potential clients like FetchIt, which is the Canadian equivalent of GoShare. This can be even better for making money if you’re also capable of performing the related construction or landscaping services on top of transporting the materials.
Furniture or Appliance Delivery Services
Some furniture stores charge significant fees for delivery services on larger items like furniture and appliances, so there’s another excellent opportunity for you to make good money for yourself here, especially if you’re able to help with the heavy lifting. Helping with appliance repair transportation would work for this as well. Advertising in the same channels listed above would work well for making money by finding this kind of work, either within the same ad or perhaps separately so that it can get its own attention.
Moving Services
Advertising your help with moving services for people who are relocating their homes or small businesses can be a profitable side hustle for pickup truck owners. Some people also need a hand with getting household or office items into or out of storage units or to and from a garage sale, a job where a pickup truck is often better suited than a box truck because smaller vehicles tend to have an easier time getting around storage facilities.
Recreational Vehicle Delivery Services
People often buy recreational vehicles like motorcycles, ATVs, and snowmobiles without having their own way to get them home. This is another opportunity worth advertising, and you could even take it a step further by reaching out to local stores and dealerships to let them know you’re available for business deliveries so they can offer your services directly to their clients.
Towing Services
If someone really needed to tow something, they would already have a truck of their own, right? Not necessarily. Consider that there might be a cottage owner out there who needs to transport a newly purchased boat, or someone might buy a rural property and want to bring in a trailer to set up permanently as a vacation hideaway. Directing some advertising toward clients seeking out towing services could reap rewards.
Snow Plowing
If you’re reading this then there’s a good chance you live in Canada, which means that if you’re willing to spend some money up front to install extra equipment and winter tires on your truck then you can convert it into a snow plow each winter. This could not only save you some big bucks through doing your own snow plowing, but you could also make some money doing it for others. There’s a ton of potential here from residential clients to small business, as long as you can tolerate long stints at strange hours with little notice through the colder months.
Food Delivery
The fact that your vehicle happens to be a pickup truck doesn’t mean it can’t be used for more traditional mobile income sources such as food delivery. This can include anything from the old-fashioned method of signing on with a single pizza chain to the newer business models like Uber Eats or Skip the Dishes. It’s not unusual for drivers who choose the app method to use more than one at a time to maximize their revenue.
Ride-hailing
It may take some time after recovery from COVID-19 before ride-hailing returns to being a safe and reliable revenue stream. As soon as people warm back up to it, though, ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft are likely to return to pre-pandemic levels, which renews that opportunity to add side income with any vehicle, pickup trucks included.
Advertise on Your Truck
Some people don’t want to give up their own time but are still interested in finding ways to use their trucks for alternative income. It might surprise you to learn that some local businesses will pay a weekly or monthly rate to use your vehicle as a moving billboard. This can be an appealing option because it doesn’t typically involve changing how you use your truck in any way, although it can perhaps draw unwanted attention depending on how visually distinct the advertisement is. You’ll also want to ensure you align with a business you trust since passers-by might associate your vehicle with the brand, which could have unintended consequences with unhappy customers. Still, with the right arrangement, this is a low-commitment way to earn some cash.
Rent Out Your Truck
Of course, the revenue stream that requires the least commitment is to rent your truck out to others so that they can perform these tasks on their own. Apps such as Turo make it easy to arrange short-term rentals on your own. In fact, if you love your truck as much as most pickup truck owners do, the hardest part might be trusting other people to take care of your baby as well as you do.