A container lot plan has seven parts: what you sell, who buys, where the cans come from, how buyers pay, how you deliver, how you track leads, and your year-one targets. Use it for a new lot or to rebuild one you already run, and fill every blank with a number from a supplier quote or your own books.
The seven parts
- Product mix. New, one-trip, used or modified, and which sizes. Units that fit on the lot: ___
- Target buyers. Storage, job sites, farms, conversions. Who calls and who walks in.
- Supply and stock. Supplier: ___. Cost per can delivered to your lot: ___. Cash tied up in stock: ___
- Pricing and payment. Price per can: ___. Margin per unit: ___. Cash, outside financing or rent-to-own.
- Delivery and site prep. Who hauls, what you charge, and whether the buyer's ground needs leveling first.
- Marketing and lead tracking. Where quotes come from, and who makes the call back. Set a rule, such as every quote gets a call the same day.
- First-year targets. Units sold a month: ___. Quotes a month: ___. Close rate: sales divided by quotes, counted monthly from your own quote log.
Check rent-to-own law first
Rent-to-own is regulated by statute in 47 states. Find your state in the index, read the statute, and see whether your payment plan falls under it before it goes in the plan.
How we know: the count comes from the state statutes index kept by the Association of Progressive Rental Organizations, read on 2026-08-01.
Set up tracking before you buy ads
Install a Meta pixel, Google Analytics 4 or Google Tag Manager before any ad budget. Of the 182 sites that loaded, 48 (26.4%) had none of the three, so those sites can't show which ad brought a quote.
How we measured it: a 2026-08-01 scan of sites from our research into lot-based dealers, mostly dealers plus a few agencies that sell to them. We checked each home page's code for the three tools.
If most of your leads call, a pixel won't catch them. Keep a call log and ask every caller how they found you.
After the plan
Open the lot with how to start a shipping container business. Then work the door with how to sell shipping containers from your lot.
Free workshop
Want the whole system?
The free workshop shows the whole system: every call, walk-in and Marketplace message followed to a sale or a no, and every sale traced back to what brought it in.
Watch the free workshop