This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome to Something New. We're calling this new segment Throwback Thursday slash Where Are They Now? We're gonna do an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. Welcome to Sadosville School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
Now last week was our first one of these new features. It was all about a New York City musician who creates a suite of online resources to learn jazz. His project began as a hobbyist blog and is now a booming multiple six-figure business. Well, today in our second feature, we'll hear from a woman in Denver who originally had an idea to offer private cooking lessons. And that went well, but along the way, she discovered an even bigger opportunity in the world of food tours.
When we featured her a while back, her business was already doing gangbusters. It is a stellar example that I often mention, especially in the context of what a local tour business can really be. This is not just small money. This is something that can become sustainable and high profit. But what's happened since?
Well, let's hear directly from her. She'll give us some updates, talk about how she's grown and tell us her biggest challenge. I'll be back at the end to help wrap us up. But without further ado, here is Jessica. [Music]
Hi, my name is Jessica Baumgart.
I am in Denver, Colorado, and I was featured in episode 648. So I used to work in communications and marketing and sort of went through a quarter life crisis. I quit my job and sold everything I owned and went with my husband for a year traveling around the world. And while we were backpacking, we did food tours everywhere we went. We just became hooked as travelers ourselves.
It was our favorite way to explore a new city. And so when we came and moved to Denver, Colorado, I was working as a private chef. I was involved in the food scene here and just thought what a great way to show off the city's thriving food scene and the restaurants that are opening up every day here in Colorado. So launched it originally thinking maybe one or two days a week. I would bring some people around to local restaurants and talk about what was going on in Denver's food scene.
And in the past two years, have seen it grow to seven days a week and a full staff of food tour guides and lots of new restaurants and new challenges. A lot has changed in the last year, like every entrepreneur, I'm just like riding the wave sometimes, it feels like with my business. But since we talked last year, a lot of growth, which has been amazing. When we checked in last, I was seeing about 300 to 350 guests on our food tours every month, which is sort of how I measure what we're doing month by month. Right now, we've grown to between 550 and 700 guests a month.
So almost doubled from the first year to the second. And that has presented all sorts of new challenges and exciting growth opportunities. I expanded my staff. So at the beginning, I was guiding a lot of the food tours myself. Then I had one to two guides.
Now I have a team of seven food tour guides who are running my tours seven days a week here in Denver. We launched a new tour in a different neighborhood. That helped us grow a little bit as well. So in terms of revenue, the last time we checked in, we were seeing about 20 to 25,000 a month in revenue. And now we're closer to 35,000 to 40,000 a month in total revenue.
So that's been great, a lot going on there. With the new staff, our margins have decreased. So that's something we've seen financially happen over the business. Just in hiring more people and outsourcing more things. Because with the growth in the number of guests that we're seeing every month, it's not possible for me to tour 600 people a month.
So the team has grown quite a bit. I've also outsourced some other areas of the business, like I hired an administrative person to help on the weekends. So that's where we are now. My biggest challenge right now is scaling the business without compromising quality. I think like any business owner, like any micro business owner, a sole proprietor, you go from having total control and it's your baby, right?
I mean, my side hustle was my baby and now it's like my main hustle. And it's really difficult for me to delegate and let other people handle that. But there's no way for us to grow and for me not to be able to do that. So that's probably my biggest challenge is navigating all of the new issues that come up with an increased number of guests per month. They're one of the fastest growing sectors of the tourism market.
So I know I get a lot of emails from people saying, "Hey, I wanna launch a food tour in my city. How do I go about doing XYZ?" My general advice for people launching tours is you have to love the details. You have to love the operations side of the business. You have to love all those little pieces that keep the trains running on time and the experience smooth and effortless for both your guests and your partners. I think a lot of people like tours or tour businesses because they're like, "Oh, I love food.
So I wanna launch a food tour," which is great. You do have to love food because you're gonna be talking about it all day, every day. And you have to be willing to do things that you don't think are necessarily fun or sexy. Like you have to be able to sit down and look through a commercial liability insurance policy in detail. But my advice is always do a deep dive on the details.
Make sure you're really committed to the operational side of running the business because that is what will keep you in business, I believe, over time. Having great customer service, having a really strong staff. I think, especially with tour businesses, guides are everything. For the most part, the only person they're gonna see that represents you and your business is the tour guide. So I always take a lot of care and intention to hiring those people and making sure I have the right people representing the business who are gonna be really fun and love people and love food and not just be kind of like a part-time person that will phone it in.
And the same goes for people running their own tours as well. I know plenty of food tour operators that never hire another guide. They guide their own tours. They're like sole business owner of one, which is perfectly fine. As long as you can really sustain the excitement and the passion and the level of excellence with your tours when it's maybe your 500th or 600th time talking about that tasting or that restaurant.
I would like to create more systems where I can take myself out of the business when I want to. I love my business so much. I never wanna get to the point where I completely am not involved as some business owners are, but my goal is to kind of set things up so that I can take extended periods where I travel. I mean, I started this business because I loved to travel so much and was food touring all over the world. And I don't have a single international trip on my calendar in the next year, which makes my blood boil.
I know, I need to have my passport out at some point for me to feel like a sane human being. So that's a personal goal for me. If I could learn one new skill and just download it to my brain, it would be SEO for my website, 100%. Because as people learn who are launching tours, especially food tours, there are a lot of third-party websites that will sell your tours for you, like TripAdvisor Experiences or Viator, Airbnb Experiences, Expedia, Get Your Guide. There are all sorts of websites that will sell your tours for you.
They're also gonna take a nice big commission for that sale. So as a tour operator, you always wanna get people coming directly to you, to your website. And I think SEO is just like witchcraft and sort of magical. And for the people that really know how to do it well, it's a way to succeed so quickly on the internet. So that's something I'm slowly teaching myself with the help of an SEO expert.
But if I could download that into my brain today, I would do it in the heartbeat. - Thank you so much, Jessica. Amazing, really wonderful to hear how much your business has grown, even since we first featured it, which was pretty incredible at the time. Now she's got this full staff, she's got close to half a million dollars a year in revenue, and she's really building this solid foundation. Now, as she mentioned, her profit margin has gone down a bit.
I just wanted to pick up on that. Smaller margins are not uncommon as you grow, because what happens essentially is you need to really invest in infrastructure and you realize that you can't do everything yourself. And so part of that is either hiring or outsourcing, delegating somehow, getting help essentially. And in her case, she mentioned, she was touring 300 people a month and now she's touring 700 plus. So this kind of growth is not simple or easy.
You almost have to acquire a whole new set of skills to go from whatever a good amount of income is, I mean, it was a very good amount of income when we first featured her, but now obviously to go to something much bigger than that. It's not simple or easy, it requires a different set of skills. Now you also heard her advice, learn SEO and avoid dependence on other sites or platforms wherever possible. And not just avoiding dependence, but creating independence wherever you can. [Music]
I am grateful to Jessica for her advice, for her transparency, and helping us kick off this new segment, along with Brent last week.
And the next time you're in Colorado, maybe you wanna check out a delicious Denver food tour. That is the branch he's going under now. You can find it at deliciousd Denverfoodtours.com. We will, of course, link it up on the show notes page, which happens to be sidehustleschool.com/1118, 1118. 2020 is our year of interaction.
If you have a question, if you would like to update us about your side hustle, if you have an idea about who we should feature in our next Throwback Thursday segment, if you would like a regularly priced food tour, you know, pay regular price, get one regular food tour. For all those things, or at least most of them, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We will be highlighting and answering them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. I'm so glad you're here. Be sure to do one thing today to get closer to a goal you believe in.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
