Food and Travel Writer Creates Food Tours in Marrakech, Earns $60k Annually

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Side Hustle School, what's up? This is Chris Guillebeau. Here we are rocking episode 201. Big day yesterday with episode 200. Thank you again for joining me on the journey.

So much more to come. And today's episode takes us to Morocco, the North African nation that borders Spain where an American expat starts a project with a goal of earning a couple hundred dollars a month, but then it jumps to $5,000 a month. Crazy how that works. I'll tell you exactly how it happened in just a moment. First, I want to hand the mic over to a listener for a shout out of someone who's helped them along the way.

Let's hear what they have to say. - Hello, it's Mike from Phoenix. Side Hustle School is helping me take my educational consulting firm to the next level. The person that helped me is my dad. When it came time to name my company, I chose Luca Partners because my dad's nickname was Luca.

Lucapartners.com. Thanks Chris. [Music]

In January 2014, Amanda Ponzio Mutaki was sitting with her husband, Yousaf, at a cafe on the main square in Marrakech, Morocco, watching tourists go into restaurants that they knew weren't great. As an American expat married to a local, Amanda would give advice when she could, along with specific recommendations on her website, A Rock Mama, but watching those tourists go into subpar dining experiences, she suddenly realized she was perfectly situated to offer English speaking tours that would show tourists where the good food was hidden in Marrakech. And as a freelancer who wrote about food and traveled for food, Amanda had the skill set to pull it off.

Since her husband Yousaf grew up in Marrakech, he already knew a lot of people and a lot of good places to eat. They also ate out fairly often, so they had plenty of non-touristy stops to choose from. The first step was coming up with a tour route that made sense. They wanted the tour to be a walking progressive meal, so they'd go to one place for appetizers, another for the main course, and then a stop, of course, for dessert. Making sure the order of the food and the route of the walking tour made sense was the most time-consuming part, at least initially.

While Amanda and Yousaf already knew the restaurant owners at some of the stops they wanted to go to, they didn't know all of them, which meant they had to spend some time introducing themselves and explaining what they were trying to do. This wasn't something that had ever been done in Marrakech before, so some people weren't interested or just weren't sure, so it took some persistence to get a comprehensive tour set. While they were in the design stage, they kept this guiding principle in mind. Would Yousaf's mom eat here? And would Amanda's American mom ever think to walk into this place?

If the answer to the first question was yes and the second question no, then they knew it was a good fit. Once they had the route set, Amanda set up a new website using WordPress that accepted payments through PayPal, and she made sure to use good keywords, so it was easily discoverable in search engines. She spent $50 buying domain names, but since she was already paying for hosting on her other website, that was it as far as technology costs. A more challenging part of set up was figuring out the legal stuff, particularly in Morocco. The tourism industry in Morocco is highly regulated, which added a whole layer of bureaucracy for them to navigate.

They had to work with licensed city guides, who for the most part work on commission, but Amanda naturally wanted a food-focused tour without the high-pressured shopping, so they had to find and hire people that'd be willing to work for an hourly rate, not on commission. Amanda or Yusef would technically lead the tours, but the hourly licensed guides would accompany them with their official badge that made everything legal. With that legal framework finally set up and some minimal marketing in place, it was time to officially launch Marrakech food tours, and Amanda started with some pretty low expectations. She wanted to make $200 a month to cover schooling costs for her two kids, side note, school is pretty cheap in Morocco, apparently, and to give their budget a little more breathing room in general. They started out charging $50 a person for the walking tours, and within a couple months of launching in May 2014, they were making a few hundred dollars a month, with Yusef guiding about six tours a month.

After only three months, they increased the price from $50 to $65 a person, and actually had the number of bookings increase when they did that. While they had already exceeded Amanda's financial expectations in the first couple of months, revenue continued to increase, and within six months of launching, they were bringing in $2,000 a month. The increased demand for tours meant that they needed to hire guides who would actually lead those tours, not just accompany them. So during the past two years, they've slowly added guides who are both qualified to lead the tours, and open to being paid hourly, instead of on commission. By adding guides, they've been able to increase the number of tours, and these days, by working with five contract guides, they've been able to run 25 to 30 tours a month, and consistently bring in about $5,000 a month.

They've also made some minor upgrades to their systems, including switching to a new booking process, and while they've hired guides to run the tours, depending on the season, Yousef still clocks in about 25 hours a week, leading some tours and doing administration. But now, instead of doing this on the side, Yousef has been able to quit his job and focus on the food tours. Meanwhile, Amanda still has other freelance projects, and only spends about five hours a week keeping things running. She still doesn't spend much time on marketing, because most of their bookings come through referrals, TripAdvisor, and organic search results. Amanda credits a lot of their success to finding something missing in the marketplace, and then going for it.

She also says we were the right people at the right time to meet that need. And last, they made the decision to just focus on food, and only do tours in English. They could have done a bunch of other kinds of tours, they could have done tours in other languages, but at least in this case, the choice to specialize was definitely the right one. [Music]

Awesome story. Congratulations, Amanda, and Yousef.

Sometimes when you have an idea for a side hustle, you have a goal like making a couple hundred dollars a month, and as you can see in this story, it goes on to do much more than that. So a side hustle can affect your life in all sorts of positive ways, and I love what they've been able to do here. Now, a fun personal note, I remember going to Morocco years ago, and I was in Casablanca, and I was thinking back on that experience. I remember enjoying being there. I think I went on a little guided tour myself, in addition to exploring independently, but I also seem to remember going to some really bad restaurants, and that's probably because I didn't know where to go.

So if only I'd gone to Marrakech instead of Casablanca, and if only Marrakech food tours had existed at that time, maybe I would have had a better experience. But now listeners, next time you're in Marrakech, you know where to go. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/201. If you have a comment or a question for the show, give me a call on the Hustle Hotline that is 8449 Hustle.

We'll continue to feature listener questions and contributions as we go forward. So much more is on the way for the rest of the year. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.