Food Tour Guide Chomps Down on $100,000 Profit

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

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I had a phone call today with my good friend Gretchen Rubin, who has a wonderful podcast. You've probably heard of it, it's called Happier. And as part of our call, she was interviewing me for a new course she's making. We were talking about how people start these kinds of projects, these side hustles, for all kinds of reasons. And sometimes we have to be careful, people like Gretchen and myself, in not assuming that everyone else is like us.

She gave the example of how she and her sister are both writers, but Gretchen does most of her writing alone or in the library where she doesn't actually communicate with people. And her sister Elizabeth really prefers to work in a group. So that's why she's a screenwriter and works in Hollywood in writers rooms. In my case, I try to be aware that not everyone values their independence and autonomy as much as I do, which is why I talk about different motivations from time to time and benefits and rewards and so on. Today's story, however, seems quite aligned with my values and those of many of our listeners.

I'm gonna tell you about a Colorado food tour business that just started one year ago and in that year has made $100,000 profit. Now, here's how she put it, the person running this business, when we asked her what is the greatest thing about your food tour hustle? And she said, "I absolutely love controlling my time." Although it's not always straightforward, it's amazing to be able to go to the gym when I want, walk my dog, work in my PJs, or travel, as long as I have my laptop and phone attached to me. So far this year, I've been to Mexico City, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Italy, and I'm heading to Cabo next month. My business continued to run throughout each of those trips.

Working at a traditional nine to five, I would never have been able to take that kind of time off. Normally that's the kind of thing I would put at the end of the episode, but I just wanted to kind of front load it right there because if you're out there and you're looking for a life like that, maybe you should pay attention to this story. My name is Chris Guillebeau, you're listening to Side Hustle School. Here's a quick thank you to our sponsor and I'll tell you about this food tour guide who chomps down on $100,000 profit. [Music]

Jessica Baumgart had made a lot of active choices.

The Denver, Colorado native was working in marketing when she and her husband took a year-long career break traveling through five continents. They did this after saving up for several years and downsizing most of their possessions. When they came home, Jessica didn't want to jump straight back into the same kind of work. She needed something new and she found it in at least two opportunities. The first was a full-time business, at least for a while, where she taught private cooking classes.

On the side, she moonlighted for a company that provided guided food tours. She discovered that she liked leading these tours for strangers more than she liked cooking for them. Maybe it was because someone else cleaned up. Maybe it was because she got to connect more instead of slaving away in the kitchen. Whatever it was, she liked the tour guide business and she had some ideas on how she'd do it differently if it was her own project.

Eight months later, she made it her own project, launching a new brand called Sabre Denver. Each tour lasts about three hours and covers six tastings around the city. It followed the same format of other tours with good food and rotating locations, but this iteration had her own spin. It focused much more on local chefs and local ingredients to truly give a memorable and unique experience. She spent a total of $3,000 to get started.

Jessica's investment covered building and hosting her website, hiring a graphic designer to create a loco, filing an LLC in Colorado, gaining membership to Denver's Visitors Bureau and purchasing liability insurance. That Visitors Bureau membership is where a lot of her early customers came from. She drummed up further interests by reaching out to hotel concierges to invite them on a free tour. Her goal was to get them to recommend the tours to their guests. Five days after her website went up, Jessica received her first booking.

She says she was caught off guard at how quickly it started. All of a sudden, her planning was real. Three months in, she was guiding tours seven days a week and desperately trying to hire other guides to take some of the stress off her plate so she could turn it into a real business. It's now been almost a year since Jessica launched Savor Denver. How fast can you grow into her business in one year?

Well, here are the numbers. She currently hosts around 350 to 450 guests per month. The business is on track to gross $200,000, that's in sales, and net income should exceed $100,000, all by the end of the year. And remember, she did this by spending only $3,000 in startup costs. As Savor Denver grew, she was working less and less on her day job slash other business of cooking lessons.

She finally decided to let that go and focus full-time on the tours. She recently added a cocktail tour and hopes to launch more neighborhood tours in response to demand. [Music]

All right, so a couple other food tours or tours in general that we have featured on the show, actually several of them, but I pulled out two examples here. Episode 201, Food and Travel Rider creates food tours in Marrakech, earned $60,000. And episode 508, Government Researcher offers private tours of nation's capital.

This last story, number 508, is a good contrast to what we're looking at today because there are two ways of building this kind of business. You can build it to where it is dependent on you, or you're the one doing the tours all the time, or you can do it where it's built around a brand. And in that story, 508, I think the guy's name was Rob, he is doing all the tours himself. Now that's not to say that this is a bad thing, maybe that's what he wants to do. That's totally fine.

Again, your side hustle, your own motivations. But in this story, Jessica is building more of a tour business. It's not built around her personality or something only she can do, at least in terms of physically leading the tours. So she can go to Mexico and still get paid for tours taking place in Denver. My question is all things being equal, which is better?

Again, nothing wrong with doing everything yourself, but if your goal is to build a bit of a brand, if you do want to embrace that independence, if you do like the idea of getting paid for something that's happening in one place while you're in another place, then this option is probably more of a model you would want to follow. And if you'd like to see more about how she's done it, come and check out our show notes for today. Every single day we compile some detailed notes, including links to resources, other episodes, that might be interesting to hear, or anything in particular that I mentioned in the episode, like a resource. You can always access those for free on the side hustle school website, which is sidehustleschool.com/thenumberoftheepisode. Today is episode 648, so sidehustleschool.com/648.

I also want to give a shout out to another friend of mine, Jody Edinburg. Jody runs the very popular website, legalnomads.com. And I thought of her when working on the food tour episode because that's something that she used to do in Mexico. Go and check her out as well, or look her up on social, Instagram in particular, at legalnomads. Thank you for listening today.

I will be back tomorrow. Got another great story coming up and much more to come. Make sure you're subscribed. New episode every morning. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.

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