Amsterdam Bike Tours Become Passive Profit Center

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

[Music]

Today's Side Hustle School feature was inspired by one of our stories in year one. I'm always excited when that happens. This guy in the Netherlands sets out to make some extra money. Just like I talked about two days ago, starting from necessity, he just wanted extra money. That's totally fine.

But in his case, he grows it to a real business that can largely operate without him. This business earns up to 20,000 euros a month. It's like $22,400, and he still has his day job. What kind of business is it? Well, it is a touring business.

In his case, a bike tour business. We've had a number of different episodes featuring tour businesses in the history of the show. Something about Washington DC tours, Denver food tours, Chicago pizza tours recently, scooter tours, a guy operating a little kick bike, scooter tours in Florida, adventure tours, aerial tours, and more. These stories often have some things in common, but also some differentiation as well. And at the end of the story, I'll recap with a four step process to setting up your own touring hustle, especially if you're in a city that sees a lot of visitors like Amsterdam.

So quick message from our sponsor. I appreciate them helping us keep the lights on. And then I'll tell you all about the Amsterdam bike tours and become a passive profit center. [Music]

Vincent Linson's world travels had left him broke and looking for a fun way to make some extra cash. Despite returning home to the Netherlands with a full-time job at one of Amsterdam's major financial firms, he found himself in need of extra money to cover some expenses.

Vincent always wanted to be a tour guide and felt he'd taken enough walking tours in other cities to have a go himself. It was a time in his life where he had nothing to lose. So he figured he might as well give it a shot. He joined a company where he could give tours of the city on big yellow bikes. For two months, Vince gave 10 tours a week scheduled around his day job and received a crash course in the art of big city tours.

However, he didn't appreciate the way certain parts of the company were organized and he felt he could do a much better job. A few weeks later on his morning commute, Vince tuned into episode 158 of the Side Hustle School Podcast and heard about the urban hiking tour company that someone had set up in San Francisco. I believe that was Alexandra Kennan. Shout out to Alexandra. And that gave him an idea.

By the end of the episode, his Cytosil Amsterdam experiences was already coming to life. Total startup costs were just around $250. Vince created a Squarespace website and bought a couple of things to help him run his first tour. To make this business a success, Vince knew he was going to need to be better than the competition. He had to offer a service that people would tell their friends about when they got home.

So to begin, he looked at the tour's people most liked to take in Amsterdam and then thought about how to put his own spin on it. He spent weeks researching the history and folklore that surrounded parts of the city. Storytelling plays a big part in tours and choosing locations based on how they form a narrative is really important. For example, on the Anne Frank tour, you're invited to feel the history and visit prominent locations that tell the story of the Jewish people in the city. It was also important to create a core offering of tours that were easy to replicate and follow.

This meant attractions needed to be visible, accessible, and simple enough to gain entry to. That way it would be easy to scale the tours and add additional tour guides if the company were to grow. Well, so far so good, but Vince's main struggle was spreading the word of Amsterdam experiences and getting people to make bookings. He launched a Facebook business page that resulted in a few sporadic bookings. He tried to promote through friends, but found it to be unscalable.

Then at a local Airbnb event, he met a guy named Stefan. Stefan had previous experience as an online marketer and loved Vince's business idea. So the two decided to collaborate, team up, and become co-founders of the business. Together, they devised a marketing plan that supercharged their growth. They focused on tasks like creating an active, well-reviewed TripAdvisor profile, sharing their tours on Airbnb, promoting through Google ads, and creating website pages with good SEO, search engine optimization.

These three strategies combined brought in a lot of direct bookings and ensured they had a consistent, steady flow of people using their services. Vince and Stefan also worked to establish partnerships with boat tour companies. It's nearly impossible to get a boat tour license, so it was much easier to partner with people who already had one, sharing the profits. This helped to offer an additional experience to their customers and bring in a stream of bookings from another reliable source. The income for Amsterdam experiences depends a lot on seasonal demand.

Between March and November, they can earn profits of up to 20,000 euros per month. Again, that's about $22,000, but in the winter months, this can drop way down to just a couple of hundred. So there's definitely some peak periods there. And despite achieving such success, Vince and Stefan still work their day jobs and have instead hired tour guides to help them scale the business. Because of their high TripAdvisor rating, many tour guides find them and offer their services, but they also look for guides through their personal networks.

Vince says a good tour guide should be local, friendly, and good at improvisation. If you can think on your feet, tell a good story, and hold a group's attention, you probably got what it takes. For anyone looking to start a similar business, Vince also says it's paramount to get some time under your belt working for an established company first. That way you can learn the trade and look for some areas where you would improve or at least do it differently. This can give you the starting point for your own venture.

Looking ahead, Vince and Stefan want to delegate and automate their operation. They both have lofty goals, like starting a tech company to fight global warming on a large systematic scale. So they want to create a set it and occasionally check on its strategy. They're not just spinning their wheels, they're building a real business. [Music]

All right, congratulations to Vince and Stefan.

Pretty awesome story. I always love when people are taking an idea and then improving upon it, building on it from there. So as promised, a four step process, as deduced from the story, which you may have heard as we went along, but step one is to learn the ropes. Somehow you have to learn how this particular industry works. There are lots of little quirks and tips.

You don't have to reinvent everything, reinvent the wheel we could say in this case. You just need to add something to it. Step two, set up a replicable format. Really smart to do the same itineraries, the same historical lessons on each of your tours. So you're not just inventing it every single time you go out, especially if you want to eventually bring on additional guides, like the majority of our tour stories actually have done.

I'm pretty sure. Step three, make sure it works well and garners good reviews. So before you do anything else, before you really start to scale or try to bring in a bunch of new customers, test the process and make sure you're getting legit reviews, not just from your friends, but a stranger that comes on this tour, are they going to love it? Put some time into that and make sure it's a great customer experience. That's only gonna help you going forward.

Then you focus on bringing in new customers. And because of sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp and similar, if you can get this right, if you get this model right, you're gonna have referrals and the business can continue for a long time. So that's why the key is really setting up the right foundation. So learn the ropes, set up a replicable format, make sure it works well and garners good reviews, then focus on bringing in new customers. If a touring business is not for you, maybe something else is.

That's why we've got a different story every single day on the show. My hope is that it provides you inspiration and also leads you to do something. That's why I often say inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Next time you're in Amsterdam, be sure to check out Amsterdam experiences. I will try to do that myself.

Today's show notes, including links to everything I mentioned. All right, sidehustleschool.com/837. Thanks so much for listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.