Anchors Aweigh! Graphic Designer Leads Guided Sailing Tours

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

[Music]

Hello everyone, it's a new week. I am coming to you live from Phoenix, Arizona, where tonight, that is tonight, for those in real time, at least I am kicking off the new tour for the new book, "100 Side Hustles." I'm so excited for this. And of course, if you're listening later, then the tour has begun and I was excited and I'm probably still excited whenever you're hearing it. I don't wanna say too much about that here because I wanna focus on the story, but it is an exciting time and I'll be sharing updates as I go from city to city. And hopefully I'll get the chance to hang out with many of our listeners.

The tour details are always at sidehustleschool.com/tour. Now, in today's story, an Australian graphic designer packs his bags to see the world and stumbles into a new line of work leading guided sailing tours. He discovers that a particular demographic of young professionals is not being marketed too well or provided for at all. That's when he gets the vision to start his own brand. Not surprisingly, this story includes a lesson in knowing your demographics and catering to them.

It's also a disaster and recovery story. This guy learns that PayPal is not his pal. The service almost sinks his ship before it sails by withholding his money. Spoiler alert, he no longer uses PayPal. This is a fun one.

It's even got me looking at the schedule to see if I can go on one of these Mediterranean tours at some point myself. So, anchors away, graphic designer leads guided sailing tours is coming right up. [Music]

Approaching his 30th birthday, Australian Chris Tobone felt it was time for a change. An established graphic designer for nearly 10 years, he decided to take a year off to travel the world. But after nine months of hostile stays and banana pancakes, money was in short supply.

And Chris was thinking of ending his globe trotting then and there. Not ready to cut short the adventure, he applied for a tour guide position and got the job. He only paid about $78 a day, but his meals and accommodations were covered. Plus, he'd get to travel all around Europe for free. He ended up staying in the role for several years, learning a lot about the industry.

After a while, many of his typical passengers, who were in their 20s, started asking him what tours he could recommend when they returned in a few years. They were getting too old for youth accommodations, but also didn't want to end up on a cruise ship that served baked Alaska after ballroom dancing and bingo. Chris spotted a gap in the market. This demographic of young professionals, aged late 20s to late 30s, wasn't getting much love from the guided tour industry. He decided an experiment was in order.

The next off season, Chris went back home to Melbourne and put pen to paper, figuring out how he could create something for this age group. Then he leveraged his large network of industry contacts and made the decision to sell sailing tours in Croatia for the following summer. These Mediterranean trips were big winners and they appealed to his demographic. Using his background and design, Chris put together a website, created social media accounts, and started contacting all of his old passengers through Facebook. He was able to convince 40 of them to trust him with the idea that he could take them on a spectacular adventure, only now with his own company.

Pricing that first tour was a challenge, as he needed to cover his costs while making it competitive with other established brands. He admits he was just happy to fill the boat, but he did. The majority of people on board were in their late 20s to late 30s. His experiment had paid off and he saw a future in what he called CODA sale. This was an interesting project for startup costs because in some ways there weren't really any costs at all.

All he needed to do was create a website, which he could do it himself, and then rely on his network to do the marketing. But of course, in other ways, he had a lot of costs since he had to rent a boat and hire a crew for a week. Those things aren't cheap. In fact, his came with a $33,000 price tag. But he thought, no worries.

He would just use the payments he received from his customers to front the cost. Well, this brings us to the PayPal fiasco. You see, Chris had been using PayPal for six months to collect deposits with no problems. Then six weeks before his tour was ready to set sail, PayPal froze his account with no warning. To say he had questions was an understatement.

Apparently, as the trip date approached, money began flooding in, which was a red flag in the eyes of PayPal. They thought Chris was laundering money. Upon further investigation, they realized he wasn't doing that, but because he was still collecting payments without delivering a product, they kept his account frozen. They would only unfreeze it after the product was delivered. And that product, of course, was the Mediterranean tour, which inconveniently couldn't happen without the boat.

So that plan was about as helpful as the proverbial screen door on a submarine. Without the money, he couldn't pay for the boat. Without the boat, he couldn't deliver the tour. PayPal wouldn't budge, and because the deadline for securing the boat was in a week, it left him with no time to get approved for a bank loan. Fortunately for Chris, family and friends sent a life raft in the form of a personal loan, on the promise that he'd pay it back as soon as his funds were released.

Since then, Chris has sailed away from PayPal. He now uses an easier payment solution that holds his money in a separate financial institution, with the added benefit of no longer being mistaken for a money launderer. His advice for marketing products with a hefty price is to have faith in your product or service's worth. He truly believes that his customers are getting the best experience available. He over delivers and hasn't had problems filling the tours.

Speaking of price tags, the Kota Sale tours run between $1,200 to $1,500 per person, which is up from $900 a person on the first tour. He's upgraded his selection to four boats that run during the summer months. Those tours go for seven days and specifically target young professionals. The business currently brings in just under $300,000 a year, with word of mouth still being his number one marketing tool. For Chris, it's full steam ahead with no plans of taking his hands off the rudder any time soon.

He plans to add a new destination each year, starting this year with Turkey. Italy, the Greek islands, Asia, and the Caribbean are also in the works. [Music]

Yes, well, I love the spirit. The audacity of saying, I'm gonna go and start my own tour company, leading groups through the Adriatic Sea. And if you think about it, like as you kind of like think through the story, as audacious as that is, as big and as ambitious as it is, he's not taking a huge, huge amount of risk.

Okay, so $33,000 to charter the boat, not a small amount of money. But number one, if it didn't work, like if he wasn't able to get the tour together, he didn't actually have to pay $33,000. He had a deposit, whatever that was. So you have to give that up and yes, it would be a loss. But again, I think if most of us think, how much does it cost to start a cruise line, essentially, we think of a number a lot higher than $33,000.

And also it's doable, especially when it's paid by deposits. So he didn't even have to have that capital when he started. Now, of course he did run into the PayPal problem, which by the way, is not the only PayPal horror story I've heard over the years. Heard of a number of people in situations like that. So just from a technical, logistical point, that's something to look out for.

Maybe you actually wanna withdraw your money and put it into bank account as it comes in through PayPal or wherever else you're taking your funds from. But still, he was able to figure that out too. So good for him. Sounds really fun. And I'm not kidding when I say I wanna go on one of these.

So I'm gonna go check it out. Maybe you will too, and maybe we'll see each other there. But if I don't see you in Croatia, perhaps I'll see you somewhere on the 100 Side Hustles Book Tour. I'm gonna sign off so I can go and get to work. I got a lot to do this week.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes. All right, sidehustleschool.com/884. Episode 884. Tomorrow is the day, Phoenix tonight, Los Angeles tomorrow, and onwards from there.

Thanks so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

from The Onward Project.