This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up my friends? So glad you're here. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau and welcome as well to our Failure Friday special segment. Really been enjoying making this segment for you this year.
I get a lot of emails about it. The principle here is we can learn as much from failure as we can from success. If not more, in fact. So Failure Friday is a collection of stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course failure. So just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you will hear directly from Sidestlers who have struggled to get something off the ground.
Or perhaps they have encountered an unstoppable force such as COVID-19. That's what you're gonna hear about today. Not COVID so much particularly because you already know about that, but about how it affects this guy's business. So this story features Rob from Washington DC. We told the successful story of his tour business on episode 508, I believe.
Government researcher offers private tours of nation's capital and that tour business was doing really well. It was just kind of cruising along, lots of clients. And then, I don't know, something weird happened in the spring of 2020 that caused business to drop 89%. Let's let Rob tell the story as well as how he is looking ahead to the future, what he's learned, et cetera. And then I'll come back at the end to wrap us up.
[Music]
My name is Rob Tingelow. I'm the founder and owner of Trip Hacks DC Tours. I help people plan their Washington DC trips and give them guided tours once they get here. On March 7th, 2020, I got an email from a customer who was booked on a tour with me the following day. They said they had decided to cancel their entire trip because of COVID-19.
My first reaction was disappointment. I was pretty upset because this was a last minute cancellation. But I went out and gave several other tours that week. Things felt okay. However, just a few days later, it was clear that these would be my last tours for a while.
Cancellations started pouring in. My credit card processor flagged my account for an excessive number of refunds in a short period of time. It's somewhat fitting that it was a Friday the 13th when I walked into a physical bank branch to wire the funds necessary to cover those refunds. This was not something I ever imagined doing. I sat in the banker's corner office as he typed routing and account numbers into the computer.
And he asked me if I thought the business was done for. I didn't really know how to answer in that moment. At the end of 2020, I closed the books on TripHacks DC. Tour sales were down 89% compared to 2019 in what I had initially expected to be a great year. From the experience, I learned not to be too hard on myself for things that are completely out of my control.
There's nothing I could have personally done to stop COVID from devastating the travel industry. Similarly, there's nothing I could do to control the big tourist sites in Washington DC. When Smithsonian museums are closed, a lot of people don't have a desire to vacation here for completely understandable reasons. But at the end of the day, that's out of my hands. I also learned that it's important not to lose focus during a crisis.
There was a lot of temptation to spend my time and energy pursuing things like virtual tourism, mail order gift boxes, and other unproven pivots that are not the core of my business or what I'm good at. In the end, I'm glad I didn't chase shiny objects. Now that there is light at the end of the tunnel, I hope to be back soon doing the thing that I love, giving tours. [Music]
Friday the 13th, wiring money for refunds. How about that?
Well, good for Rob for sticking things out, doing the best he could, understanding that there's a lot that he couldn't control. I spent a lot of time learning that lesson over the past year as well. Perhaps you did too. And this is another reason why a side hustle is so great because even though it's disappointing, to say the least, when your business drops, whatever it was, 89%, I think he said, it's not his main source of income or his only source of income. So I'm really glad that he is able now to get back to work.
Thanks again, Rob. Check out his website at triphaxdc.com. triphaxdc.com or follow him on social, pretty much every social network it looks like at Trip Hacks DC. So check that out. If you've got a question or an update for us, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
Thank you so much for joining in today. Remember, never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. Let's get back to work, everybody. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
[Music]
From the Onward Project.
