This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not more. It's with this principle in mind, we have started Failure Friday. It is this new segment, been running for a couple months now, a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. Just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you'll hear directly from side hustlers who have struggled to get something off the ground. I'll tell you a quick story of something that went very wrong.
Hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Glad you're out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host, and I have been enjoying this segment so much. I hope you have as well.
The stories that we've been sharing, they tend to vary a bit, but often the story begins with an idea what the person thought would happen, and then of course, what really happened. And finally, what they learned from it. So there's often a bit of a gap between that part about how here's what they thought was going to happen, and here's what actually happened in the end. That's often where the adjustment and expectations has to take place, and then hopefully some lesson after that as well. But the whole entrepreneurial journey, just like the whole life journey, is one that consists of mistakes, missteps, sometimes disasters, sometimes failure, but hopefully a bit of regrouping and redirection.
We try, however, in this segment to focus more specifically on the actual mistake or disaster or whatever went wrong, rather than just skipping ahead to the lesson, because when you are going through something difficult, you're not necessarily thinking like, oh, I'm going to get through this and it's going to be fine on the other end. I mean, it probably will be, and you probably know that, even when something difficult is occurring. But in that moment, it can seem very wrong, right? So we just want to stay on that moment a bit. Today's short story features Chris Waters.
This guy has an incredible business. I love what he does. We first featured him in episode 943. Reddit Secret Santa delivers sack full of adventure. So he has built a whole business around something that is an incredibly fun project, a project slash business slash mission.
But even a Secret Santa has some fails along the way. So let's hear from Chris about a point in his client contract that he was a bit too relaxed about, perhaps, until he learned his lesson. So over to him and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
Hi there, my name is Chris Waters. I go by The Architect.
I founded a bespoke event planning business called Constructed Adventures, where I build out seemingly serendipitous perfect days and wild adventures for clients. A really easy term to latch onto is just very elaborate treasure scavenger hunts. Anyway, early on in the business, I was still trying to figure out pricing. A lot of event planners just charge a flat rate for the whole thing and then do their best to try to get the margins to a point where they're making a profit that's worth their time. So that's what I was doing.
And I ended up getting to adventure number seven. For context now, I've done 74 adventures. So this was very, very early on. And it was a Valentine's Day anniversary adventure. And this was early on, so I wasn't charging enough money anyway, but I made one big mistake.
And that is charging a flat rate for the whole adventure. The problem with this is I send them to a restaurant where they're told they can order whatever they want. Everything's already been covered. I thought this was gonna be perfectly fine because it was Valentine's Day and many restaurants do prefixed meals and menus so I can gauge how much it's gonna cost. Unfortunately, the client and his fiance ended up ordering like four or five bottles of wine, which tripled the price of the Valentine's Day meal and went way over budget.
So after working really hard to build this whole perfect date day, running the whole thing, I ended up losing money on the adventure because I didn't put any addendum capping the amount of money that they could spend. So lesson learned with this is now when the contract is sent and the budget is broken down is where I expect the money to go. There is a caveat that says, if this adventure goes over budget because you decided to spend two to $3,000 on food or wine 'cause you wanted the most expensive thing, you're paying for those two to $3,000. I'm not gonna eat that out of my flat rate. So my lesson that I've learned now is I charge a flat rate for my work and everything else is charged on top of that and that includes food so they can order whatever they want without any risk to me.
Thank you guys. I hope that was an enjoyable story. If you are an event planner, by all means, don't hesitate to reach out. I would love to hear how you do things. Cheers.
[Music]
Awesome, thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate you sharing there and I love everything that he's doing. As I mentioned before, very elaborate treasure scavenger hunts is how he describes it, creating seemingly serendipitous perfect days. And as you heard there in his story, Chris has a spirit of adventure, even though it is a misadventure, turned into a misadventure. In this case, he really believes in the work he does in creating these wonderful experiences for people, just with a limit on the food and beverage spend now.
So never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is our overall theme for this segment. Check out Chris's website at constructedadventures.com, constructedadventures.com, or follow him on Instagram at constructed_adventures. Also, as you just heard, he's happy to hear from other event planners. And maybe there's somebody out there who wants to book a seemingly serendipitous perfect day.
Check it out. There's an online form on his site where you can give him some information. He'll get back to you. If you have a question for us, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. All right, that's it for today.
Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you'll subscribe and come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
