This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey, hey, hey, what's up? Welcome back. This is "Sydistle School." I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Today's segment is known as Throwback Thursday. It's where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them.
Now, last week we heard from a former attorney and White House aide who starts a service helping businesses with podcasts. It's actually grown into a seven-figure operation. Today, in our latest feature, we're focusing on the phenomenal fungi business from Asheville, North Carolina. That's correct. That's not even a name I made up.
That's their name, Phenomenal Fungi. And we featured the founder, Dave Eberhart, long ago in episode 1003. Fungi becomes sporadic mushroom farmer. Today, we're gonna hear from his partner, Shannon Barrett. Dave looks after the mushrooms and Shannon comprises the C-suite of the company.
She does things like update the website and talk to us. Now, I really appreciate her taking time because it's been a busy year in the mushroom kingdom. They're now selling about $20,000 a month. So let's hear her updates. She's got lots of good stuff here and I'll be back at the end to wrap us up.
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We launched our side hustle in 2018 and initially thought we would be growing gourmet mushrooms to sell at farmer's markets and to local restaurants. Instead, our business now focuses on providing equipment and supplies to other mushroom growers. David, or Cougar, as he's known to friends, has been a mushroom forager since he was a kid. When we moved to Asheville, we discovered a large community of mushroom enthusiasts. He began growing mushrooms in bags at home and soon we had more than we could eat.
As a 30-year herbalist and a self-proclaimed science nerd, he knew there were other things we could do with those mushrooms. So he began making extracts, also known as tinctures. The tinctures capture the beneficial compounds from the mushrooms, making them more bioavailable. We started sharing them with friends and family and then decided to launch an online business. At the time, we thought we'd sell a few tinctures online but would focus on selling fresh mushrooms locally.
David is the founder of the company and the heart and this is his main side hustle. He was a master carpenter for almost 35 years and wanted a business that incorporated his passion for mushrooms, the outdoors, and helping people reconnect to our original medicines. In 2019, he scaled back from working as a carpenter and focused on the side hustle full-time. I help out in my spare time but I still work as the HR director for our local municipality. My experience in project management, budgeting, communication, and marketing help support the business.
So much has happened since we were last on the show. As we shared in our original episode, Whole Foods had just proclaimed mushrooms as a top food trend in 2018, noting their health benefits. By 2019, more people were starting small-scale mushroom farms to do what we'd originally planned, grow gourmet mushrooms to sell locally. Anyone growing at that scale needs certain specialized equipment and supplies. One piece of equipment that makes life a lot easier for hobbyists and small mushroom farmers is a laminar flow hood.
This piece of equipment creates sterile airflow which is essential for working with mushroom cultures and for bag production. David built his own when he had trouble finding one to purchase. A friend saw it and asked him to build one for him, then another friend asked, and eventually I suggested we list them on our Etsy site. In 2019, we were selling about one flow hood a month. We also began selling mushroom cultures.
A small amount of mushroom mycelium think mushroom seeds that gets expanded on substrate to produce the fruit bodies or mushrooms. During that time, we sold some fresh mushrooms, but most of what we were growing was going into our mushroom tinctures. Our business took a turn when we realized that we were not going to be mushroom farmers, but instead we'd be supplying other mushroom growers. In 2020, our business exploded. We went from averaging about $1,400 a month to $20,000 a month in sales.
Everything changed when the pandemic hit. Suddenly people had time to try new hobbies and they began buying flow hoods and cultures. We had a hard time keeping up with the demand. We learned a lot about production, supply schedules, and shipping last year. Our biggest challenge currently is the same so many other businesses are facing, access to supplies and materials.
We use HEPA filters in our flow hoods and it now takes our manufacturer about 12 weeks to ship them. When we started, it took about two weeks. The lead time keeps increasing and we never quite catch up. We also experienced trouble sourcing plywood earlier in the year. Now it's metal.
We use metal trim to protect the filters and we're having a hard time sourcing it. Shipping continues to be one of the bigger challenges, although we've come a long way from last year. We tried the big national carriers and had terrible experiences. Now we rely on private couriers that we find through the online platform U-Ship. We also use freight for some hard to deliver areas like Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
The advice I would share with someone thinking about starting a hustle like ours, one that's based on a passion or a niche, would be to think about the supplies and equipment that are required to be successful as a possible business option. Our pivot happened organically, but in hindsight, I'm glad it did because we're in an area with a lot of other mushroom farmers so there is a lot of competition. David is starting to offer classes locally and we have plans to record videos with information about how to grow mushrooms at home. We've partnered with another entrepreneur who created a unique hydroponic system that allows you to grow just about anything on your kitchen counter. We're working with him to produce mushroom spawns specifically for his systems.
Our business doesn't look anything like we originally envisioned and that's okay. We're really excited to see what comes next. [Music]
Thanks so much Shannon, really appreciate those updates. Really interesting to hear of course about the supply chain issues. We are seeing that across a lot of different businesses.
It's been in the media a lot. So, good luck navigating all of that and congratulations on going from a $1,400 a month business to a $20,000 a month business. It's probably a good thing that Dave is now full time in the land of mushrooms. Again, Shannon runs this business with her partner, Dave. You can check out the Phenomenal Fungi website at guess what?
Phenomenalfungi.com. If you can't spell that, just type in something close to that in Google, you'll probably find it. And there you can buy mushroom tinctures, mushroom cultures and mushroom merch, including hoodies, t-shirts and mugs. Doesn't everyone want those things? Maybe you know someone who wants one for a holiday gift.
Anyway, check it out. Also, let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives for more than 1,000 stories. We are going strong here in the last month of the year. I'm so glad you're part of this community. Thanks for taking time and I hope you'll come back tomorrow.
New episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
