London Chocolate Tours Lead to Sweet Success

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

[Music]

Hey there, what's up, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. I am your host, Chris Guillebeau, coming to you from the sound studio at World Domination headquarters in Portland, Oregon. And in yesterday's episode, I talked about one type of tourism side hustle, a guy who's an amateur pilot and is making money by showing off parts of Oregon, actually. Today is another tourism-focused side hustle, and this one is all about chocolate.

So if you listened to yesterday's story and thought, well, that's awesome, but I'm not a pilot, do you like chocolate? Great, keep listening. Now, I often talk about the importance of writing lists. If you're trying to figure out what your side hustle is, I would highly encourage you, whenever you have a chance, take out your notebook or just grab a piece of paper and start writing down all the ways you spend your time when you have a choice about it. So write down your hobbies.

What do you like to read? What kind of music do you like? Do you like sports? Do you like video games? What do you do when you go online and you've got some time to just kind of mess around?

What websites do you gravitate toward when you're planning a trip? Where do you want to go? Or let's say if you could go anywhere, where would that be? And if the day is wide open to you, how do you spend that time? Now, I don't actually believe that the best way to start your side hustle is to follow your passion, but it's true that many successful side hustles come from digging into those things that you enjoy and seeing if there's something that connects them, not just something that's beneficial to yourself, but something that could be beneficial to others.

And that's what you'll hear in today's story. It's all about a series of chocolate tours in London that eventually turn into a full-time job bringing in a six-figure income. But like a lot of stories, it was an overnight success that took a while. That story's coming right up. [Music]

Today's story comes from London, where Jennifer Earl runs chocolate tours.

It sounds like a dream job, right? Well, it definitely is now, but it took her a while to get there. To really understand this story, we have to jump back to 2005 when Jennifer was temping part-time to make ends meet. She knew she wanted to do something on her own, but she wasn't sure what that would be. So she started writing down everything she loved and everything she was good at.

That list included chocolate, meeting people, talking, eating, and London. From there, she brainstormed different ideas, and the standout idea was chocolate tours. She optimistically figured that everyone loves chocolate, or at least most people, so it should be an easy sell. And just as important, it was the right level of commitment for her. It was different enough that it was outside her comfort zone, but also small enough that she wouldn't have to take out a loan, spend a ton of money, or take a lot of risk to get started.

So how did she get started? Well, she began with research, and in some ways, research meant trying a lot of chocolate, but it also meant learning more about the history of the city. She wanted her walking tours to combine food with quirky historical facts. So she researched and prepared for about a year before she actually got going. Now, in talking with her friends, she met someone who was quitting his day job to become a full-time business coach.

He was kind enough to teach her how to create a basic website. And basic it was, to keep things simple, Jennifer made the tour dates linked to a PayPal payment where people could pay for the tour. She would then manually track bookings with an Excel spreadsheet, a system that she admitted led to lots of errors as she got up and running. Still though, her total cost of startup were less than 100 pounds. Not quite a $100 startup, but close.

Jennifer's first customers came through her Toastmasters group. Since she knew everyone in that group, she charged half price and also invited some friends for free to round out the group. She thought that first tour would be about two and a half hours, but it turned out she had enough material to last four hours. To herself, this helped her justify the 60 pound fee that she was charging. Now here was an interesting experience.

A few months after getting up and running, she got her first media call from a journalist who wanted to feature her in an article about Europe's hidden secrets in "The Daily Mail." Now "The Daily Mail" is a huge newspaper with a lot of readership, so Jennifer was sure this was her big break. A few weeks later, the journalist called back to say that the article would be in the upcoming Saturday paper, and Jennifer panicked. She was worried about that PayPal Excel spreadsheet system that she had hacked together. She said the system didn't have a maximum number of tickets, so there was no way to prevent 40 people from signing up, for example. She had a vision of her tours being wildly overbooked and having to contact all the people to sort out the situation.

This actually happened when she was on a mini break in the south of France with her then boyfriend. The couple spent most of the weekend trying to fix the ticket system. The then boyfriend was not particularly happy, and in the end, she actually only sold three pair of tickets. So the big break in "The Daily Mail" was not that big. After about a year of trying to make her chocolate tours into full-time income, Jennifer decided she needed a, quote, "real job." All this time, she had been doing temporary work on the side while devoting much of her attention to the hustle.

So for the next several years, she worked a real job. She was a buyer at Marks & Spencer and a food developer at the UK headquarters of McDonald's. She said these were great learning experiences, but she still really just wanted to be on her own. So she continued to build the hustle. Those first few years, she only made a few thousand pounds, but business slowly increased.

During those years, she never actually paid herself out of the revenue, but she was able to write off most of her expenses, which allowed her to save much of her salary from her corporate job. And that meant she was able to put a down payment on her flat and still save money for when she quit her job to focus on the tours. In 2012, she brought in 16,000 pounds in revenue, and since 24,000 pounds was the average salary at the time, she felt pretty good. So good, in fact, that at the end of the year, she decided to quit her job and make that jump to full-time entrepreneur. Over the next two years, revenue doubled each year, and in 2016, she brought in 82,000 pounds, which is about $106,000.

These days, Jennifer has multiple tours around London, as well as specialty workshops for schools and corporations. She now has a team that runs most of the actual tours. She's upgraded her website and uses a system called Peak Pro for all her tour bookings, and that connects directly to her Stripe account, which is much upgraded from the old PayPal and Excel spreadsheet setup. And now that this business is at a sustainable level, the experience has given her the confidence and skills to launch something new. The new project is called Taste Tripper.

It offers curated, self-guided tours revolving around chocolate, coffee, or beer. She's looking to bring on partners for the new experience, and she has high hopes that it may actually exceed the chocolate tours, but if it doesn't, or if it takes some time, she can rely on the income from that overnight success that she's built up over many years. [Music]

Well, as I said, sometimes it takes a while to make a big success. There are a lot of overnight successes in the world that take a few years or more, but look now. What a great success story.

The next time you're in London, be sure to check out Chocolate Ecstasy Tours. I will be there myself in October for several days of events. Hopefully, I'll get to see some listeners. And listeners, wherever you are, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Today's show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/r.

So much more is on the way. I'm Chris Guillebeau. So much more is on the way. I'll be back once more tomorrow. [Music]