This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
In today's episode, a listener from Georgia wants to franchise her culinary tours. She has a successful side hustle already. She's organizing these tours. The venture is flourishing, delighting both locals and tourists. And the growing popularity has sparked interest from other cities, or at least she's thinking about it.
She's thinking about this possibility of going beyond her current location and franchising it. So how do you do that? And by the way, I've talked in previous episodes about how buying a franchise is not usually a great idea, at least buying one of those big national franchises that everybody knows all about. But when you're the one doing the franchising, that could be a little bit different. So I'm not sure we've ever talked about it, at least from this angle.
So let's tackle it here in this episode. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Thanks for tuning in today. Detailed question along with my answer in just 30 seconds. [Music]
I'm Aisha from Savannah, Georgia.
My side hustle involves organizing local culinary tours that highlight regional cuisine and hidden gems in our city. It's been a hit with both locals and tourists growing faster than I expected. I'm now getting inquiries from other cities about my business model. This has led me to consider franchising. What are the key steps and legal considerations in turning a side hustle like mine into a franchise?
How do I assess if my business model is replicable and robust enough to become a successful franchise? [Music]
Hey, thanks for the question. Franchising a culinary tour could be a good opportunity or it could be a big headache and hassle. Let's just be clear, it could go either way. I know some people who've had both experiences.
Sometimes they think, oh, we're gonna take this global or national or regional, whatever it is, we're gonna take it beyond what it is currently. And you just end up kind of trying that for a couple of years and maybe it works and you think it's gonna take off. And then as I said, it just turns into a great difficulty. Obviously the potential return or reward could be amazing, but you just have to always think like, why could this not work? Like what could go wrong here?
And I think when you think about city tours, you can always think, well, couldn't somebody else do that? Like couldn't somebody replicate that? What's my secret sauce? No pun intended when we're talking about restaurant tours here. But why is it working so well here?
And am I sure that this can be replicated elsewhere? That's just a word of caution. But now let me give you some practical steps. So practical steps, franchise suitability assessment. You wanna do a detailed analysis of your business.
Again, thinking about uniqueness, but also the scalability of your operations. You want to develop comprehensive guides. You really want to create detailed operation manuals and training guides. You wanna spend a lot of time systemizing your business. That is a key to franchising and whichever side you're on.
Like if you're trying to buy a franchise, you're trying to be a franchisee, then the head business, the head office, they want you to follow things pretty strictly. And they've got like, here is this operating procedure and you've got to do it this way. And that's great if it's a profitable business 'cause then that works, right? They know what works, you're supposed to do it. So on the other side, like when you're the one developing the franchise, you need to create that model.
I also think it's smart to start with a pilot in one or two cities, just to see like how does your operation go from your area to someone else? How does your knowledge transfer to other people? You might identify some gaps as part of that. And really what you wanna do is to establish proof of concept before you take your franchise options and opportunities out elsewhere. As I said, it can amplify your side hustle success, but it requires a lot of planning and execution to get right.
I'm always cheering you on. I'm always wishing you the best. I just want you to be careful. Listeners, if you have a question or a situation, a scenario, sidehustleschool.com/questions, more to come throughout the year. Hey, guess what?
Tomorrow is a bonus day. Tomorrow is a day that only comes around once every four years. That's fun. I'll share more about that tomorrow. And then of course, new episode every day, regardless of what day of the week it is.
That's it for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
