This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hello, my friends! Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau and today, or at least today's episode, is Thanksgiving Day. If you're listening to this in real time in the U.S., Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. If you're listening from outside the U.S., I would say as well, Happy Thanksgiving, even though it may not be your holiday. It
is personally my favorite holiday of the year. It is centered around gratitude, or at least in theory it is. And if you're listening to this later from anywhere, I'm pretty sure you can still have a gratitude practice just about any day of the year. The last Thursday in November does not have a monopoly on that. Now, what else can you do on Thanksgiving?
You can eat pie. And yes, you can do this any other day of the year as well, too. Today's story is, in fact, about Thanksgiving. It is about pie. Specifically, it's about a seasonal side hustle from a New York City woman who earns a pretty good amount of money on the side, five figures, just by baking pies two days a week every November. How did this come
about and how did this woman become known as the Pie Lady of Washington Heights? Well, stay tuned. I'll tell you in just a moment. When you look past the stuffing and cranberry sauce, Thanksgiving is a time when we take stock and express our gratitude to loved ones. Back in the day, the first American Thanksgiving was neither a feast nor a holiday, but rather a simple gathering of survivors. Following
the Mayflower's arrival at Plymouth Rock on December 11th, 1620, the Pilgrims suffered the loss of 46 of their original 102 settlers. But with the assistance of 91 members from the Wampanoag tribe, the remaining Pilgrims survived the bitter winter and yielded a bountiful harvest in 1621. To celebrate their survival, a traditional English harvest festival lasted three days and has continued ever since with some modifications to the Thanksgiving observance we carry on in modern times. Now, the first thing you need to know about today's side hustler, June Francis Coleman, is that while she is a proud New Yorker working in the film industry, her familial roots go back to Alabama, the home state of her mother, where hospitality and an abundant amount of food could always be counted on. As is traditional with many Southern families sharing cooking responsibilities in the kitchen and meals at the dinner table is not just something you did when all your schedules lined up. It was a necessity. It
was how they connected in good times and bad. Her June of the holidays lost some of their appeal when her mother passed away. Since so much of the focus was on spending time with family, Thanksgiving and Christmas were especially rough. But in the fall of 2011, just over two years after the death of her mother, June began to get excited about holidays again. One day right around Thanksgiving, she received some unexpected visitors to her Washington Heights residence. The couple who lived next door had gone apple picking with
their young son and decided to share in their bounty by bringing her a bushel of apples. It reminded her of a simpler time, similar to how she grew up where neighbors were on a first name basis and shared what they had. And most of all, it reminded her of her mom. June was moved by their kindness and even though she was still grieving, she couldn't help but think, what would mom do? It occurred to her that mom would bake a couple of pies and share one with this lovely family. June rolled up her sleeves and got to baking using
a cherished family apple pie recipe that had been passed down to her from her mother and her mother before her. This pie known as Nana's Alabama apple pie was well received by the couple and their son. In fact, it was so well received that they begged her to make more for a holiday party they were hosting. Feeling as though she had found a way to rekindle the love of baking that she shared with her mother, June said yes. Everyone loved those pies at the party and many people asked how they could get pies of their own. Well, that's
when it occurred to her that while the Big Apple boasted plenty of amazing places to get cakes and cupcakes, there was a serious deficit of really good apple pie. And not just that, but pie in general. She felt that if anyone could fill this pie-less void, it was her, but June was also a little busy. She worked as a production accountant in the motion picture and television industry, an intense job that required a lot of hours and commitment. She knew that she wouldn't have the bandwidth to start up an actual bakery. So instead of
taking the unnecessary risk of building something that she wasn't sure was going to take off, she decided to start a pie shop out of her own home. Unlike the regulations in some other states, cottage laws in New York City allowed the production of pies out of a home kitchen without any kind of income cap. So June filed a request called a 20C exemption that would exempt her side hustle from the licensing laws that usually apply to food manufacturers and started her side hustle, Fancy Pies, as a sole proprietorship. That first year was mostly an experiment. She started out baking for each of her five favorite family pie recipes, including Nana's Alabama Apple, creamy Jamaican spice pumpkin, and her southern bourbon pecan.
Now the interesting thing about these cottage laws was that she was allowed to produce the food in her kitchen and then sell it, but she couldn't sell the food from her house. So what did June do? Well, she stood outside in her Washington Heights neighborhood, selling pies to the people who inspired her to start Fancy Pies in the first place, her neighbors. That experiment was a big success. She realized for next year, she would have to take her operation somewhere else because her neighbors, bless their hearts, simply wouldn't leave her alone. After selling out of the pie she had baked to sell, she set off to celebrate
her own holiday with a stack of pies and actually had someone chase her down the street asking her if they could buy them. The neighbors had even stopped calling her June and began calling her the pie lady, which was of course a compliment. June realized that with demand being as high as it was, she'd need to scale up her production for the following year. By then she had started going to graduate school at Sarah Lawrence College, and she discovered that they had a massive production kitchen in one of the buildings that she had a class in. June was able to strike a short term rental agreement so that she could use their space to bake her holiday pies for the season. This time she had 85 pre-orders coming
up, so she enlisted the help of a close friend to do the job with her. Unfortunately, her friend bailed on her, so she ended up rolling out every one of those pies by hand herself. It simply wasn't feasible for her to do it that way, so after the final pie was picked up she decided to retire her baker's apron for the 2013 and 2014 seasons. But our story is not over because in 2015 she realized how much she'd missed it. And this time she decided to look for a contract baker in a new space. A couple of hours of online research
led to her securing her first contract baking partnership, and she ended up doing a pop-up shop at a restaurant that had always been a big fan of her pies. This setup worked pretty well for June, who continued this way through 2016. She added two new pie sizes to her offerings, a couple new flavors as well, Miss Lady's Cherry and Mama's Dutch Apple, and was able to churn out a few hundred pies in 2015 and around five hundred in 2016. But there were challenges in the pie hustle. Since she wasn't baking them herself anymore, she felt it was hard to ensure that her product was consistent.
She never received a single complaint from her customers, but to June, fancy pies wasn't just a pie company, this was her mother's legacy. So she decided this year, 2017, she needed to take things back into her own hands. Literally. So now June is at it again. But this time she's got some help from an industrial dough roller and a massive 40 quart mixer courtesy of the kitchen she rents space from at the Hebrew Tabernacle of Washington Heights.
Production has been streamlined to just two days a week, where she'll generally bake around a hundred full size pies, 400 mini pies, and around 20 to 30 special order extra large pies each week. Fancy pies is an opportunity to do something she loves while sharing her family's traditions with her neighbors. It also doesn't hurt that this seasonal side hustle should bring June an additional $10,000 this year while she's only working two days a week in the month of November and the vast majority of her customer base has come completely through word of mouth. A little gratitude can go a long way. And in June's case, it brought her not only that extra money, but also a chance to reconnect with those family traditions, show hospitality to the neighbors and honor her mother's legacy. I just hope
she's still able to enjoy some of Nana's Alabama Apple for herself. I don't have much to add to this story today, but I do like how it kind of transitions. And at first it was just selling pies to the neighbors from her house. And then her first attempt at being a bit more commercial and selling more pies ended up being so tough that she took the next couple of years off, but then she came back. And for two years, she worked with a commercial baker, did that pop up shop 500 pies last year. But then now
as you saw this year, she's taking matters back into her own hands, just getting smarter about the equipment she uses trying to be more efficient while still putting a lot of love into those pies. Now, speaking of gratitude and pie, first of all, I'm grateful for you and second, I got to go eat some pie. Thank you for listening today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/327.
I will indeed be back tomorrow with another story. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
