Food Tour Guide Chomps Down on $100,000 Profit

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

[Music]

Food tour guide chomps down on $100,000 profit. Welcome friends and welcome to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau, your host, bringing you stories, ideas, tips, actionable information, actionable education, you can take away and apply. Hopefully get you thinking about your own side hustle or small business or the next thing you can do to create financial freedom in your life, even without quitting your job. That's what we're all about.

Today, I'm gonna tell you about a Colorado food tour business that in less than a year turned $100,000 profit. This started many years ago, it's still going. I'll come back to that at the end of the episode. But for now, I'll say the story is very much aligned with my values and many of our listeners as well. So if you are new and you're like, what are the values?

Well, here's how this person put it. This person I'm gonna tell you about, her name is Jessica. When we asked her what is the greatest thing about her side hustle, she said, I absolutely love controlling my time. I like to go to the gym when I want, walk my dog, travel as much as I want, as long as I have my laptop and phone. So far this year, I've been to Mexico City, Vancouver, Chicago, Italy, heading to Cabo next month and the business continued to run through each of those trips.

So that is a desirable lifestyle for a lot of people. If you're looking for a life like that or maybe just something similar in your own way, of course, maybe you should pay attention to this story. Stay tuned, be right back. [Music]

Jessica Baumgard has made a lot of active choices. The Denver, Colorado native was working in marketing when she and her husband took a year long career break traveling through five continents.

They did that after saving up for several years and downsizing most of their possessions. When they came home, Jessica didn't wanna jump straight back into the same kind of work. She needed something new and she found it in at least two new opportunities. The first was a business where she started teaching private cooking classes. And then on the side, she moonlighted for a company that provided guided food tours.

She discovered that she liked leading the tours for strangers more than she liked cooking for them. Maybe it was because someone else cleaned up. Maybe it was because she got to connect more instead of slaving away in the kitchen. Whatever it was, she liked the tour guide biz and she had some ideas on how she'd do it differently if it was her own project. Eight months later, she made her own project, starting her own brand, starting her own food tours.

Each tour lasts about three hours. It covers six tastings around the city, followed the same format of some other tours with good food and rotating locations. But this iteration had her own spin. It focused more on local chefs and local ingredients to truly give a memorable and unique experience. She spent a total of $3,000 to get started.

This investment covered building and hosting her website, hiring a graphic designer to create her logo, filing an LLC in Colorado, a membership to Denver's visitors bureau, and liability insurance for the walking tours. And that visitors bureau membership is where a lot of her early customers came from. She drummed up further interest by reaching out to hotel concierges to offer them a free tour. Her goal was to get them to recommend the tours to their guests. Five days after her website went up, Jessica received her first booking.

She said she was caught off guard at how quickly it got started. All of a sudden, the planning was real. Three months in, she was guiding tours seven days a week and desperately trying to hire other guides to take some of the stress off her plate so she could turn it into a real business. Well, at the time of our original story, it had been a year since Jessica launched Savor Denver. How fast can you grow a tour business in one year?

It turned out that the business was on track to gross $200,000 with net income of around $100,000. Again, only with $3,000 in startup costs. That is a pretty good return on investment, I think. She was hosting 350 to 450 guests a month. Also, as noted in the introduction, as Jessica grew the business, hired other guides, she was able to travel and just kind of live her life as the business grew on its own.

Well, not totally on its own, of course, 'cause she was still very much involved, but without her being on the ground leading all the tours day by day. At the time we left off, she had decided to let go of the other business with the cooking lessons. Focusing full time on the tours, she recently added a cocktail tour to her repertoire and was planning to launch more neighborhood tours in response to demand. [Music]

Are these tours still going? Yes, they are.

Check out delicious denverfoodtours.com to learn more about Jessica's business. She's got Denver Food Tour, Denver Cocktails Tour, Arts District Food Tour. She's got private tours. If you don't wanna hang out with strangers, basically your choice, public tour, private tour. And as noted, she loves the freedom of choosing her own work hours and work locations, being able to work from Cabo, in particular for part of the winter.

Jessica said she never would have been able to have that kind of time off in her nine to five job. And it also helps that they get to be work trips because of course she gets to sample local food. That sounds good to me. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

We tell you these stories to get you thinking about what you can do, what you can create for yourself. And I really believe there is something out there you can make for yourself. So get to work on that. Get closer to a goal every day. Just a little bit of progress does help.

I try to do that myself in my own life. So I will leave you today, but of course, new episodes coming up and you can access the complete archives of sidehustleschool.com. 3,300 plus free episodes. That's it for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.