This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello and greetings. Welcome back to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. We are kicking off a brand new week today. I hope you're having a good day, a good morning, afternoon, or evening, whatever time it is in your world.
Got a lot of great stories for you this week. Today is actually a big success. It actually turns into a huge success, making literally millions of dollars. But as you know, if you've been listening to the show for a while, I like to focus on the origin story. If you hear something that's doing really well, you think, well, that's great, but how did it actually come to be?
And what I wanna show you is that a lot of really big successes, not always a million dollars, but $100,000 or $50,000 or whatever the number is, a lot of those big successes really do come from people looking within themselves and understanding their skills, their hobbies, their passions, experimenting a bit, being willing to step out and try something, even if they're not sure what the outcome is gonna be, and then just tweaking or adjusting as they go along. So today's journey will literally take us from $100 to $10 million. And it all started as a hobby. It started as an interest in baseball. We're gonna call this the All-American from Hawaii hits a home run with baseball apparel hustle.
And we will step up to the plate right after this quick message from our sponsor. [Music]
Hawaiian native Travis Chok has always loved baseball. He started playing when he was five and hasn't stopped since. In high school, he broke his arm during the season and had to spend the rest of his time recovering. Unfortunately, that also meant he was cut from his high school team, but he would go on to make the club baseball team at the University of Oregon and transform himself into a two-time All-American.
Baseball wasn't just a sport for Travis, it was his life. With such a strong interest, it comes as no surprise that Travis's first job would be related to baseball as well. He graduated from the UFO with a degree in education, but had no idea what he was gonna do with it. Drawing on his sports experience, he sought out a job as a junior varsity coach at a nearby high school. But he soon discovered there just wasn't a strong baseball culture in Eugene, Oregon.
For someone whose identity was centered around the sport, Travis was dismayed. As an Asian-American from Hawaii, he had never really felt like he fit into any social groups in school and baseball was where he found people he could relate to. Since the baseball community in Oregon was seriously lacking, he decided he would try to fill the void himself. He got together with some former teammates from his club baseball days. They decided that the best way to do this was to put together youth baseball camps.
So for each week that summer, Travis and the gang taught 24 kids between the ages of seven and 12, everything they knew about the sport they loved. For this venture, they settled on the name baseballism because, well, maybe it related to tribalism, but maybe it just sounded cool. As is typical with most baseball camps, there are free t-shirts given out to the campgoers, but instead of just using a generic t-shirt design, Travis and his partners decided to design them themselves on high quality shirts. Travis had spent a fair amount of time teaching himself design, but his motivations for doing so were a bit different. You see, when he was in high school, he used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to change the grades on a failing report card so that he would have something better to show his parents.
Whenever he ran into a problem he couldn't solve, he would turn to YouTube for the information he needed. Kids, there you go. If you ever get in trouble in school, you might want to learn Photoshop. Never know when it's gonna come in handy. The camp ran successfully for two years over the summer, but eventually the four friends went their separate ways and got real jobs.
Travis ended up working as a physical education teacher. He pretty much assumed that baseballism had run its course, but it turned out it wasn't gonna sit on the bench for long. See, Travis continued to wear those camp t-shirts around town, those ones he was proud of after developing his Photoshop skills in high school, and occasionally he'd have people stop him on the street and ask him where he purchased the shirt. One day he was hanging out with his old partners and he mentioned this. It turned out it wasn't an isolated trend.
People were coming up to them to ask where they got their shirts too. They began to consider how they could transition their old business, baseballism, into an apparel company. So in 2012, Travis took a chance and used $3,500 from a credit card to get their new side hustle off the ground. They put that money toward a Kickstarter campaign with a video about what they were trying to do and a preliminary batch of baseballism branded shirts, caps, stickers, and mobile and computer backgrounds for their supporters. After 55 days, they exceeded their Kickstarter goal of $13,000 and they got to work.
There wasn't a whole lot of thinking involved at that point. Travis hit up a local screen printing shop and that shop recommended several blank t-shirt manufacturers. The team got some samples and they made a decision. It helped that the other three teammates had specialized skill sets as well. One had become a lawyer, another worked in finance, and the last had a lot of experience in sales and operations.
These skills complemented one another and they operated with a philosophy founded in baseball, know your role, trust your teammates, and don't get in their way. Travis's garage became baseballism HQ for all incoming and outgoing orders, and they focused their attentions on building a strong audience through social media. Travis really liked to tweet. In fact, he tweeted so much, he exceeded his Twitter limit the first few days. An hour after hour, he would just put out these baseballisms or these little sayings, like you'll never know until you dive or live life like a three to one count, which don't make much sense if you don't play baseball, but it created a kind of in the know community.
This proved crucial to the success of baseballism as they attracted only the right people who would buy their product. Sales grew so much during the holidays, even the first year, that it was no longer feasible to run the business out of Travis's garage. It was one thing when he started having trouble maneuvering around all the merchandise, but it became more pressing when his neighbors began to complain about all the trucks that were inconveniently taking up all the road space when they were dropping off shipments at his house. It was a good problem to have, but it also meant that they needed to look into a more permanent solution. They eventually rented a small store in Northeast Portland, Oregon, and they brought in over $300,000 in revenue their first year.
By the third year, when Travis finally quit his job to go full time on the hustle, baseballism did 1.3 million in sales. 2015 was 2.7 million and just under $7 million in 2016. This year, they are poised to make more than $10 million, with slightly under 20% going to their bottom line, so at least $2 million in profit, and they now have four brick and mortar stores in Portland, Atlanta, Scottsdale, and Cooperstown. What had once started out as a passion project has clearly taken off and turned into a very thriving business. Travis says he does remember frequent struggles and packing orders until 3 a.m.
while he still continued to have his day job for two years. But like the other thing, it wasn't a terrible problem to have. The best part of this experience for Travis has been being able to work with his friends and also never feeling bored. He's hoping to open more stores and become a household name. In fact, he says there's nothing else he'd rather do because it's the closest thing he can get to being in the big leagues.
Well, Travis and his friends, they have certainly knocked it out of the park with baseball-ism. [Music]
Well, what a fantastic success. Huge congrats to Travis and his partners. Truly amazing. Portland is my hometown, but I'm not sure I've seen this store, so the next time I'm back, I'm gonna make sure to check it out.
Now, I do wanna point out that a side hustle doesn't have to turn into something like this. In fact, probably the majority of the stories we feature on the show don't turn into $1 million or $10 million businesses. They don't necessarily become the kind of projects where the person who starts them goes to work on them full-time. Sometimes yes, but that's often not the objective at all. I think the initial goal is still the same, though.
The initial goal is to do something you love that has value to other people, try something different, explore your creativity, and create more options for yourself because making money and creating an asset, just like this project, does create more options for yourself. And in this case, it clearly took off, but in lots of other cases, it just provides extra money for someone, and that's great, too. That's why I feature a range of stories on the show, but it is really fun to see when something like this happens. Oh, and by the way, why was Cinderella kicked off the baseball team? Because she ran away from the ball.
You can't do that, Cinderella. All right, my friends, I don't want you to strike out. I want you to succeed. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at www.sidehustleschool.com/331.
Thank you for listening. You're a rock star. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
