Personal Trainer Pumps Up Breakfast with $25,000/Month Pancake Hustle

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

[Music]

Hello, greetings and welcome. This is Chris Guillebeau here with you on Side Hustle School. We are kicking off a new week and we're also on a bit of a health kick recently. At least in terms of show programming because tomorrow's episode is about a CrossFit enthusiast who resells chalk. That's right, chalk of all things.

I'll tell you all about that tomorrow. But today's is about a personal trainer who makes and sells healthy pancakes that can actually give you better abs. That's right, my friends, this is not a late night television infomercial promise. It is a true story. A personal trainer pumps up breakfast with a $25,000 a month pancake hustle and she is taking this breakfast of champions to the next level with pancakes that put the pro in protein.

By the way, did I mention $25,000 a month? That's right, $25,000 a month. Let's say a quick thank you to our sponsor and then get out your pancake pan. Or of course you could just keep listening. [Music]

Healthy eating isn't exactly sugar, spice, and everything nice.

It's kale, quinoa, and protein pancakes too. At least that's what Ashley Drummond, a personal trainer from Tampa, Florida, believes. Ashley spent her days hitting the ground running, from client sessions to the gym for her own training to more clients to the grocery store and back again, all while needing to stay on top of her food intake at the same time. For a lesser human, it would be absolutely exhausting, but breakfast, the notorious meal of champions, was her starting point. And in more ways than one, it was her best kept secret.

You see, prior to launching the side hustle that is now a full-time business, Ashley spent the past seven years whipping people into shape as a personal trainer. She had a passion for helping people feel better about themselves as they reached their fitness goals, but she also felt a pull to add something else to her life, something bigger, and something that would allow her to have a bit more free time. But Ashley, a self-proclaimed foodie, just didn't know where to start. Now, here's something you should know about Ashley. She firmly believes you should be able to eat the foods you want every day without it having to be a cheat meal or cheat day.

And one of the things that she craved on a regular basis was pancakes. I mean, who doesn't? But the pancake mixes out there were full of less than fantastic ingredients, so she made her own version that was high protein, low carb, and incredibly tasty. She even bragged that she got her abs eating pancakes. As she made her usual breakfast of protein pancakes one morning, she started to think about how she could combine her goals in the form of a side hustle.

As she folded chocolate chips into the batter, she thought more about how to help people reach their fitness goals without actually having to train them in the process. As the pancakes began to warm up, Ashley thought about where she was heading. She didn't want to just be a personal trainer forever. She wanted to find a way to stop trading time for money. With a steaming stack of pancakes now on her plate, the idea suddenly popped into her head.

The solution was right in front of her the whole time. Protein pancake mix could be packaged, sold online, and then made at home by other people. It was a way for Ashley to help others reach their goals without having to be in the gym with them. Of course, a few details would need to be whipped out, but it felt like a weight had been lifted. Ashley's side hustle was literally in the pan.

Still, would people even want them? She was determined to find out. The next morning, she made a few extra servings of her protein pancake mix, put them into single serving baggies, and brought them to her next personal training sessions with her clients. The clients fell in love at first bite and began to tell their friends. Before she knew it, Ashley even had someone message her on social media to ask if they could get their hands on some of that protein pancake mix.

So she started making small batches in her kitchen, packaging upwards of 15 orders a week. Instead of building a website, she started by posting on her social channels so that people could direct message her with an order. Then she would send them an invoice through PayPal and go buy the ingredients. She would measure out each ingredient, heat seal the bags, and ship them out from her new best friends at the post office. By the time Ashley was on a first name basis with those post office employees, a local news channel had gotten a whiff of what she'd been cooking up.

They wanted to feature her on a summer health segment. With all of the grocery store trips, pancake batches that needed mixing, labels that needed printing, bags that needed to be sealed, and those trips to the post office after work, Ashley was quickly starting to feel like a forgotten pancake in a pan, burned out. Everything she did was hands on. The news feature was a turning point for Abs pancakes, which was named, of course, because you can get Abs eating them. It was time to go legit, and that meant handing off the whisk for some of the responsibilities so that she could really build a brand.

The very next day, she looked for a co-packer. She says this part took a lot of research to learn the rules and regulations of packaging, manufacturing, and fulfillment. But eventually, after searching through what felt like the whole country, Ashley found a co-packer in San Diego that would produce a run of 500 units for her first order. She now had manufacturing her products in the bag, once again, literally, but her side hustle challenges weren't quite over. She had to learn the ins and outs of barcodes, nutrition labels, and expiration dates, just to name a few things.

What was the lesson Ashley learned the fastest? That you can learn a lot when people ask you for things you don't know about. Once her product development was a light golden brown, it was time to flip to the next task at hand, her website. Ashley ended up using Shopify to serve as an online storefront so that she wouldn't have to keep fielding orders through her Instagram inbox. And she added a subscription platform called Recharge to help manage ongoing customer subscriptions.

The exposure she received from the news story was fantastic for driving new traffic to her website, but the best publicity she's had so far came from the time she pitched a Shark Tank one year later. By that point, she'd already made $100,000 in sales. And following that episode, the abs pancake site went from about 50 visitors to over 30,000 visitors in seconds. And the sales she made in a few weeks following surpassed the previous years. Awesome as that was, Ashley's pancakes, fluffy and delicious, would not have been able to sustain the momentum without her social media strategy.

It now included Facebook ads, Instagram hashtags, cross promotions, and partnerships with influencers that helped grow abs pancakes. Her plan of attack was simple, find other health food brand or fitness companies, build a relationship with them, and share posts about both of their brands. Mix, flip, plate, repeat. She even hosted competitions asking followers to repost or tag photos in order to receive some pancakes on the house. Sugar free syrup not included.

If it sounds like she was working hard, well, she was. She believed in this project. She wanted to give it every chance of success she could. And let's talk about success. Ashley has been able to now build a side hustle that brings in around $25,000 each month.

That is a lot of flapjacks. Looking back, she says that the project would have fallen flat had she not trusted her instincts. As she says, in the end, only you know what's best for your brand. So it's important to take other people's advice with a grain of salt, even if they're successful entrepreneurs. Above all, she believes it's the daily things she does that keep her moving forward.

Small details like invoicing, making phone calls, website maintenance, and regular social posts might feel boring sometimes. But like the grams of protein in her pancakes, each step adds up. Following that breakfast of champions dream, she has successfully flipped her way to an all-new, sustainable source of income. And it tastes so good. Mm.

Wow, what a success. Congrats to Ashley. I can't wait to try these abs pancakes myself. I have not had a chance to sample them myself, but I might actually go in place in online order after finishing this episode. And just a couple of quick comments.

There is a lot to learn with an undertaking like this. So in the episode, we just briefly highlighted things like expiration dates, and nutrition labels, and co-packing, which is all about getting a company that can take your recipe and put that food product together. And then, of course, there were the logistics of shipping and marketing, all those social posts, partnerships, everything else that she put together. So with all of these things to learn and manage, there are a couple of schools of thought about how to approach that. How much do you do yourself, and how much do you outsource?

That's kind of what it comes down to. And some people say, OK, right from the beginning, you should focus only on your core competency. You should outsource everything else. Don't do anything that takes your time away from the most important aspects of the business. Well, this story illustrates an approach that I think is particularly wise.

It's kind of a compromise between these positions of do everything yourself, maintain control, versus hand everything over. I think when you're getting started and just trying to figure stuff out, it's good to do everything yourself. That way, you know how to do it, at least to a base level. It's your business. You're building all the elements of it.

But then, as you go on, especially if it becomes a big success like this story, then you outsource it to people who can do it better. In the beginning, you have to figure out how to make the perfect protein pancake recipe. You can't just go to a co-packer and say, hey, I want to make protein pancakes. Can you guys figure it out? This will also save you money on the front end because you're doing it yourself.

But then, going forward, it helps you make better decisions. Because as you outsource things, as you hand things over, you know what you're expecting. You know the outcome you want. So you'll probably be able to get a better outcome, or at the very least, you'll be able to save time by handing some responsibilities over. Well, that's my encouragement for you today.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. I enjoyed making it for you. Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, where you can find links to Ashley's protein pancakes, as well as all the different tools I mentioned-- Shopify, Recharge, the subscription program, anything else we can come up with. Those are going to be online at sidehustleschool.com/541.

Like I said, it's health week. Tomorrow we got the story of the guy who resells chalk. And who knows what's going to come up after that. So much more is on the way. Be sure you're subscribed.

Tell your friends about it. Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is Side Hustle School.