Frenchman Says Bonjour to $35,000/Month Foodie Hustle

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

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Do you believe in an overnight success? Well, for the most part, I don't. I believe there's usually a lot of work involved in an overnight success. Usually takes a lot of nights, often weeks and months. There are often failures, or at least challenges, obstacles, missteps along the way.

So in each story that I bring to you every day, I try to tell you not only what was good, what was amazing, but also what obstacles were encountered. Now speaking of every day, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is episode 601. Thank you again for joining me for 600 days or two days, or however many days you have been part of this experiment. It is a bit more than an experiment now, I suppose, since we are still going strong.

And we're going strong because of listeners like you. So thank you for your support. Now today's story looks at a side hustle that is a real business. It has more than $30,000 in monthly sales during the holiday season at least. And it's been going for a decade.

This is operated by someone in Quebec, Canada, who still has a regular job, and the growth has been slow, steady, and sustainable. So not an overnight success, but a long-term sustainable one, which I think is actually a lot better. So stay tuned, I'll tell you all about this Frenchman, who says bonjour to a $35,000-a-month foodie hustle. [Music]

In a lot of ways, Cedric Fontaine is your typical Frenchman. He's usually found with foie gras, cheese, bread, and butter on his plate.

And he's never far from a glass of red wine. Cedric brought his love of gastronomy with him when he immigrated from France to Canada about 15 years ago to work as an e-commerce consultant. But upon his arrival, a friend informed him that he wouldn't be able to find his favorite French flavors in Quebec. He almost got on the next flight back to France. But never one to shy away from a challenge, Cedric was determined to scour Quebec looking for a flavor from every region of the province.

He began a directory of artisanal food producers and used that as a basis to begin his new venture, Terroir Quebec. Terroir was the perfect side hustle starting point because the word refers to the unique environmental context that helps give food its distinct flavor. Cheeses from different regions, produced in different seasons, can have characteristics that inform the taste and flavor profile. The same can be said for coffee, wine, chocolate, and even tomatoes. Cedric began Terroir Quebec in 2005 with about 10 products.

And he's since grown to about 400 different items. For the first five years, he kept the inventory in his basement, managing just one order a month in the early days, scaling to 30 a month in those first years. He is a self-described techie and he relied on his own programming prowess to get his e-commerce website up and running. At the time, he looked online for an open source solution, but there wasn't a lot available to him. Keep in mind, this was back in the dreary days of 2005, pre-WordPress and Shopify.

So aspiring modern side hustlers can rest easy, you don't have to worry about coding. And for just a couple of thousand dollars, Cedric was able to purchase a full inventory of those first 10 products, so that he had 12 of each, enough to launch his website. He wanted to focus on organic items, labels without a huge list of ingredients, less filler, more substance. And with substance comes seasonality, both for the kind of products that Cedric sells and for the volume. During the summer, he's a go-to purveyor of barbecue sauce, dressings, spices, and jams.

In the winter, he shifts towards selling herbal teas and comfort foods like sea salt caramel. Terroir Quebec's orders are seasonal too. Cedric typically ships about 300 orders each month from January to September, and then 800 orders a month from October to December. Because of this calendar, he has to be strategic in how he builds and sustains his inventory. He keeps a running list of everything he has in storage, and perhaps even more importantly, their expiration dates.

He then uses those lists to determine what to highlight and push in his email newsletters. Now, as mentioned, not everything is easy, nothing is an overnight success, let's talk about challenges. When Cedric was dreaming about how he wanted his side of social look, he had grand visions of worldwide shipping. And that dream crumbled pretty quickly, once he realized that shipping fees would cost more than the products themselves. But there were also some hard lessons to learn with shipping just within Canada, because some provinces cost more to ship to, and it was tricky to balance that out with his low profit margins.

He also started out handling his own fulfillment, but eventually things got to be a bit too much for him to do when he was hitting up to 30 orders a day. He also discovered that food items can be challenging to ship, because surprise, there's a lot that can go wrong. And when he wasn't having to worry about spoilage, the products themselves were prone to breaking in the shipping process. There were more than a few mishaps during terroir Quebec's early years, but these days Cedric says they have the process down. So what about the money?

Well, I mentioned relatively low profit margins. Cedric can still use a lot of the revenue to invest in more products, advertising, and growth, but of course, he also wants to make some money for himself. So he takes about 10% of his side hustle's monthly revenue as his bonus extra income. This means he takes home about $1,000 a month during a slow season and then upwards of $3,000 a month during the holiday months, which typically bring in around $35,000 each month in sales. While the extra money is great, Cedric recommends knowing what the driving factor is behind creating your own side hustle or your business or whatever it is you want to do, that why is probably gonna be a better and longer lasting motivator than just extra spending money, especially when the going gets tough.

And those artichokes expire on the way to Vancouver. That was a rough week. Last but not least, Cedric suggests knowing your limitations so you can grow intentionally and deliberately. So what's next in the world of fine food and maple butter? Well, Cedric is looking for ways to tweak his shipping methods in order to increase his profit margins.

He's also working on a new website and expanding his product offerings to foods found from all over the world, not just in Quebec. We'll wish him bon chance since terroir inside us all seem to go together just like fresh cheese and warm baguette. [Music]

All right, unlike a lot of other online businesses we featured on the show, this is the kind of project that does come with some risks and will take some time to succeed. But when I said take some time to succeed, they all take time to succeed, but this one is definitely like a long-term projection kind of thing. Because the costs are high and whenever you're purchasing a food product to resell, you have to deal with all those complications of shipping and storage and the need for it to go from your warehouse or your basement, wherever it is, to the customer in a fixed period of time before it expires.

So these are not small obstacles. But also, you know, some of the opportunities that I tell you about on the show are new. So I've been talking about dropshipping a bit lately. We had that story which I keep bringing up about the guy who made $300,000 from dropshipping or reselling a coffee grinder. I still think that's amazing and credible and we've had other stories like that too.

Well, this kind of reselling, at least the technology that enables it, didn't exist 15 or even 10 years ago. So people have been doing reselling and dropshipping forever but not really in this way that people are doing it now. So the thing is there are all kinds of opportunities out there. My philosophy is always if you have a passion for something, then go for that, choose that. If you're not sure what you want to do, why not choose a project that is relatively easy and relatively low risk?

Now, the good news is that Cedric clearly knows his why. Love that little point at the end about how he's, you know, really focused not just on making money, but also on building this as a fun project that's reaching all kinds of people. And so for him, it's not all about the money. It's a strong side income, but he also seems like a food ambassador or a food evangelist of sorts. So good for him.

Congrats Cedric, keep up the good work. And to our listeners, thank you for joining me again on this journey, as I said, episode 601. We've got so much more on the way. I'm working with the team on some fun stuff that I can't wait to reveal to you soon. So do stay tuned as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/601. That's it for now. I'll be back again tomorrow. Once again, my name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School.