This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
When a St. Louis man has a vision to create his own hot sauce, he begins in his kitchen. That vision then extends to thousands of bottles being stocked and sold in more than 70 retail stores and counting. Welcome to Recital School, my name is Chris Guillebeau. Now there are all kinds of reasons to start an income generating project.
One of those reasons is because it's fun, it's creative. It allows you to do something a bit different than you do for your job and hopefully reach people, help people and make some money. But a side hustle can also be a backup plan as you'll hear at the end of the story today. Now this story also includes a reminder of one of my favorite life philosophies, hang up and call again. I will explain that as we go along.
Gonna say a quick thank you to our sponsor. They allow the show to be free, I appreciate them. And then on with the show, this salesman's spicy side hustle serves up serious sales. Had to practice that. Spicy side hustle serves up serious sales as well as heat and flavor.
Stay tuned for the warmup. [Music]
St. Louis, Missouri salesman Charlie Backer was getting ready to host friends for his Super Bowl party. Like any good host, he had a wide array of snacks and nibbles for his guests, but wanted to add something special and unique to the table. So while the 49ers and Ravens were warming up on the field, Charlie began to heat things up in the kitchen.
He put together a simple recipe for a hot sauce using fresh ingredients like peppers, vinegar and garlic that he picked up at the supermarket. After a few tries, he felt he'd landed on a recipe which had more kick than the punter for the Ravens that night, but didn't lose out on any flavor. Charlie served it to his friends and they loved it. It was early days, but he could feel people were really warming to this hot new recipe. Over the course of the next few years, he worked hard on his hot sauce.
He'd tinker with the ingredients and flavors and cooking times to try and get it just right. Then he would share bottles of it with friends and family. He even gave it a name, hot Charlie's, and had a sticker created to put on the bottle. Then in 2017, Charlie felt like he'd finally cracked the hot sauce code. That's the next book by Dan Brown, by the way, the hot sauce code, the Illuminati.
Back to the story, one of his friends took a bottle home to try, and the next morning that friend was on the phone imploring Charlie to start selling the sauce. This friend wasn't just complimentary, they downright told him he'd be crazy not to sell it. Charlie was a salesman at heart, but he never thought of pitching his sauce to anyone, except for his friends who came over for parties. It was just something he did. But he also wasn't gonna miss an opportunity to earn some cash if he could, especially when people were asking to buy it.
So he thought, "Why not give the people what they want?" Unsure of where to start, he made a Facebook page for Hot Charlie's and began offering his bottles. In the first week, he'd sold five of them. In the second week, he sold 50. To keep up with the demand and sales, he created a standalone website using a local designer to help him manage orders and promote his sauce. And all of this was an incredible surprise for Charlie, who loved working on the hot sauce and selling it.
But for his wife, kids, and dog, who had to deal with what became bucketfuls of hot chilies in the kitchen every day, it was getting a little too hot to handle. So a few months into the operation, Charlie began looking for ways to get his sauce bottled. He turned his attention to Google and looked for bottling companies in his local area of St. Louis. In a story that we've heard before, he quickly realized it was hard to find a bottler who would work with small quantities.
They all wanted big batches, which of course he wasn't ready to produce. He couldn't justify spending a lot of money on what was still a passion project. So he dug into his vast reserves of patience to keep looking for the right bottler and eventually came across one. He used a strategy which I call hang up and call again. If you don't like the first answer you get, we'll keep calling, find somebody else, keep looking for the answer you do want.
Charlie was eventually introduced to an independent bottling company, which focused on small scale sauces. They took him under their hot wings and showed him how to turn the sauce he'd been creating in his kitchen into a bottled consumer-ready product. All this took a bit of time. The sauces had to be nutritionally approved, had to have their own clear branding. He already had a previous label, but he leveled it up by creating a cartoon of himself wearing a bow tie.
Then after that, it was just a waiting game, which took a few months. Once approved, Charlie began looking for retailers to stock his product. He began with smaller stores in his local area and used his sales experience to help him land a few placements. These smaller retailers were great because they'd often order a case of hot Charlie's right then and there. There were fewer hoops to jump through and less paperwork to fill out than your larger retail chains.
Still, Charlie says now if you were to approach larger chains, patience is key. Some retailers can take five to six months to approve your product, even for a small trial run. So be sure to keep in touch throughout the process and don't let yourself be forgotten. Even a quick phone call just to check in can be enough to ensure the process is still chugging along. Over the past year, retailers have been a large source of hot Charlie's profits and the sauce is now sold in 70 of those retailers across three states.
From those early days in the kitchen hosting Super Bowl parties, he's now selling thousands of bottles and he's not done. Looking ahead, Charlie is going all in on his hot sauce side hustle. He recently lost his job and decided it was his opportunity to focus on hot Charlie's full time. The goal is to expand into more retailers and take hot Charlie's nationwide. He is fired up.
Awesome, I love that story. Congratulations, Charlie. I'll be on the lookout for hot Charlie's. Maybe it's not nationwide yet, but hopefully it will be soon. So what do I mean by this philosophy of hang up and call again?
Well, it comes from the work I do in the field of travel hacking, which is all about helping people see the world on a budget using frequent flyer miles, other strategies. It's kind of how I went to go and visit every country in the world over the course of 11 years. That's another story. But the philosophy is if you've got frequent flyer miles or if you're calling the airline trying to book something or if you're just trying to get a flight changed or whatever it is you're hoping to achieve, if you call the airline representative and they say it's not possible or you don't like the answer you get, well, there's not much risk in saying, okay, thank you for your time, then hanging up and then calling back again to ask the same question of a different representative because often in these situations, some people are more empowered than others, some people are more knowledgeable than others. You may very well get a different answer just by asking somebody different.
And what most people tend to do is they either just accept that first answer, say, oh, okay, can't change that flight. I can't use my hard earned miles to book the trip that I want. Or they just argue, essentially. They kind of get into an arguing match and that's really difficult because you're probably not gonna win. You're probably just gonna stress yourself out, maybe not be nice to somebody else.
Either way, you're not gonna go away a winner. Whereas if you hang up and call again, you may not get the answer you want the second time, but there's not much harm in doing so. Just gonna take a couple of minutes of your time and it could lead to the outcome you want. So that's what Charlie did in this story in terms of looking for a manufacturer that would help him with the small scale batch that he needed to produce. He just kept asking different people or different companies until he found the answer that he wanted.
And to me, this points to the skill of resourcefulness, which I've said before, is probably the most important skill you can have in the side hustle world. Like you've got all kinds of skills and knowledge that you have gained in your education, your training, your work, all that kind of stuff. But if you can be resourceful, you can do so much. And resourcefulness is something that isn't necessarily taught. It's just something you develop as you go through life and work and you encounter obstacles and what do you do?
Do you just kind of get stuck at that obstacle? Do you challenge that obstacle? Do you give up? Or do you look for another answer? So in a lot of my work, what I'm trying to do in different ways is to encourage people to look for different answers and to show them the tools and strategies of how they can go about doing that.
So hang up and call again if you don't like the first answer you get. That's my encouragement for you today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Listeners, as always, remember inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/626.
I also want to give a shout out to my friend Dan Schwabel. He is an author and has a new book coming out called "Back to Human." Subtitle is "How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation." Dan is a prolific guy who has written a bunch of books. He writes a column for Forbes. He does all kinds of other things and I always appreciate his work. You want to check that out on Amazon or wherever you purchase books.
Again, it's called "Back to Human, How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation." Thank you for listening to this fiery hot episode. I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School.
