Social Worker Bakes Cupcakes for The Walking Dead

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

[Music]

Hello, hello, what's up? Welcome and happy Boxing Day to everybody. At least those listening in real time. And if you're listening later, as usual, well, Boxing Day occurred. It was the 26th of December.

Now this holiday is largely celebrated in the UK and former British colonies. It's also known as St. Stephen's Day in Ireland. And according to my inside sources at Wikipedia, it was a custom in Britain for tradesmen to collect Christmas boxes of money or presents on the first weekday after Christmas as thanks for good service throughout the year. And that is where we get Boxing Day from.

Now, as a quick reminder, if you've got an Amazon Echo device this Christmas, like millions of other people did, you can now subscribe for free to the Side Hustle School Flash Briefing. This is just a super quick, customized one-minute little story and tip. Again, completely free. And if you need some help getting that set up, just go to sidehustleschool.com/alexa. Hopefully I didn't just set off your device there.

I apologize if I did. You can just tell it to go back to sleep. And for everyone, in today's episode, a social worker bakes cupcakes for the walking dead, at least the cast and crew of the TV show, as well as hundreds of other people. She goes from struggling to make ends meet to being able to buy a home in large part thanks to this side hustle. I love a good story of how a side hustle can create sustainability in someone's life.

It's exactly what we've got here. So following this shout out to our sponsor, I'll tell you all about it. [Music]

Carrie Buchanan has a demanding, and might I say selfless, day job. As a social worker in her hometown of Canton, Ohio, she provides support to people with disabilities. But a few years ago, Carrie found herself needing some support of her own.

She was going through a stressful divorce. After the separation, she moved into a small condo with her two teenage daughters. A few close friends came over on moving day to help her pack her things. And to thank them, Carrie couldn't buy expensive gifts, so she turned to her creative side instead. While shopping at a local craft store, she came across a large muffin baking tray, and an idea struck.

She would use the muffin tray to bake extra large or jumbo sized cupcakes for her friends. What's better than cupcakes? Extra large cupcakes. She whipped up a batch and all her friends loved them. Over the course of the next year, she received multiple requests to bake the extra large cupcakes again.

Gradually, she modified the recipe, adding creamy flavored icing, topping them off with an extra treat like a peanut butter cup or a s'more. The cakes became Carrie's signature dish. She'd often bake them for special occasions or for friends and family. It was a fun hobby that made people smile. But while the cupcakes solved her original thank you gift problem, they couldn't eliminate all of life stressors.

As the next year rolled around, Carrie fantasized about packing everything up and escaping in a trailer. In her fantasy, she would sell homemade French fries out of the back of the trailer while traveling around the country. The idea was so appealing that she even went to a local carnival to ask the workers about life on the road. But this particular fantasy wasn't meant to be. She couldn't just drop everything and run away.

She had commitments at home. She had those two teenage daughters to care for. Still, the idea didn't go away entirely. Carrie soon began dating someone new and told him about her life on the road dream. He suggested she modify the idea a bit, do something similar, but keep things closer to home.

Instead of running away, she could bake and sell some of her giant cupcakes at a local market called First Friday. And he even suggested a business name, Bombshell Cupcakes. As a fan of pin-up culture, Carrie thought it fit perfectly. She booked a stall at the market and got baking. She whipped up 100 giant cupcakes in 10 different flavors that had proved popular among her friends.

She asked her dad, a commercial printer, to make some business cards and tags for the stall. This kept her startup costs extremely low, as the only real expense was the supplies. Friday was market day and Carrie got a big surprise. She completely sold out within two hours and made over $300. It was an empowering moment as she finally had a bit of spare cash to do some nice things with her kids.

She returned to the market each week and more and more customers showed up. As the orders continued to come in, she upped her baking skills. Within a few months had finally graduated to making everything from scratch. No more packet mixes or canned icing. And for a couple more years, Bombshell Cupcakes continued to drop bombshells at the market.

Carrie was still baking out of her home kitchen all while working full time. But then she introduced ice cookies. And these turned out to be even more popular. People would request custom orders for parties or with their favorite characters or corporate colors. Over time, this part of the business became so popular that Carrie added it to the name.

It was now called Bombshell Cupcakes and Cookies. She continued with both her day job and side hustle. She would work all day and then come home at night to bake cookies and cupcakes. It was time to bring on a little help in the form of her first and only employee. Although that employee only worked part time, she allowed Carrie to increase the volume of her operation so that she could keep working her full time job.

Then in January, 2018, she hit another breaking point. Her home kitchen could no longer handle the increased capacity. So Carrie's dad, the printer, invested $10,000 so she could build a new kitchen. She was able to put an actual bakery in the lower level of her home. That bakery stayed busy all throughout 2018.

And Carrie was able to take home close to $20,000 in profit from the business. This has made all the more impressive by the fact that each order is just 35 to $50. In other words, she's taking in a lot of orders. She's also been able to expand to include a few side-side hustles. Now listen to this, she sells the cakes through the business and still events at the local market.

But on top of that, she creates themed cookies to sell at sci-fi conventions across the country, even meeting the cast and crew of "The Walking Dead" at one show. She was also invited to be a contestant on the Sugar Rush cooking show, which debuted on Netflix. Looking ahead, Carrie has even bigger plans for bombshell cupcakes in 2019. She understands you can only bake and decorate so many cookies by hand. It's not a business that scales.

So just recently, she began offering live-streamed baking courses, which has mixed up another source of income. Next is a YouTube channel so that she can share more of her knowledge. And the goal of all this will be to create a paid video tutorial course to generate income in a more passive way. Lots of stuff going on in the kitchen there, but what she is most proud of is that this side hustle has enabled her to purchase her own home. Those bombshell cupcakes have had extra large benefits.

[Music]

Okay, so here we can see the evolution of a project from Genesis to experiment to grow. And what we're seeing now is Carrie thinking even smarter and asking herself how she can go from baking more cupcakes and cookies, which is fun and awesome, but ultimately not sustainable, at least not on its own and not with her doing much of the baking, to those so-called side side hustles that will allow her to reach more people. So I'm excited to see what happens with bombshell cupcakes, and that is kind of the path you need to follow if you want to grow. But as always, let me say, it's also okay to just make cupcakes or do whatever you want to do and sell them at the market or whatever the case may be. So on this boxing day and really every day, just remember that your next steps are your own.

I think it's important to have a goal. It's important to have kind of a vision to get there, to know what the next steps are. But in the end, the reason why you have a side hustle or you do anything else in life, presumably, is because it's important to you. So assuming that is important to you in some fashion, at least, I hope you enjoyed today's program. We are coming to the end of the year, but as mentioned, Side Hustle School season three is coming up.

Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/725. That's episode 725. As I sign off, I wish you happy holidays once again. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]