Bucket List Becomes Swashbuckling Adventure Tour Company

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

[Music]

Hello and greetings. What's up, welcome back. This is Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host, bringing you a different story every day in 2019. We are kicking off season three and I am so excited that you are here.

Gonna make some big things together this year and I very much hope you'll be part of it. Now, here's a question for you as we kick today's episode off. Do you have a bucket list? What's a bucket list? Well, it's also like a life list.

A list of things to accomplish one day. Hey, guess what? It is a new year. In fact, even if you're listening later, just decide for yourself. This is a new year.

It starts today. New year every day. And the reason why this is significant is because we tend to have a lot of momentum in the beginning of the year. So at some point later, you might get discouraged and struggle. Like that's normal.

That happens to me too. I actually talk about it a fair amount on the show. But for now, why not let momentum carry you? Let's identify some goals. Let's make progress.

Let's work toward whatever it is that you want to accomplish or achieve or become. And by the way, there are seven days in the week, but not one of them is called some day. So I think it's time to get to work. In today's story, a small town Oregonian grows a travel blog into a multiple six figure business. We're calling it bucket list becomes swashbuckling adventure tour company.

Today, I get to check something off my bucket list because I have always wanted to use the word swashbuckling. I challenge you to use that at some point in conversation today. Be like, hey, I just had a swashbuckling cup of coffee. I'm not sure if that should count, but hey, you do you. So here's a quick shout out to our sponsor and then the story.

Cue the Indiana Jones themed music. And meet Chase Behringer. He's the chief adventure architect of his tour company, the bucket list lifestyle. His job, which was a side hustle if not his job, allows him to take small lively groups of people on the world's most epic adventures. He's led all sorts of these adventures, including trekking to Mount Everest base camp, celebrating the Holley festival in India and attending the carnival in Brazil.

Although Chase is now living life to the fullest, that wasn't always the case. He comes from a small town in Oregon with barely 300 people. Growing up there, you were expected to graduate high school, get married and land a job at the local plywood mill. Maybe once in a while, if you were lucky, you could go to Hawaii. After a series of life events, Chase spiraled into a deep depression.

It was from that point that he started writing his bucket list. A list of things he had never thought he'd be able to do but decided to write them down anyway. His list served as a light at the end of the tunnel. He started a blog to hold himself accountable and one by one Chase began taking items off that bucket list. Every item he completed gave his life direction and pulled him farther out of depression.

He says that he grew the blog by asking himself what makes me different. There are a lot of travel blogs, discovery, exploration blogs out there. Why would anyone read his? He said his willingness to tell the truth with every post he writes was his number one reason. If he does something ridiculous, dangerous, or something he wouldn't want his mother to read, well, he posted.

After three years of frequent solo travel, posting on his blog and growing his audience to several thousand, his cup was full. Now he wanted to share the amazing experiences he'd been having with others. His idea was to get people to come on a trip with him. He would simultaneously design a trip and make a profit. After all, people were already willing to pay for these trips.

Why shouldn't others benefit from his world traveling expertise? The first adventure Chase booked came from a Facebook post. In that post he wrote, who wants to run with the bulls in Spain with me this July? The response was overwhelming. So he found a great deal on Airbnb and booked the trip.

The bucket list lifestyle, as he called it, was born. So let's look at the business details of this. Chase arrived at pricing by asking himself three questions. Number one, how much will it cost? What is the base cost for him?

Number two, what is the actual experience? And number three, what's it worth to me? The location of a trip also played a role. For example, India is cheaper to visit than Tokyo. The key is to gauge the experience factor while keeping prices reasonable.

His Facebook page is his best marketing platform. He's now branched into planning adventures for concierge businesses, company retreats, private trips for couples, and high-end travel events for coaches. Some of these events can run anywhere from $15,000 to $40,000 per person. He's already contracted for six more of these high-end adventure tours with one coach alone in 2019. These could include anything from getting a healing from a Maasai medicine man in Kenya to climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to taking a group to Thailand.

We've spent a lot of growth in the past two years. When we asked him what didn't work, Chase said hiring too fast. He wasn't smart about how much money he had on hand and one time came up short on payroll. He had to use an advance on his credit card to cover the checks. So what is next for the bucket list lifestyle?

Well, Chase is now writing a book on road travel and giving talks about the freedom of following your bucket list. He's also currently in the process of hiring more staff, this time more deliberately, to set his business on autopilot. [Music]

All right, for all of our stories this year in season three, we're gonna have detailed show notes. On these show notes pages, you can access any resource that I mentioned in the episode, as well as of course the person featured. You wanna check out their website or follow them on social media.

Today is episode 735. So the show notes page is at sidehustleschool.com/735. And as an example, on that page, you'll see some of the business tools Chase uses to run his bucket list company. For example, he uses Asana, a platform that helps him plan and organize his team's workflow. He uses Canva for easy to use design and infographics.

He uses several other tools and will link those things up. And we try to do that every day, just about. So if I'm featuring somebody's story, we try to look at what do they use, how do they make this happen? So that if you're interested, you can do some further research. And if you're just here for the stories, well, no problem.

More stories are on the way. By the way, what's on your bucket list? Let me know, hit me up on social media. My Instagram is 193 countries, that's 193 countries. Or it's just my name on Twitter and Facebook, Chris Gillibough, G-U-I-L-L-E-V-E-A-U.

Before I go, here are a couple of suggestions, some things you might want to consider adding to your bucket list, or you might not. But suggestions nonetheless. Number one, go into a crowded elevator and say, I bet you're all wondering why I've gathered you here. Number two, hire two private investigators and get them to follow each other. And number three, get a shirt that says life and then hand out lemons on the street corner.

You get it? Life, lemons, lemonade. All right, thank you so much, my friends. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. My name is Chris Guillebeau, I'll be back again tomorrow with another episode of "Side Hustle School." [Music]