Mountain Biker Takes B-Line To All-Natural Profits

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

[Music]

What's up? Welcome, my friends, to a brand new week. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau, for Side Hustle School, bringing you a different story every single day, a different true story, I should say, of somebody with a job who finds a way to create an income-generating project. You usually do so on a journey that involves using their skills. Maybe it's something they're passionate about, but doing so in a way that doesn't require a ton of money and doesn't require them to quit their job.

That's what it's all about. Now, we asked one of the two guys behind today's featured story. If somebody else wanted to follow a similar path, how would you advise them? What would be their first steps in getting started? We often ask that question because it can lead to some interesting replies.

This person said, "Funny how often this is asked "as we've come along this journey. "There's nothing wrong with jumping in "and building a plane as you fly it, "but why not preserve time, which is also money in this case, "and find a company or person you admire "in a similar field and meet them, talk with them, "ask them all the questions you can think of, and then more. "And remember as well, you don't know what you don't know. "There's a reason why we all have parents. "It's to grow and to be guided safely "through the life process, "and starting a business is no different." So I would say go find a business parent and ask for help in raising your entrepreneur self.

I thought that was interesting. I am often all about building the plane as I fly it, but I like to present different perspectives from time to time. And of course, depending on the project that you select, depending on the business that you wanna start, you might very well benefit by following a process like this. All right, now in this story, two friends create an all natural energy gel that's as good as the process alternatives, if not better. They then shift into a higher gear and crank out a side hustle.

These mountain bikers take the B-line to all natural profits. I'll explain what a B-line is if you're not familiar. Also, in case you're not familiar, is a coconut a fruit or a nut? Maybe you know the answer to that, but I wasn't sure myself. I went back and forth in my head before I turned to this wonderful resource you can go to online to learn all kinds of things, which is a great website.

You just type things in and it gives you an answer. So as a bonus, by the end of this episode, you too will have a definitive answer to the botany of the coconut. All that and more is coming up in about 30 seconds. [Music]

Chris Hawkes and his friends are avid mountain bikers and endurance athletes. On any given weekend, they'd much rather be pedaling their way up a hill than sitting on the couch watching Netflix.

Chris enjoys his day job. He's director of sales for what he calls the best dairy company on earth, but it's his extracurricular activities that really get his wheels turning. Mountain biking is hard going. You can burn thousands of calories in a good session. And if you want to keep going, you need to replace that lost energy fast.

Chris typically turned to energy gels, a sweet, carboloted jolt of energy that comes in a squeezable packet for on-the-go eating. The only problem was that these gels were highly processed and often left Chris and his friends feeling a little off in the gut. This isn't surprising considering that they are usually full of junk ingredients. But they worked, giving a much needed carb dose when your body requires a good pumping up. Chris believed there must be a healthier way.

So together with one of the friends, he asked a nutritionist for a good natural replacement. It turns out the replacement was very simple. Nutritionists advised them to mix honey and molasses in a one-to-one ratio. Both are all natural ingredients and would serve a similar purpose to the processed gels they'd been using. That worked too.

And not only was it totally natural and healthy, it was also delicious. They had just created what they called craft energy food. The mixture became a staple of their biking sessions. In fact, they loved it so much, they wondered if they could turn it into a product. Chris had had ideas for businesses before, but never got past a note on a scrap piece of paper.

Something about this idea, however, stuck with him. So he and another friend decided to crank it up and see if they could make something happen. They started by creating a mixture, putting it into some packaging, and then trying to sell it. They invested their own money into buying some basic manufacturing equipment, and they got the packaging made from a local manufacturer. Soon enough, they had their first pro-quality batch and decided to go on a long mountain bike trip to celebrate.

Of course, they'd be powered by their own brand of all-natural energy gels. They called it B-Line Natural Energy. B-Line is a common way to describe an alternate path in mountain biking, which is what they were all about. On that trip, they visited the local bike shop and offered a sample of that first batch straight from the production line. The store owner loved it and offered to buy a box.

It was the first $17.50 they made, and it felt like they just won the Tour de France. They used the money to buy a six-pack of beer, another popular source of energy. It was around then that Chris and his friend realized something important. They had no idea what they were doing. Were they even allowed to sell a food product?

Did they need to have it certified or approved? If someone got sick, were they liable for any damages? Also, what's actually the best way to make these gels efficiently? They spent the next two years slipping gears, trying to answer those questions. Chris says that in hindsight, he should have sought some advice at that point.

If they were to start again, they'd try to find an expert or consultant to educate them. It would have cut their time to get where they are today in half. But even so, they figured it out. They gradually refined the packaging in the mix and soon had a fully-fledged and certified health glue product. It wasn't in their nature to give up.

Any true endurance mountain biker knows you just have to keep pedaling and eventually you'll reach the top. Over time, they added flavors like coconut to the mix, eventually producing three product lines in different sizes. Packaging became a perfect reusable pouch, easy to carry on the ride or the run. They also kept contacting retail outlets, using skills Chris had learned in his day job and found more bike stores to distribute. They built up their online presence, enticing repeat customers to buy direct.

And before long, they were on the downhill run. A few years after its inception, Beeline has become a visible brand and product operating in a competitive space. The team believes they've found the right market fit and now it's just a matter of getting the word out through marketing. Over time, they also started to make money. They're not earning a full-time income just yet, but as Chris puts it, last year they made enough that they could have purchased an SUV with the profits.

They would use that SUV for mountain biking adventures, of course. That's tens of thousands of dollars and hopefully more to come as they grow. Their end goal is to generate enough revenue to be their only source of income. For the next climb, they'll be launching another food product line in the near future with funding coming entirely from sales at Beeline. Whatever happens there, they'll never forget the lessons learned from their first side hustle.

The next product launch should be just like riding a bike. [Music]

Awesome, congratulations to Chris and the Beeline team. Do you think that's a great name? Beeline for an alternate mountain biking path. Also a great name for a product.

Seems like a very logical name for a product that is well aligned to its market and to its origin story. So very cool. And in terms of getting advice or kind of wishing you had gone back and had somebody in the industry kind of help you along, versus figuring it out yourself, I really think it kind of depends on what the project is, what you're trying to accomplish. Because I am a big fan of building the airplane as it flies. But for something that is complex, something that involves manufacturing a food product for sure, we've talked about this a bit on the program before, there are a lot of resources out there to help foodpreneurs, anybody doing some kind of good product like energy gels.

Whereas if you're doing something like starting a YouTube channel or whatever else, you might be able to figure out most of what you need to know on your own. So I guess the bottom line is if the biking shoe fits, wear it. Okay, now in terms of coconuts, I was actually curious about this. Here's the answer. A coconut is not a botanical nut, it is classified as a fruit, even though the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, recognizes coconut as a tree nut.

So it's a little bit of a mixed result there. But also another source said coconut is a one-seated droop. By the way, a droop is a fleshy fruit with thin skin and a central stone containing the seed. So it could be a plum, a cherry, an almond, or an olive. Coconut is in that family.

In more general terms, however, a coconut can be a fruit, a seed, and a nut altogether, because a nut is technically a type of fruit. So even after I read all that, I'm like, actually, I'm not totally sure. I know what the answer is. It is not a botanical nut. So let's just go with that and say it is mostly a fruit.

All right, fun facts. We're gonna knock this up here on the show. Today's show notes are inside us all school.com/919. 919 will include links to everything I mentioned, including Beeline and much more is coming up tomorrow. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

Thanks for listening, my friends. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From The Onward Project.