Dog Lover Turns At-Home Baking Into Barking Business

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

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Greetings and welcome back. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. I wanna begin today with a shout out to my sister, Mary Guillebeau. It's her birthday today. She is a side hustler like us.

Maybe we'll have her story on the show at some point. In fact, the story that you'll hear today actually sounds like something she might do. Our story is about a Michigan-based dog owner who uses her baking hobby to launch a gourmet dog treat hustle. And as part of the story, I wanna talk about registering your business. This is a question that comes up a lot.

People want to know, do I need to have an LLC? Can I be a sole proprietor, et cetera? I think this is something that a lot of people feel unnecessary anxiety over. It's really not that complicated. I'm not qualified to give legal advice, but I can give you some general tips.

So I'll tell you that story in just a moment. [Music]

High school counselor, Melissa Bruno, has been a dog person for as long as she can remember. Each time she sees a dog passing on the street, she immediately has to go over and say hi. Melissa grew up around dogs, and now her household in Oxford, Michigan is full of them. She's got a boxer, a French bulldog, and a Boston terrier.

Melissa has also been making homemade dog treats for years. In fact, she devoted so much attention to the dogs that her family would give her a hard time that she baked for the pets and not for them. The dogs, however, seem pretty happy with that arrangement. They loved the treats so much that Melissa decided she wanted feedback from other dogs. She knew her dogs would pretty much eat anything when it came down to it.

So were they really good or were her dogs just hungry? So she started taking samples of the treats to work. The dog biscuits received rave reviews from her coworkers' pets, the focus group went well, and her colleagues started requesting lots, lots more. Melissa slowly began to realize that she might be able to make something of her hobby and turn her biscuit baking into a business. Last fall, she decided to go for it, and Bruno's Barkin Biscuits, LLC, was born.

Once she got her first online order, she didn't believe it was real. She actually logged out of the shopping cart and logged back in several times just to confirm the order was actually there. Once she finally believed it, she knew she was on her way. She decided in that moment to fully commit. Melissa then moved beyond her office colleagues, selling the treats at craft and vendor shows, as well as farmer's markets.

Her high-quality treats are natural, preservative-free, and healthy. Whenever possible, she tries to use organic and community-supported agriculture ingredients. She started out by investing about $400 in baking materials, as well as purchasing various labels and bags to display her treats at the shows. She had to pay $50 to obtain her LLC status, and she had to apply for a state pet feed license in Michigan. That cost an additional $25.

Besides these expenses, her costs have been extremely low. She made that online store using squareup.com, which was totally free to set up. The only marketing she's done is through a basic Facebook page, and at some point she plans on investing in her own website, but for now she's happy to take it slow. Her income for this new project has ranged from $500 to $600 a month, and so far she's reinvesting most of those earnings back into the project, adding new dog treat recipes, enhancing her packaging, and so on. Melissa's ultimate goal is to get her product on the shelves of specialty stores and move away from craft shows to help free up her weekends, to spend time with her family, and of course, her dogs.

She is currently in negotiations with a few pet store buyers. [Music]

So congratulations, Melissa. Bruno's Barking Biscuit sounds really fun. So let's look at this concept of licensing and registering your business. Again, I'm not qualified to give legal advice, but I can tell you for a lot of the stories that I feature on the show, probably the vast majority, in fact, the required legal filings are very minimal.

You can operate a lot of projects as a sole proprietor. Whether you need a business license or not is gonna depend on what you're doing, as well as what state you live in or what province you live in. Very simple step to figure that out. Just go to Google and search the name of your state followed by business license. We usually take you to a Secretary of State page, which in a lot of cases is actually not that complicated to navigate.

There's gonna be a lot of complex material there, but it should be really simple to get your basic business license. And depending on what you're doing, you may not even need that. If you choose to incorporate, if you want to do something a bit more formal, that can also be really cheap. So Melissa chose to do that. Bruno's Barking Biscuits is an LLC, cost her $50 to do it online.

Now her story was a little bit more complex because she's selling a food item. So in her case, she had to get an additional certification. The state wants to make sure you're not selling something toxic. So that was $25. It may actually be $25 a year, but the point is it's very minimal.

And for non-food businesses or anything that's not potentially dangerous or very controversial for whatever reason, your licensing and registration steps are gonna be really easy. And in fact, I think it's far more important to think about other things for the most part. If I were Melissa, I would think, how can I reach more dogs with my delicious Barking Biscuits? How can I go from selling in-person at a farmer's market to selling to tech savvy dogs online? And this brings up a potential obstacle.

Dogs are notoriously unreliable with making payment. They don't have good credit scores. Some of them don't even have PayPal accounts. So since I don't wanna entrust my side hustle wellbeing to dogs, no disrespect, how can I reach their owners? How can I reach dog lovers everywhere?

We had an episode early in the show called "The Airbnb for Dogs" about a woman in Texas who's making up to $200 a day, taking care of people's dogs while they're traveling. She got her start using the platform Rover.com. If I was making Barking Biscuits, I would wonder, how can I partner with Rover.com? Or maybe some other site like it. Those are the kind of things that I would worry about.

Or not just worry about, but focus on and devote my attention to. So people who are listening to this show have all kinds of different situations. I realize that if you are doing something unique or in some industry that has a lot of regulation, then you might need to get more specific advice. But for the rest of us, let's focus on making something that people want and then connecting with those people for whom the product or service is a great fit. That's my encouragement for you today.

As always, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. If you would like to learn about Barking Biscuits or Rover.com, anything else I talked about, just come over to sidehustleschool.com/122. That's 122. I'll be back tomorrow and every day. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.

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