632: From Weekend Side Hustle to $300k/year Business

22:48That's going to be their takeaway. It's not going to be the history. It's going to be the food, but mostly it's going to be how you made them feel. Yeah, that's kind of what's what stands out from the tours that I've been on and the tour guides that we've had. It's like the level of excitement. And you could be talking about something that in a different context would be like, who cares? Like, why does this even matter? But they're like, so into it that you're like, well, now I'm into it. Now I'm invested in this. And it really does help. So that's, yeah, that's helpful to know. Okay, the social media ball is rolling.

23:17Now we're starting to collect a critical mass of reviews here. We've got the spiel down. Does it get old, telling the same jokes, telling the same stories, eating at the same restaurant. Like, imagine, like, I'm doing this every weekend, and I know this line is going to get a laugh, but it's, like, it's slowly killing me inside. Or it's like, I'm getting paid to do it, so it's all good. No, it really doesn't. No. The dynamics of the group are different every week, right? You know, and I think that's what's kind of fun. It gives you a little bit of butterflies before the tour, because you don't know what that group is going to be like.

23:44You don't know where they're going to be from. You don't know their story, right? Again, once you start kind of connecting and asking them where they're from, and, hey, people love to talk about themselves. And so if we can start connecting with those people, they're going to open up a little bit and they're going to build your knowledge and all that. It's going to build their trust with them. And so I think that makes it makes the dynamic different every time. No tours ever the same. No two days are alike. There was this Jimmy Buffett line. Somebody asked, you ever get tired of singing Margaritaville for 40 years?

24:11And he's like, honestly, no. You know, this song has paid the rent for decades. So I'll never get tired of singing it. That's exactly right. That's right. Yeah. Mobile native Jimmy Buffett, by the way. Right. There you go. That's right. Gulf Coast. Cool. Love it. Is there a minimum number of guests? This was, you know, one of the, I guess the pros and cons. So one of the booking platforms that another guest mentioned is Airbnb experiences where somebody books an Airbnb Immobile. That site is going to, you know, try and get incremental revenue by recommending some of the things to do while you're in town.

24:41One of them is going to be Chris's food tour. But even if only one person books at the time, anyways, it's recollection. So it's like the requirement was like, even if one person books, you got to go do the thing. It's like, ah, I got to go do my three hours spiel for one person. Airbnb experiences, they do have that requirement. For us on our website, I do have a two person minimum. So if you book on our website, we will do the tour for two people. And I've done plenty of tours for two people, especially in the middle of August. I can't figure out why nobody wants to do a three hour walking tour when it's 100 degrees outside.

25:13I still haven't figured that out. Our marketing strategies there may need some work, but I've giving two-person tours. And, you know, as long as you've got your, again, you know, I think, you know, that goes back to what we talked about with your structure of your pricing model. And, and then so, no, I'm not making any money off a two-person tour, but I'm also going to make sure I'm not losing any money off a two-person tour as well. Okay. Are you still doing the bulk of the tours yourself? You mentioned, hey, we've got some other tour guides here. We're going to give the script to, and they can run with it.

25:42I've slowly got a good, great team of tour guides. I don't give as many tours as I used to. In the early days, it was my wife and I giving tours. I was working at the steel mill, and if I was off on the weekends, I would give those tours. If I had to work the weekends, my wife would give the tours on those dates. Slowly but surely, of course, we got burned out really quick. I've got small kids at home, and we've got a family as well, and other priorities too to tend to. So we started hiring a couple of tour guides, And yeah, we gave them a script, told them to make it their own. Don't copy word for word.

26:17Put your personality into this script. And they've done that. And that's been a game changer for us. I've got about six tour guides that lead tours right now. And so they're passionate as I am about our city. They're as knowledgeable. And again, I think the best thing about it is that they love people. They love connecting with people. That's their greatest trait. And so I'll let them give as many tours as they want. And if there's a weekend that everybody happens to be off at the same time, then I'll go give it. OK, yeah. So starting out, I mean, it seems like a great weekend side gig where it's like I can have that full time job because this is going to happen during off hours.

26:51Anyways, you know, people taking the tours are probably going to be off work, too. And so it makes sense. You can be as small of a food tour operator as you want, or you can be as large of a food tour operator as you want. If you wanted to, you could do this on Saturdays only, Fridays or whatever day you chose to do that. Or if your town has got the demand, you could do it every day of the week. You know, it's kind of it's one of those things that that's what's really fun about this industry, too. Yeah, just block off the calendar availability. Like there's nothing going on on a Wednesday afternoon, so you can't book that day.

27:19That's right. Yep. And if you know you're going to be on vacation two years from now, then, yeah, go ahead and block that off. But for us, you know, we've got a great team of tour guides. And so there have been times where, you know, I get to go on vacation and let the tour guides handle everything. And that's a great feeling. Yeah, that's really cool to be able to remove yourself from the delivery logistics of it. And I feel like that is where it could wear on people. If I don't have enough margin built in to hire somebody else to do this, then I'm committed to spending every Saturday night going out and doing this thing.

27:49And if you love it, that's one thing. But it's like, even if you do love it, it's nice to have the option to step away. Absolutely. Yep. More with Chris in just a moment, including taking the business full time and the other marketing levers he's pulling to keep this thing growing. That's coming up right after this. Was there any revenue target or number of guests target where you felt comfortable calling it quits at the day job and said, look, this is going to be our full-time thing? No, I don't think there was ever a number. If I had put a number on that, right, when you've got a family at home and you've got small kids like I do, there's never enough.

28:23And so that day would have never come. So, no, I didn't have a revenue target that I was looking for. I don't know. It was kind of just the timing was just it just worked out. My wife, she got a job teaching elementary school, and so that kind of took care of some of our insurance and benefits that we needed for that. And the timing was just right. I knew I kind of scaled the business as much as I possibly could. The last few months of my job at the Steel Mill, oh, I was a bad employee. They did not like me because I was always taking off. I was always in the break room on the phone and the bathroom on the phone.

28:56right like i had scaled it to as much as i could without getting fired yeah and and so i knew but i believe in this business and and i believe that you know even as we sit here today i believe that you know our business is going to continue to grow and and and we're going to continue to connect people to mobile we're going to grow mobile through our food tour and it's exciting and it's grown every year since that starting as a side hustle into a full-time thing it's grown every year you know and we hit a course we got a covet story just like everybody in 2020 you know knocked us down. But 2021, we were back with numbers that were greater than 2019, you know, and those have grown every single year.

29:34So, you know, I'm so thrilled. Yeah. So a couple ways to expand, you know, number one is, you know, getting in front of both more locals and more travelers, which sounds like you're doing through these different tour booking platforms like TripAdvisor and these like, you know, best things to do in mobile type of lists. What else is going on on the marketing side these days? You know, one of the things that we've kind of tapped into with our tour are themed tours. And you mentioned the haunted tours. We give a haunted tour as well in the month of October. That's something that we've really tapped into.

30:05Again, it brings out some of the locals. And so if you've taken our traditional history tour before, you might come out and take the haunted tour. And we have haunted cocktails or, you know, haunted themed food and drink during some of those tours where we will make a visit by the graveyard. and telling some of the haunted stories of Mobile. Okay. And so that's something that we've kind of tapped into. We're going to do probably nine or ten themed food tours this year. One of those is a Jimmy Buffett themed, you know, our native Mobilian. Oh, I got to come to town. Yeah. Jimmy Buffett talks about food a lot in a lot of his songs.

30:42So we're going to have a Jimmy Buffett themed tour where we talk about some of his stories that he has growing up here in Mobile and also tying that into the food that he talks about in some of the songs. So we're going to have a cheeseburger in paradise. Love it. We're going to have oysters and beer, some frozen concoctions, and all the good stuff like that. But again, the theme tours are great. Christmas tours, those are Christmas-themed. We have Mardi Gras in Mobile and Mardi Gras-themed tours. So we've really tapped into that. Again, it's brought out locals. That's been the biggest thing that has distinguished us from, I think, a lot of other food tours is the fact that we have 70 percent of our people are locals that come on our tour.

31:25And I think a big reason is because of the theme tours. Now, you're also running the Port City Plate podcast. Do you consider that a marketing channel for the business or is this just something fun to do? That is. I did start that as a marketing channel for the food tours. Again, I've got these relationships with these restaurant owners and people in our city who have these stories that, yeah, we tell the story on the food tour, but we get to really go in-depth on their story on the podcast. And I would highly recommend a podcast for a food tour operator because no one is going to say no to being on your podcast.

32:01And you might have found that out, Nick. And that also helps with, you know, it helps build your credibility as well. And it gives you stories. Some of the interviews that I've given, I'll turn that around into the script of our tour. And I'm always learning things about that particular restaurant that I didn't know through the podcast. And so incorporating some of those stories back into the tour as well has been so beneficial. Now, I can't say that I don't have a revenue number to give you. I can't say that that podcast has given me X amount of revenue. Yeah. But it has absolutely been beneficial for me and the community and for our tour.

32:44Right. Building relationships with restaurant owners. Hard to imagine a downside to doing it other than just the time commitment. That's right. Okay. The other angle that another tour operator was using was kind of like for team building events, where it was like, you know, instead of going for these Wednesday, Tuesday tourists, you know, maybe it's a family and you get five or six people come in at once, but it's still a lot of individual sales. And sometimes they want to call you and ask questions. And it's like she found it was somewhat easier to make big ticket, you know, 50 person team building sales for some corporate office that happens to be in town and needs something to do.

33:16Like, do you play around with that at all? Absolutely. A quarter of our business last year was was strictly corporate and team building tours that we had given. And so we absolutely tap into that. If you're working in an office, you're looking for something different than just going out to a restaurant. And so the tour allows you to mingle with your group, go to different restaurants, do something different. I've also found that we've tapped into a company here called Airbus, and they build airplanes around the world. They have a manufacturing plant in Mobile. And Airbus has used us a few times for when they bring corporate clients down from other parts of the world.

33:54They bring them here to Mobile, and they take our tour. And so it's another way for somebody else to promote Mobile outside of just maybe the Chamber of Commerce saying how great the city is. You know, you get to these people, these executives get to come and take the tour. And it's again, it shows how, hey, Mobile is a really cool place. We have a really cool history. We've got great restaurants and it's a thriving town. And it makes them feel good about their decision to locate and do business at Mobile. Do you do anything proactive to get on the radar of those corporate booking travel coordinator type of people?

34:26Or is it just by virtue of being number one for things to do in Mobile that they reach out to you? It's a lot of hard work. I would say the number one thing is going back to what I mentioned at the very beginning is going out and networking with people. I absolutely recommend that. I think getting your name out there. But yeah, email, that's another big way that we kind of capitalize on that too. Okay, email in terms of trying to find a decision maker, trying to find a contact person at these companies? That's right. Yeah. And so email marketing. And so, yeah, we'll even send out sometimes specific emails to our list of client, our email list who are potential team building tour guests.

35:03And so we'll send out a specific email to them specifically telling them about the different options. So, you know, yeah, when it comes to team building, we've given tours on trolleys and, you know, we can do as much or as little as you want to do on a team building tour. Is the email list primarily just existing customer base or is there a reason somebody else would be on it? Primarily, it's an existing customer base. My guess is it's not huge. So you kind of scrub that list for people who have, you know, company looking email addresses. You're like, hey, you look like you took our tour last July.

35:36Hope you had a great time. You know, open the door in that way. Like if you ever need a team building activity, you know, keep us in mind. That's exactly right. Absolutely. They'll do that. But, you know, a good little strategy that I kind of came up with was I created a blog and it was on our website, best team building activities in Mobile, Alabama. And it was, you know, it's like a top 10 list. Right. And so if you search for team building in Mobile, that's the number one thing that's going to pop up. So we've got that on there. And of course, you know, you click the link and send you an email right to me.

36:05And we'll start planning that corporate tour. Love it. Yeah, that's probably not a huge search volume, but very high, very well qualified traffic that does come through. That's right. Very good. So what's a day in the life look like for you today? Maybe this weekend, for example, if you've got a dozen people booked, but you've got somebody else handling that tour, you're answering the phone, you're doing the podcast. Where's your time going if you've got other people doing the actual logistic tour side? Yeah, I still consider myself a solopreneur in a way because I don't give as many tours. This weekend, for an example, we'll give probably six or seven tours this weekend, but I'm not going to give any of them.

36:43Oh, how cool is that? That's exciting. Yeah, it's fun. Of course, you're still responsible at the end of the day, and emergencies happen. So you've always got to be on standby a little bit. But at the end of the day, I think that communication with the restaurants, I mean, constant communication with the restaurants about our groups. And if something is a little bit off schedule from our normal tour, they're going to know about it ahead of time. And so I think, you know, communicating with the restaurants, communicating with the tour guides constantly and getting good people that you trust. And I think that's a good recipe for for me to be able to handle a lot of the logistics.

37:20I get to create these theme tours that I've talked about. Like right now, I'm working hard on our haunted tour season coming up in October. And so, you know, it gives me a chance to plan that. It gives me a chance to plan some of the team building tours that we'll do over the next few weeks as well. So a lot of planning. Were your roster of guides pulled from existing tour operators? Like, were they doing this before, either for themselves or for another agency, another company? And they're just like, oh, I have capacity. I could add on another tour. Or these like completely homegrown hires where you're like, look, we'll teach you how to do how to lead these food tours.

37:55It's an incredible mix of people. So I do have one person that was a tour guide for a duck boat that she did a duck boat tour. She was a tour guide for them. Other than that, nobody else had really ever given tours before. Now, they were, again, passionate about our city. One person is a retired school teacher. One person actually took our tour as a visitor, loved it so much. She moved here and reached out to me about taking tours and told me that the reason that she moved here was because of the tour. Wow. Now she's given tours for us. And so. That must have been some tour. Yeah, it is. It's an incredible mix of people.

38:32So, yeah, you never know where your next great hire is going to come from. That's fascinating. Anything else that's surprised you along the way? I never set out to quit my full-time job. I certainly didn't anticipate that. That was never my plan. It was just really just, again, like I mentioned at the beginning, a passion to talk about our history and to give those tours. So, no, I never would have imagined starting a podcast or quitting my full-time job. I even wrote a book. I wrote a book called The Culinary History of Mobile that had never been written before. And so, you know, just little things like that that have opened up so many doors and avenues.

39:11It is surprising when you stop and think about it. That's fascinating. We'll have to link up the book in the show notes here. Absolutely. Where do you want to take this thing? Is there a geographic expansion play? Like, oh, we're going to take over the whole Gulf Coast. Is there, I mean, there's a limit to how many people are coming through town. And I guess you got a decent chunk of the customer base that's locals, but then I got to imagine that taps out after a while. What's next for you? Yeah, we did expand to a neighboring city that's called Fairhope, Alabama. It's a very small town. You know, it's a lot of boutique shops and great restaurants there.

39:47And we did expand there. And that tour is going really well, too, and it's growing. But my plan is not to – I don't plan on having an empire of food tours along the Gulf Coast myself. I'm going to franchise this thing, world domination. I'm passionate about where I'm from. I'm passionate about Mobile and Baldwin County, the area that I'm from. And so that's where my passion is. So it would probably be – I'd be doing those towns an injustice to really expand and do that in some other town. But what's next for me, though, is I have started a course, and it's called Food Tour Founders. And so I want to give people who are interested in this niche an opportunity to take my course and learn the lessons and perfect the entire strategy of your business and for people to do this in their food tour.

40:38And I hope that, of course, my big goal would be to have not an empire, but thousands of food tours around the world, potentially, of people that have taken the food tour founders course. And that would be incredibly fulfilling for me. You can impact a lot of lives that way, both in the tour operators and in the people going on those tours, wherever they travel. Because it is such a memorable experience. The one that stands out to me is riding on the back of these motorbikes in Vietnam. and it just feels like you're going to die because there's just wall-to-wall motorbikes in these packed cities.

41:13And then eventually the traffic lets up and they feel like they're really flooring it or, you know, open it up. You look over the girl's shoulder and you see we're going like 25 miles an hour. Like, oh, gosh, it feels like we were flying now. But it was such a unique thing. And still talking about it 10, 12 years later. That's right. Yeah. And there's a great network of people. They take food tours everywhere they go. Yeah. And so that's another, I think, a marketing win for a food tour operator that is organically, you're going to have people that are searching for food tours because there are a lot of great food tours out there.

41:44And it makes an impact on you. There's so many great operators that give great experiences that people can trust that, hey, you know what? A food tour is a great experience in a city because you're going to eat at some of the great restaurants. You're going to learn about the unique food and the food that ties into the history. Well, it's something that we like to give as gifts, too, where it's like, I don't know what to get you, but I know you're going to this place this week. And here's a gift certificate to this place or here. We already booked it for you on Thursday night. You know, have a good time.

42:15Yeah, it's a great idea. I don't know. Do you get gift card traffic? Absolutely. Yeah, we do. We do. We have gift cards on our website. And so, yeah, that does happen pretty frequently where maybe a relative might book a tour or give someone a gift card for them to come to Mobile or something like that. So that does happen pretty frequently. Very good. Well, foodtourfounders.com. This is brand new. So you'd be a chance to be an early student of Chris's if you go check that out. Foodtourfounders.com. We'll link that up in the show notes. BienvilleBytesFoodTour.com as well. If you happen to be in or around Mobile, check them out.

42:50Go take one of their tours. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. My number one tip for Side Hustle Nation is simple. It's probably been said before. Just do it. Step out there and do it. yeah, it's scary. It's scary to think about the what ifs, especially when it comes to business. I think for anybody, if you've got a passion, especially for food, for tourism, I say just do it. Just do it. Very good. Again, foodtourfounders.com. You can find Chris over there. A couple of takeaways before we wrap up. Number one is really this call to be a steward of the community, right?

43:23It's the relationships with the restaurant owners. It is leading with this, hey, we're fans of Mobile. We want to get the word out. This is a great place to eat, a great place to learn about the history. And that excitement rubs off. And it's not, we're approaching this as like, you know, money hungry startup entrepreneurs that will come. And that is great. That's a by-product of doing the first part of, you know, trying to build a product that people really want and value, which I know you've done in this case. The second thing is to build that marketing engine where now seven years deep into it, it looks like you can't search for things to do in Mobile and not come across Chris, But it didn't start out that way.

43:58It started with friends and family, social media, organic. Can you leave us a five-star review, right? And it starts to compound and it starts to compound. And then we get the corporate booking tours and we start the podcast and, you know, integrate. Then we expand all these different other, you know, themed tours. And then we're expanded to the nearby city. And it seems like a lot starting out, but it was just a weekend side hustle starting out, right? It just, I want to hammer that in that the marketing engine doesn't have to be overnight, but it can really start to compound as you get into it.

44:25So fascinating stuff. I'm looking around to see if there are any food tours nearby. We're out in the burbs, so probably less good around here. But definitely lots of opportunities to do something in and around Seattle, especially seasonal with the cruise traffic coming through. So it makes a lot of sense. If you are looking for something to listen to next in this local tour niche, I've got some other episode recommendations for you. Episode 370, we talked to Rob Petingalo. He did a history tour, walking tour in Washington, D.C. And what was unique about his business was YouTube was the primary marketing strategy.

45:01It was interesting, but like YouTube is global. Like it was like I'm marketing a local business on this global platform. Well, how it worked in his case was he's targeting, you know, common questions that up and coming visitors to D.C. were going to ask, like, how does the Metro work? Or, you know, what are the best things to do in the summer? And so he'd create these videos. Hey, I'm Rob. I'm a local tour guide in Washington, D.C. And here's how to use the Metro. Here's how our Metro system works. Again, super targeted audience. And he'd get customers booking all the time. I watched half a dozen of your videos.

45:28And it's so cool to meet you in person. It's so cool to book one of your tours. We talked to Michelle Maddox. She was the one doing the guided meditation on the Red Rocks in Sedona. That was primarily through Airbnb experiences. Again, tapping into these pre-existing marketing channels. We called it the buy buttons theory. Like, you know, where are my target customers already doing business? If they're coming into town, they might be doing it through Airbnb. And maybe there's a strategic partnership through local hotels or, you know, making connections with the concierge desks at various hotels in this case.

45:54And the other one that comes to mind, oh, the Michelle Maddox episode was number 347. And then we had Alex Kennan in 193 way back in the archives. She was doing the urban hiking tours in San Francisco. So lots of bookings through those, you know, corporate team building stuff. Plus, you know, through building up that reputation over years of putting in the reps and getting those TripAdvisor reviews and showing up as a as a cool thing to do in town. And she ended up getting a book deal with like Mountaineers Press or Mountaineers Publishing. Like the urban, she like literally wrote the book on the urban hiking, just like you wrote the culinary history of Mobile.

46:27And if none of those appeal to you, that's all good. But hustle.show is where you can find a little two-minute quiz to get your own personalized playlist of the episodes that are most impactful for you. You can do it on your mobile device, just a few short multiple choice questions, and it'll spit out that playlist for you. Hustle.show is where you'll find that. Big thanks to Chris for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our advertisers in one place.

46:55That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. if you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. She'll fire off that text message. Hey, we should totally start this in our town. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.