676: This PE Teacher Started a $150k Side Hustle

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1:15In this episode, you'll learn the fun, unique business he chose, how he got his first customers, and how he's scaled it to a pretty serious income stream all on the side. from foampartyallstars.com, Tim Karstensen. Welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Hey, Nick. Thanks for having me. I've been listening to your podcast for quite a while. Love it. And I thought, why not come on and tell our story here? What a cool example. I guess I just gave it away. It's a foam party business. Let's stick around. We're covering the startup costs, the marketing tactics, the pricing and delivery, all that good stuff.

1:48So you might be able to borrow Tim's idea or a similar local service and spin it up in your own town. But I got to start off at the beginning. Out of all the side hustles, why phone parties? How'd you come up with this? Yeah. So I've been an elementary PE teacher for the past 18 years and always in my summers off, I have either another job or another business. I used to teach and coach in the summers, driver's ed, stuff like that, which has its own stories. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got the whole summer off. I might as well take advantage. Yeah, yeah. So in 2022, in the summer, I was kind of looking for something else.

2:26And at first I stumbled upon the bounce house business and I kind of did a deep dive on that. But for me, it was a little too saturated. I found out that the floor for insurance in the bounce house business is pretty high when you're just starting out and it's hard to make money in the beginning. Okay. Interesting. Do you find like you're going to need a lot of inventory, multiple bounce houses, like to make the insurance pencil out for somebody like starting in that space? Even if you had one or two bounce houses to start, your floor for insurance might be, let's say,$5 ,000,$6 ,000, which, you know, if you're renting out a bounce house for a couple hundred bucks, it's going to take a while to get that back.

3:05I found some people that were doing bounce houses down there in the Southern states, Arizona, Florida, California, Texas. We're also doing foam parties for kids. And I think it was a party rental Facebook group that I stumbled upon that. And I thought, oh, okay, that's interesting. Foam parties for kids. I mean, I remember when I was in college, I went to a foam party, but I don't think that's not really a kid's thing. So, you know, it picked my interest and I was like, okay, I'm good at working with kids, 18 years teaching, you know, elementary PE. And then I, you know, looked around here, around the Chicagoland area.

3:41And I found out at that point, there was only one other place and they were about 50 miles north of me. So that was really the only competition I could find. So I thought, okay, this looks doable. Okay. Okay. And maybe we should pause. Like I, I kind of have a vision and I've been on your website. Like it's just like kids running through walls of bubbles, like, you know, sometimes up to the shoulders in bubbles. So like, it just looks like a lot of fun. Yeah. Cast that visual of like what we're talking about here. Right. We play kid-friendly music, even hire a voiceover artist to do like a countdown to the foam party, you know, like a New Year's Eve countdown, get them excited.

4:16There's rules of the foam all over the speakers. And we have these giant, we call them foam cannons. And they shoot foam around. You can pretty much fill up like a 30 foot by 30 foot area. and depending on the size and the age of the kid, you could keep it low if it's a little kid or you could bury them up high if it's a teenage type kid. It totally depends on the situation, but the kids just like dancing around and frolicking around with their friends and enjoying it, exploring it and things like that. Okay, so it sounds like it was born from this research of looking at the inflatables business, the bounce house rental side hustle and saying, oh, it's interesting.

4:53As I'm on the website to some of these other service providers, here's something else that they offer. Like maybe we could just spin up only that part. There's got to be lower liability or something like that. And maybe that might make sense. Yeah, since it was kind of a novel idea to me and I ran it by my wife who shut down my bounce house business idea. And she said, that's interesting. Tell me more about that. Okay. Okay. From that point, I was like, okay, well, I might have an okay from my wife, which is good. We have three young kids. So she's an angel and stays at home with the kids a lot when I'm out doing phone parties.

5:27So I kept looking into it and looking at the, you know, the competition that was there. And then I found a Facebook group of phone party providers around the country and studied every post that I could from that Facebook group. There's a Facebook group for everything. That's crazy. Yeah, there really is. And they kind of lay it out in the Facebook group, how to start things and how much success they've had for a lot of the people. And that was kind of my guideline for how to get things started and just kind of went from there, you know, started up the business. thought of a name, Foam Party All-Stars, and, you know, did all the starting business stuff, got the logo and the websites, did that myself, which I don't know if I had to do it again, I might have had a professional to start out with that instead of spending so many hours on something so basic, but, but you know, you learn, you learn.

6:16That's okay. Everybody starts somewhere. I think everybody has that struggle of like trying to make a website, make it look a certain way. And And yeah, that's like an entrepreneurial rite of passage. Exactly. Yeah. You know, you might save a little money, but you're spending a lot of time sometimes. That's the trade-off. You got to weigh in that situation. So building the website, do you have any equipment at this point? Like, or were we kind of like, oh, I want to wait and see if we get any bookings. Like, what's going on here? Yeah. So I bought my first phone party set up right around when I had the website go live after I, you know, get all the business stuff.

6:52you know, register with the state and everything like that. And then in, in January, I sent out some postcards to kind of get the ball rolling and, uh, as a way to have people know that we exist. And we ended up getting quite a few responses and bookings from that, which, uh, was awesome. And since it's wintertime, people are like, can you come by in May? Like they're planning ahead. And so you don't necessarily need to have the stuff like ready for that weekend. Right. So these aren't like the private birthday party type of things. These would be interests from daycares, summer camps, park district, churches, schools, things like that, who book farther in advance than a typical birthday party would.

7:38Okay. So you build up your own mailing list of the daycares, summer camp, and then you put out kind of a really targeted mailing just to them, just to those offices. Right. Yeah. So I'd found pretty much any daycare, summer camp, park district, library, elementary school. Within about 35 or 40 miles, I made a list and I sent the same postcard to all of them. Now I kind of break it up with individual marketing for the different types. So I might, I would send a different postcard to schools than I would to churches or libraries and things like that. But back then it was just the one postcard, Vistaprint, send it all.

8:19Hope we get some responses and definitely worked to get the first few responses. Yeah. How many did you send out? I want to say maybe 700 total. Okay. Okay. So, you know, you're putting a little bit of money into it at that point. Yeah. Casting a wide enough net to kind of know if you are shooting completely blank after 700 and maybe the messaging needs some tweaking. Might be time to turn it around, right? Yeah. So, and at that point I thought, well, Well, if I needed to, if it wasn't going to work, I could sell the equipment back and I wouldn't really be all that much of a loss. Yeah, relatively low risk.

8:54What did the equipment cost? The foam cannon itself, I use a professional grade model that cost at the time about$2 ,500 for the cannon. And then I would say for other things that are in the foam party setup, we have these barriers like PVC and some vinyl with our marketing on there. barriers to keep the foam from coming back at the person shooting the foam. Okay, I'm picturing like a medieval shield. Yeah, in case the wind shifts. So it's kind of like a little wall about four feet high, maybe, with our marketing on the front that they see. And then it keeps the foam from blowing back at us and getting on our equipment.

9:34And then just little things like, well, we have a five by five tent with our branding on it that just kind of makes it look professional. and then a lot of little things like tools that you might need and hoses and electrical cords and speakers. Yes, you just need a water source and, you know, BYO bubbles basically and then in this professional cannon at a bare minimum. Right. Yeah. So we do need a water source, just a regular hose hookup works and then an electrical outlet, a regular outlet works if it's just for one foam cannon. If it's multiple foam cannons or if you're not close enough to an outlet, then we bring a generator in that situation.

10:18For most of the smaller events, daycares, summer camps and stuff like that, it's just one foam cannon. And so, yeah, I started off with one, got a few bookings before I even did any foam parties. Even though I had some booked, I bought a second setup and it just kind of kept on rolling. What did the postcard say? Was there pricing on there? It was just like, you know, booking now for, you know, summer 2023 or whatever it was. It said like, we bring a foam party to you. And then it said like foam parties are great for. And then I tried to hit summer camps, daycares, school events, church events, library, summer reading kickoffs, block parties, birthday parties.

10:59And then it says like foam party packages include, you know, foam cannon, a foam party leader. Which is you showing up and leading the thing. Right. Which at that point is just me. I'm the only guy that's available. And then book now at our website. We did have pricing on our website for basic one hour, one cannon, or we also do something called glow foam, which looks like the foam is glowing in the dark for night events. So we had pricing for that on the website, not on the postcard. Okay. What's it cost to get you to come out? For a one hour, like a birthday party, it's$3.75. And then most people just, okay, we'll book you for an hour and then you kind of clean up, tear down, and hopefully you've got another one booked for the afternoon.

11:43Right. Yeah. So for birthday parties, which is a lot of what we do on the weekends, birthday parties and block parties, we usually just an hour, which we found is a good amount of time for the kids. If you're doing two hours with the same group of kids, you know, they kind of lose interest. That's fair. It's opposite of an upsell. A lot of times it'll be, you know, we want to do two hours for this birthday and it'll be me saying, well, we found that one hour is a good amount of time. And also, if you do a phone party on a grass surface for two hours, your chance of mud is a lot higher than one hour.

12:20You don't generally see any kind of mud. But I try to warn people this ahead of time. Okay. Yeah. There's other logistics involved. Right. And it does feel weird to try to, you know, almost, you know, reverse upsell. You know, you sure you want to do two hours? I try to do that just to make it the best experience for the kids and the parents. Yeah, that's fair. And then it just dissolves like it just evaporates away or you hose it down. The foam generally dissipates within 20 minutes to a half hour, depending on if it's on grass or asphalt, concrete, that will change it a little bit. And if it's windy out and things like that, we can hose down the grass, but really it doesn't really make much of a difference.

13:04You wouldn't even know it was there after an hour or two. So, I mean, it's just wet because it's mostly water. We use about 125 gallons of water for a one hour party for one cannon. so you know that in a concentrated area you can definitely tell that it's wet okay all right so so you send out all these postcards 700 postcards you start to get some inbound inquiries through the website people start calling you hey we want to book this thing what kind of questions are they asking you because you're like you know you're presenting all the confidence of like yeah we'll bring the party to you but like never having done it before like what kind of questions come up that now you know the answer to but at the time you're kind of like uh yeah we could totally do that Tim's answer to those initial inbound inquiries, plus his first paying gig, coming up right after this.

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15:42I want to invite you to get started for free. Plus, Side Hustle Show listeners get 20 % off your first six months at Quo.com slash Side Hustle. That's Quo.com slash Side Hustle. Look at them getting that three-letter domain. Quo.com slash Side Hustle. And if you've got existing numbers with another service, Quo will port them over at no extra charge. Quo, no missed calls, no missed customers. Yeah, it was definitely a kind of a fake it till you make it type situation where, you know, you try to be prepared, you know, by researching what other people have done around the country, but you've never really done it before.

16:21So you're kind of going on the fly and, you know, just being honest. And if they ask you a question and you don't know the answer, just let them know that you will get back to them as soon as you can. But with the daycares that we initially got, most of the time it would be like, all right, we have 125 kids. Like, how long do we need a phone party for? How much is it going to cost? Is it going to ruin the grass? Which is normal question that we get. And then do they get wet? Do they need a towel? Do they need a change of clothes? Does it sting their eyes is a question that we get a lot. The answer is no.

16:53Got it. I got it. All right. Let's fast forward to party number one, then. You go and you set this thing up for the daycare or wherever it is, and it goes off without a hitch. There's kids crying and screaming. Anything could happen at this point. What happens? Yeah, it's definitely a learning process. I mean, I set it up at my house and did a party for the kids and the neighbors. That's right. I have a trial run, yeah. Right, which was smart because that would have been not good if I didn't. However, my first party that I had booked was actually kind of higher on the difficulty scale. It was a school event and it was a two foam cannon glow foam party.

17:36So that is actually much trickier. So glow foam, there's a special additive that you put into the foam that makes it glow. looks like it's you know glowing uv glow uh once once it gets dark out but you also have uv lights that are that are hanging from uh your tents uh which you know there's a lot a lot more cords to deal with it's just it's trickier especially for a first event and plus it was two foam cannons at a time so uh then you run into things like am i going to be filling up the water containers fast enough with one water source and two two cannons and you know with a huge crowd I mean there was a couple hundred kids there which looking back I would have wanted more than two foam cannons if if I knew there was that many kids but I was just happy to be there at that point I showed up and the setup took way longer than it should have spent probably an hour and 15 minutes setting up which now would be half that for a two foam cannon but yeah it went well you get better as you go along, you get more reps in.

18:42Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And it went well. The kids loved it. It was definitely a learning experience. And, you know, each one that you do, you kind of pick up something or you might do something wrong. I think that one as well. Their water source at the school, there was like a pebble somehow stuck in the water source. So then I had to run 250 feet of hoses to the next closest water source. And yeah, so one of those things, You know, they didn't check it beforehand, but which now I tell people to do. But back then, I didn't have the experience. So, OK. Yeah. So a learning curve, learning process and a non-zero amount of equipment involved between the cannons and the speakers and the tents and the hoses and everything else.

19:26It's helpful to know. Yeah. Basically packed. We have a minivan. We fold all the seats down and I could fit two foam setups in the minivan. But I mean, it's jam packed. It's like you probably way too much stuff in there. Yeah, you're not seeing out the rear view anymore. Yeah, no, definitely not. Okay, so you get these initial bookings from the postcards and hopefully some positive feedback from those and maybe some word them out. But what happens after that in terms of driving additional traffic? because it is, you know, maybe you can, well, we're going to book you every year and there's some level of recurring revenue here, but it's, it's a lot of times it's got to be kind of a one and done thing for, uh, you know, onto the next, uh, onto the next gig.

20:10Yeah. So on a daily occurrence, it's a one and done thing and onto the next gig, but we definitely have a lot of recurring, um, customers. Uh, we found that once we started doing some of the daycare locations, some of the larger chain daycare locations. Once you do one or two and get your foot in the door and you show that you do a great job, the kids love it, you're easy to work with, then it might not happen the same year, but the following year, if we had three of a chain daycare, then the next year we had 12. And it just kind of snowballed in that way, especially with a lot of the larger daycares.

20:51We did a good job for them. And, you know, the following year they would all rebook and then they would tell some of their neighboring daycares of the same chain and they kind of snowballed in that way. OK, OK. Now, the other half of the business, I would say, is birthday parties and block parties. For that, we marketed with Facebook ads. And also, I posted a lot in every neighboring Facebook group that I could find with, you know, good pictures and an explanation of what a phone party is. And there was a very positive response with that. I even use my wife's, maybe I shouldn't say this on the air, but I use my wife's Facebook account to go into the mom's pages and I would post from her account since, you know, they don't really always allow males to post.

21:42But since it was under my wife's account, I was able to post. So it would be like city name moms would be like an example of a group that would exist. Exactly. And there's a lot of them for birthday parties, especially 98 % of the time, it's the mom that is booking the party. And the dad, when you get there is asking, are you going to kill his grass? But the mom books the party. So that's like the target market. When I run ads, I run the ads to moms. I really don't run it to dads. okay yeah it's an interesting we're seeing all sorts of creative you know birthday party like especially elementary school age you can go to the bounce house place is a really popular one you go to the arcade we've had a couple where um our kids have been invited to go it's like a video game truck like a guy shows up in his f-250 and behind it is like this pretty good size like horse trailer but he's got like a couch in there and like this wall of TVs and he's got like every console imaginable as like, it was a pretty cool setup.

22:42And I don't know how much it costs, but again, it's like, you know, upfront costs for him in the setup and then just, you know, do two, three parties a day and it's slowly, you know, recoup that. And after a while, you know, so maybe you got to buy new games every now and again, after a certain point, it's all gravy. Yeah. I've heard of those too. Those actually look cool. I would love to check one of those out, but not my business, but it would be cool. I think, you know, my kids would love it. the other one somebody sent me this it was like a nerf party rental and it looked like they were you know maybe they would do kids parties but it was more like corporate team building where we're gonna set up this like pretty intense like you know with uh you know inflatable pylons and like almost like a paintball arena but like what could it come to you we're gonna pop a nerf a nerf war yeah those look fun too i saw this a similar thing with almost like a nerf war but it was with water water guns and somehow on the vest it registered when you got shot with the water and a similar type thing oh like a full like laser tag type of setup yeah i thought that was cool so yeah people uh you know people spend money on this stuff it's an interesting place uh to play and and i i think you're right like okay especially if there's a franchise or a chain daycare and well i got my toe in the door with this one and now you can see how that would snowball and you can see how it would turn into recurring revenue we'll come back for our field day next year and and we'll reserve that almost in advance well let's pencil you in let's get on the calendar Yeah, it was hard initially with some of the chain daycares to get in because a lot of times you have to go through their corporate office, you have to file certain paperwork.

24:11And nobody who seems to want to give you the paperwork, they say, oh, you're not a registered vendor. It's like, I'll be a registered vendor. Just send me the paperwork. Yeah, yeah. Show me how to register. Exactly. So, well, once you break through that and you get registered, then it's like, okay, people see you do a good job. And then it kind of has snowballed for us, at least. And we see the birthday party thing snowball word of mouth wise, too, where it's like the kid goes to the phone party. The kid goes to the video game truck rental party. Well, I want that for my birthday. Right. So this kind of like starts to starts to spread.

24:41And then the moms text the other moms to be like, well, who was the you know, Timmy really wants the phone party. You know, who who did you use? Yeah. And in the end, I think really our best marketing is seeing our phone parties because, you know, a lot of times you might see pictures and you might think, well, that's. kind of weird. I don't know that maybe that would be fun. Maybe it wouldn't. But then if you see it and it's kind of like, okay, that's the kids are really enjoying this. That's pretty cool. And then we have built into, uh, again, we hired a voiceover artist that does like a promo for us.

25:14Like, Hey, if you want to have your own phone party at a daycare or a school or a birthday party, you come get a postcard or come get a business card from your phone party leader. And, you know, and then the next song goes. So that's another way that we market. This is just like built over the over the loudspeakers, like into your party playlist. Exactly. Like a, you know, a 25 second commercial for our own business during the phone party. And that usually drives, you know, several parents over to say, hey, this is really cool. Like how much do you charge or can you come to here? Or so it's it's been effective for sure.

25:48Now, would you go would you go all the way into Chicago? It looks like you're kind of out in the burbs a little bit. But if I search phone party Chicago, you're there on the first page. Yeah, so we don't go out to Chicago too much sometimes, but basically if we're not booked around us, then yes. We do some block parties out there. Block parties are big. To be honest with you, I really need to change up our Google business profile and add Chicago in, but I'm worried because I know sometimes if you change certain things, you can get suspended, and I don't want that to happen. Yeah, like expand the service area on the little map back.

26:23Right. So I've kind of been on the fence. And if you don't have to drive that far, then that could be an advantage too. If it's a big enough party, like there's a kids museum that we're doing that's like an hour and a half away. But I mean, they're doing four hours of multi-canon. So it's like, yeah, we'll come to you for sure. If it was a kid's birthday up there, it would probably be, no, I can refer you to somebody else that does phone parties in your area. Got it. Are you going to franchise the thing and go nationwide? It'd be like, oh, I've got it. Sure. Yeah, we've got a guy in that area.

26:49There are a couple of places around the country that are starting to franchise their phone party business. I'm not planning to do that myself. Still have the teaching job. But yeah, there are some that are starting to do that. Fair enough. That's going to be the next private equity rollout. We're going to acquire all these different companies. HVAC and then phone parties. Right. That'll be the next trendy thing, I promise. Yeah. All right. So Facebook ads, Facebook groups targeting the local neighborhood groups, the mom groups. It is just kind of like an introductory post if you're not already a member there.