« Side Hustle School

#194 - London Chocolate Tours Lead to Sweet Success

2017-07-13

Banking on a universal love of chocolate, a former temp worker creates a unique side hustle leading guided tours that allow tourists to eat their way through London’s chocolate shops. Side Hustle School features a new story EVERY DAY of someone who started a hustle without quitting their job. You’ll learn how they got the idea, how they overcame challenges along the way, and what the results are. You need a hustle! Share: #SideHustleSchoolShow notes: SideHustleSchool.comTwitter: @chrisguillebeauInstagram: @193countries

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This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
Hey there. What's up, what's up, welcome back decided to school? I am your host Chris Without coming to you from the sound studio at world domination headquarters in Portland Oregon, and in yesterday's episode, I talked about one type of tourism side hustle a guy who's in amateur pilot and is making money by showing off parts of organ. Actually, today is another tourism as side hustle, and this one is all about chocolate. If you listen to yesterday story Oh that's awesome, but I'm not a pilot. Do you like chocolate, great, keep listening. I often talk about the importance of writing lists. If you're trying to figure out what your site so is. I would highly encourage you and every other chance take out. You're, not bucker. Just got a piece of paper start running down all the ways you spend your time when you have a choice about it, so right on your hobbies, what do you like to read? What kind of music do you like? Do you like sports? Do you like
games. When you do. When you go online, you got some time to just kind of mess around what websites you gravitate towards when you're planning a trap. Where do you want to go well. Let's say if you could go anywhere. Where would that be, and if the day as well? open to you. How do you spend our time now? I don't actually believe that the sway to start your side. Hustle is to follow your passion, but it's true that many successful side us come from digging into those things that you enjoy and seeing it there's something that connects them. Not just something is beneficial to yourself, I mean could be beneficial to others. That's what your hearing a story, it's all about a series of chocolate tours in London that eventually turn into a full time job bringing in a six figure income, but like a lot of stories, it wasn't overnight. Success that took awhile. That's always coming right up
Today story comes from London where Jennifer Earl runs chocolate tours. It sounds like a dream job right. Well, I definitely is now, but it took her a while to get there really understand the story. We have to jump back to two thousand and five when Jennifer with tempting part time to make ends meet. You know you want to do something on our own, but she wasn't sure that with ie So she started running down everything she loved and everything. He's good at that list included chocolate meeting people talking eating and London. There. She brainstorm different ideas and stand out idea was Chocolate Torres. She optimistically figured that everyone loves chocolate, release most people, so it should be an easy. Just as important is the right level of commitment for her was different, not that it was outside our comfort zone, but also small that you wouldn't have to take out alone, spent a ton of money or take a lot of risk to get started. So how did you get started? Well, she began with research and in some ways, research
trying a lot of chocolate, but an ultimate learn more about the history of the city. He wanted her walking two combined food with Corky Historical facts, social research and prepare for about a year before she actually got going on talking with her friends. She met someone who is quitting his day job to become a full time. Business coach. He was kind enough to teach her how to create a basic website and basic it wise to keep things simple. Jennifer made the tour dates linked to a Paypal payment where people could pay for the tour. She would then manually track bookings with an Excel spreadsheet, a system that she admitted led to lots of errors as she got up and running still, though, her total cost of start up were less than honey. Pounds, not quite a hundred. I start up but close Jennifer's. First customers came through her toastmaster group, since she knew every one in that group. She charged half price and also invited some friends for free to round up the group. She thought that first,
we'll be about two and a half hours, but it turned out. She had enough material to last for hours to herself. This helps or justify this sixty pounds iii that she was charging now. Here is an interesting experience. A few months after getting up and running She got her first media call from a journalist who wanted to feature her in an article about Europe's hidden secrets in the daily mail. Adele emails, a huge newspaper with a lot of leadership, so Jennifer was sure this was her big break. Few weeks later, the journalist called back to say that the article would be any upcoming Saturday Paper and Jennifer panicked. She was worried about that pay, PAL, Excel spreadsheet system that she had had to get she said, assistant didn't have a maximum number of tickets, for there is no to prevent forty people from signing up? For example, she had a vision of a tourist while the other but and having to contact. Able to sort out the situation? This actually happened?
she was on a many break in the south of France with her then boyfriend. The couple spent most of the weekend at trying to fix a ticket system. Be then boyfriend was not particularly happy and in the end she actually only sold three pair of tickets, so the big break in the daily mail was not that big. After about a year of trying to make her chocolate tourism to full time, income, Jennifer decided she needed a quote real job. All this time she had been doing temporary work on the side, while devoting much of our attention to the hustle till the next several years. She worked a real job. She was a buyer marks and Spencer and a food developer at the UK headquarters at Mcdonald's. She said these were great learning experiences, but she still really just wanted to be on our own, so she can t to build a hustle those first few years she only made a few thousand pounds, but business slowly increased Bring those yours you never actually paid herself out of the revenue by she was able to write off most of expenses which allowed her to a much of her salary from corporate job, then she was able to pay
down payment on honour flat and still save money for when she quit her job to focus on the tourist in twenty twelve. She brought in sixteen thousand pounds in revenue and since twenty four thousand pounds was the average salary at the time she felt pretty good. So good, in fact, that at the end of the year she decided to quit her job and make that jump to full time entrepreneur over the next two years, revenue doubled each year and in twenty sixteen she brought in two thousand pounds, which is about a hundred and six thousand dollars these days. Jennifer has multiple tours around London as well. A specialty workshops for schools and corporations should ask team that runs most of the actual tourists she's upgraded away. Site and uses a system called peak Pro for all her toward bookings, things that connects directly to stripe account, which is much operated from the old Paypal and in itself, but she set up and now that this businesses at a sustainable level, the experience has given her the confidence and skills to launch something new. The new project is called taste trip her. It offers curated self guided tourist revolving around chocolate, coffee or beer she's looking to bring on partners for the new experience, and she has high hopes that it may actually exists.
The chocolate tourists, but if it doesn't or if it takes some time, she can rely on income from that overnight. Success that she's built up over many years, whereas I said sometimes it takes it How to make the big success you're a lot of overnight successes in the world to take a few years or more, but look now what a great success story, on your London fishery check out chocolate, ecstasy tours. I will be there myself in October. For several days of events. Hopefully I get to see some listeners listeners. Wherever you are remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action for so much better today shows our online at sight of school dot com, slash one nine for so much more The way I am critical above so
more is on the way back once more to Morrow.
Transcript generated on 2020-08-06.