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Today’s episode features Christine Hughey who owns A Little Local Flavor food tour business.
Christine navigated several cities and years to land her dream job in Nashville.
Then shortly after, Christine would be celebrating a new marriage and devastated by their household income dropping from $120k to $35k.
At the bottom, she took a challenge to start her own business and in no time had created a six-figure food tour company that is growing at leaps and bounds.
Listen, learn, and let us know what you think about Christine’s amazing turnaround.
Episode Summary
Christine’s background
- She feels like she had a better than average financial understanding growing up
- Christine would go visit who are Grandmother who tasked them with tracking stock prices
- Her Grandmother would also buy them small stocks in companies they understood
- It gave them something to chat about over their times apart
- Christine admits that she took all those lessons for granted until much later
- When it was time to go to college, Christine wanted to get into the print industry
- This ended up requiring her to get an engineering degree at the college she was at
- From there she moved to Colorado and got a job she did not enjoy
Journey Towards FI
- In 2006 she is making around $35k per year and saving around $200 per month
- She also realized a true engineering job wasn’t going to be there for her in Denver
- From there she moved to a small town in Texas for a few years
- Then her dream job opened up in Nashville, TN
Things Begin to Fall Apart
- We’re now entering 2013 on the journey and Christine is hitting her groove
- Until she is shocked to find out that she’ll be losing that dream job quickly after starting
- Leading up to this, they had tried to push more and more work on her with no increased pay
- Christine’s husband helped her through this down period
- Then she got a new contract for a dream job as an engineer and things were looking up
- Then six weeks after their honeymoon, that new contract got pulled and she was unemployed
- On top of this, her husband lost his largest income-generating gig
- Six weeks after their honeymoon they saw their pay get cut from $120k to $35k
- They started cutting all expenses and downsizing their house
- Christine admits that the whole experience was crushing
- She vowed to never let one company be the source of her income
The turnaround
- Christine finally finds work at a food tour company in Nashville
- The hours are long and the pay had gotten cut in half
- Then January 2018 happened and her life completely changed
- This was when she attended her first financial independence event
- Christine attended CampFI down in Florida
- At the conference, she was challenged to start her own food tour company
- When she got home, she quit her job and started her own business that May
- This was the start of A Little Local Flavor
Building a Six-Figure Business
- Christine admits she was out of her comfort zone
- What got her through was just taking one small step every day
- Most of her education came from podcasts
- It took some time for her to shed being an engineer as her identity
- As she built her team she had several keys she wanted to hit
- Some things she wanted was to fair pay, have strong values, and a good work environment
- She then layers in lots of bonuses into her employees’ pay
- This small step really incentivizes them to do great work
- By the end of 2018, they had over $60k in sales
- But then 2019 grew like crazy
- She grew her team to include 8 employees
- They also saw the number of visitors grow to 4400 and sales to $330k
- With that, they took home 23% as profit
- Christine expects to grow that margin and increase tour types and locations
- Her 2020 goal is $500k for the company
- She also hopes to be able to scale back her involvement
Key Takeaways
- Social Currency: Christine talks about how to put out goodwill and fair pay and that’ll come back in multiples
- Taking a leap of faith: She took a leap in a smart way with a company that needed a low investment to start
Call to Action
Go out and build your social currency. Just give back and find a way you can collaborate with someone to make a positive change. You’d be surprised the good you can accomplish and the influence it can have on your own success.
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T’s Information
Her Company’s Facebook: A Little Local Flavor
Email via: Info@alittlelocalflavor.com
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