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 ou...