Starting a Six-Figure Food Tour Company | Christine Hughey

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