The Best First Side Hustle Anyone Can Start - Ep. #294

Michael McCoy (0:00)

I started going farmer's market after farmer's market, and over the course of a summer, I sold $60,000 for the product, working part-time under 20 hours a week.

Chris Koerner (0:09)

Your first three months, you did $20,000 a month working 20 hours a week? Give or take?

Michael McCoy (0:14)

Yeah.

Chris Koerner (0:15)

Holy crap.

Michael McCoy (0:16)

In the beginning, we didn't really know how good this was going to do, so we just started it out of our basement.

Chris Koerner (0:22)

You don't need a team there. You're making a couple of hundred bucks an hour of profit for the time spent in the market. That's an amazing living, but you can only scale farmers' markets so much, so you start going online. What does your first three months of online sales look like?

Michael McCoy (0:37)

When we went online in the beginning, we did in less than 30 days what we did in four months. Our best month so far, we did over $160,000.

Chris Koerner (0:47)

Holy cow.

Michael McCoy (0:48)

Basically, over the past couple of years, just online sales alone, a little north of $3 or $4 million. We've just scratched the surface of the marketplace.

Chris Koerner (0:58)

What other farmer's market items, products, services did you see around you that seemed to be extra popular, extra profitable?

I met this guy who sold pizza dough mix at his local farmer's market. He made $60,000 in a summer, mostly profit, working 20 hours a week out of his basement. No restaurant, no food truck, started the business with next to nothing. Basically, every market he walked home empty. His best day pulled in $3,000 in four hours.

We're going to interview this guy, but before I get there, I'm going to start this episode today by breaking down how you can start your own farmer's market. Because guess what? I just did this with my wife. We're doing this right now and it's actually really profitable. I'm going to cover that first, then I'm going to interview Michael about his pizza kit business. At the end of that interview, we're going to talk about other farmer's market side hustles that are printing money, homemade pasta, all kinds of stuff. Then he's going to give us more farmer's market hacks that you can apply to any business. My favorite hack is a branded bag trick that sold his product before customers ever reached his table. Enjoy. Okay, so let's talk farmer's markets. Now, I haven't spoken about this publicly yet, but it's a pretty cool story. So my wife and a friend launched their second kids farmer's market here in the Dallas, Fort Worth area about a month ago. They did their first last year and it was a big success. Their first one last year had 50 booths and it took them a couple months to sell all the booths. This one took them about a week to sell twice as many booths, 100, and it was a huge success. And it just got me thinking more and more about farmers markets, not just from the perspective of a vendor at a market, but from the perspective of the person who owns the market. So I know a farmers market is like the least sexy business out there, but the unsexy businesses are the best. They're the most profitable ones. They're the ones that people are sleeping on. So hear me out for a few minutes and then I'll get into my interview with Michael. Let me try to convince you to start a farmers market. I'll tell you exactly how ours broke down. So let me be very clear. My wife and her friend business partner did like 95 percent of the work here. I vibe coded an app for the judges so that they could score the booths on three different age categories and several different factors. That's what I did and then I showed up and filmed content. They did all the work, but I had a cool inside look into how it works and how much money it could make if the one that we didn't just do were a non-profit. We're doing this to help kids become entrepreneurs and not to be rich, but plenty of people could do this to get rich and it costs almost nothing to start. The magic is in the overhead or the lack thereof. We had almost zero overhead. Now, typically, your biggest overhead is going to be your lease or your rent or your land or where are you going to put this market? All these people to set up 10 by 10 tents, six-foot plastic folding tables and chairs. Where are you going to do this? Well, you could do it near City Hall like I do here in my small town. But what my wife and her friend did is they went to a popular outdoor walkable shopping area here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It's been here for about 15 years. It's got all the typicals, Cheesecake Factory, Grimaldi's Pizzeria, Burger Place, Frozen Yogurt, Grocery Store, you name it. It's nice. It's cool. But these guys are in the business of occupancy. They want as close to 100% occupancy as possible. And they also have apartments. It's a mixed-use complex. So they need things to be bustling. They need things to appear busy. And so it's in their best interest to host a farmers market. And so I think it was my wife called the marketing manager or emailed them or whatever, and they were thrilled to be a part of this. They said, yeah, let's set a date a few months in the future. Let's rope off some parking spaces for you, and we'll help you advertise it. We'll put it up on our electronic billboard that, like, 100,000 people drive by every day. That's not an exaggeration. It's right on the freeway. We'll send an email out to our list, like, we will advertise this market for you, and we won't charge you for it. And we're going to give you gift cards to our shopping center, to all the businesses here, to give to the judges, just to say thanks for helping participate. So we did it last year. It was a huge success. And then we did it this year. And it was a mega success. And I basically played zero role in marketing it, either to the vendors or to the people that showed up. I posted about it on Instagram the morning of. I have no idea if it drove any traffic, but it was way too short notice to make a difference. So I don't want anyone to think that you have to have an audience to do this. It was packed. And it's perfect because people are already coming to that shopping center. Most of the people at the market probably had no idea there was even a market there that day. They just went there to buy some Lululemon leggings or whatever, and then saw a bunch of kids selling cool stuff. And so they started shopping. But a lot of people did know there was a market. So they came there and then they might have bought some Lululemon leggings as well, which the shopping center would be thrilled about. And then you have all the friends and family. You have these seven to 17 year old kids with a booth and their parents are posting about it on Facebook and Instagram and everywhere to friends and family and extended family and they're showing up and driving business to the shopping center and to the other kids as well. So it's this beautiful win-win all the way around. Now, here's what we did wrong. We provided tables and chairs never again, ever, ever, ever again. What you need to provide is just a space on the ground. Hey, here's a map. You take a laminated piece of paper with a number on it. You take a sandbag. You throw a piece of paper on the ground. You throw the sandbag on it so it doesn't blow away. And then you tell people the day before, the week before, you are booth number six, seven. OK, and then around 8 a.m., all the vendors show up an hour before it starts. They set up, they set up their tent. We set out the tables and chairs beforehand, which is a big pain. I won't get into it, but we're not going to do that again. And that was basically our only overhead. That was our only cost. And then they have an hour to set up or two hours or whatever they want or need. And then people start showing up at nine and it lasts until 12, one, two o'clock in the afternoon. That's how it works. A lot of these kids made hundreds of dollars in profit. I think a few made over a thousand. And then some kids made less than a hundred. It just didn't go well. And the kids that typically didn't do well were the ones that sold really, really cheap knickknacks, you know, 3D printed objects or crafts or stuff that people buy to be nice, but they don't really need. And it's also the stuff that takes forever for these kids to make. So I know I don't recommend you sell that stuff. The kids that did well sold higher ticket stuff. And in this case, higher ticket is like twenty to fifty dollars. My daughter sold thirty five dollar custom hats. She had an 80 percent margin and she made hundreds of dollars of profit in a few hours. Her overhead was a seventy dollar hat pressing machine and some like four dollar hats she bought on Amazon and some patches and stuff like that. Great business. So I think there's even more opportunity to do this for adults. And you could charge a lot more on booth fees as well. And this concept of doing it at an outdoor shopping market, that's not really a thing. Now, I know Tractor Supply, they have markets on Saturdays. And it's genius because it brings people to the Tractor Supply. And Tractor Supplies usually aren't like in as good of a location as a Walmart. They're usually kind of off the beaten path in more rural areas. So it's a great way for Tractor Supply to market to the community, to let people know that they're there, and then also to have a high sales day on that Saturday because people are showing up, buy hot chocolate, then they go in and buy a bunch of chickens or whatever. So Tractor Supply is kind of pioneering this, along with my wife and her business partner. But at the end of this, the shopping center went up to my wife. Remember, this is the second time they did it and said, this was amazing. How soon can we do this again?