AI transcript
0:00:04 This PE teacher started a $150,000 side hustle.
0:00:09 In this episode, you’ll learn the fun, unique business he chose, how he got his first customers,
0:00:14 and how he’s scaled it to a pretty serious income stream all on the side.
0:00:20 From foampartyallstars.com, Tim Karstensen, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:20 Hey, Nick.
0:00:21 Thanks for having me.
0:00:23 I’ve been listening to your podcast for quite a while.
0:00:24 Love it.
0:00:27 And I thought, why not come on and tell our story here?
0:00:28 What a cool example.
0:00:29 I guess I just gave it away.
0:00:31 It’s a foam party business.
0:00:32 Let’s stick around.
0:00:37 We’re covering the startup costs, the marketing tactics, the pricing and delivery, all that
0:00:37 good stuff.
0:00:44 So you might be able to borrow Tim’s idea or a similar local service and spin it up in your
0:00:44 own town.
0:00:46 But I got to start off at the beginning.
0:00:48 Like, out of all the side hustles, why foam parties?
0:00:49 How’d you come up with this?
0:00:49 Yeah.
0:00:57 So I’ve been an elementary PE teacher for the past 18 years and always in my summers off,
0:00:59 I have either another job or another business.
0:01:05 I used to teach and coach in the summers, driver’s ed, stuff like that, which has its own stories.
0:01:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:01:07 I got the whole summer off.
0:01:08 I might as well take advantage.
0:01:09 Yeah, yeah.
0:01:15 So in 2022, in the summer, I was kind of looking for something else.
0:01:21 And at first I stumbled upon the bounce house business and I kind of did a deep dive on that.
0:01:23 But for me, it was a little too saturated.
0:01:29 I found out that the floor for insurance in the bounce house business is pretty high when
0:01:32 you’re just starting out and it’s hard to make money in the beginning.
0:01:33 Oh, okay.
0:01:34 Interesting.
0:01:38 Do you find like you’re going to need a lot of inventory, multiple bounce houses, like
0:01:41 to make the insurance pencil out for somebody like starting in that space?
0:01:46 Even if you had one or two bounce houses to start, your floor for insurance might be, let’s
0:01:51 say, $5,000, $6,000, which, you know, if you’re renting out a bounce house for a couple
0:01:54 hundred bucks, it’s going to take a while to get that back.
0:01:58 I found some people that were doing bounce houses down there in the Southern states, Arizona,
0:02:03 Florida, California, Texas, were also doing foam parties for kids.
0:02:09 And I think it was a party rental Facebook group that I stumbled upon that.
0:02:12 And I thought, oh, okay, that’s interesting.
0:02:14 Foam parties for kids.
0:02:18 I mean, I remember when I was in college, I went to a foam party, but I don’t think that’s
0:02:19 not really a kid’s thing.
0:02:24 So, you know, it picked my interest and I was like, okay, I’m good at working with
0:02:26 kids, 18 years teaching, you know, elementary PE.
0:02:31 And then I, you know, looked around here, around the Chicagoland area.
0:02:36 And I found out at that point, there was only one other place and they were about 50 miles
0:02:37 north of me.
0:02:40 So that was really the only competition I could find.
0:02:42 So I thought, okay, this looks doable.
0:02:43 Okay.
0:02:43 Okay.
0:02:44 And maybe we should pause.
0:02:46 Like, I kind of have a vision and I’ve been on your website.
0:02:50 Like, it’s just like kids running through walls of bubbles, like, you know, sometimes
0:02:51 up to the shoulders in bubbles.
0:02:53 And like, it just looks like a lot of fun.
0:02:54 Yeah.
0:02:56 Cast that visual of like what we’re talking about here.
0:02:56 Right.
0:03:01 We play kid-friendly music, even hire a voiceover artist to do like a countdown to the foam
0:03:05 party, you know, like a New Year’s Eve countdown, get them excited.
0:03:08 There’s rules of the foam all over the speakers.
0:03:13 And we have these giant, we call them foam cannons and they shoot foam around.
0:03:17 You can pretty much fill up like a 30 foot by 30 foot area.
0:03:21 And depending on the size and the age of the kid, you could keep it low if it’s a little
0:03:25 kid or you could bury them up high if it’s a teenage type kid.
0:03:27 It totally depends on the situation.
0:03:32 But the kids just like dancing around and frolicking around with their friends and enjoying
0:03:33 it, exploring it and things like that.
0:03:38 So it sounds like it was born from this research of looking at the inflatables business, the
0:03:42 bounce house rental side hustle and saying, oh, it’s interesting.
0:03:46 As I’m on the websites of some of these other service providers, here’s something else that
0:03:46 they offer.
0:03:49 Like maybe we could just spin up only that part.
0:03:52 There’s got to be lower liability or something like that.
0:03:54 And maybe that might make sense.
0:03:54 Yeah.
0:04:00 Since it was kind of a novel idea to me and I ran it by my wife who shut down my bounce
0:04:01 house business idea.
0:04:03 And she said, that’s interesting.
0:04:04 Tell me more about that.
0:04:05 OK, OK.
0:04:10 From that point, I was like, OK, well, I might have an OK from my wife, which is good.
0:04:11 We have three young kids.
0:04:16 So she’s an angel and stays at home with the kids a lot when I’m out doing phone parties.
0:04:21 So I kept looking into it and looking at the, you know, the competition that was there.
0:04:26 And then I found a Facebook group of phone party providers around the country and studied
0:04:29 every post that I could from from that Facebook group.
0:04:30 There’s a Facebook group for everything.
0:04:31 That’s crazy.
0:04:32 Yeah, there really is.
0:04:37 And they kind of lay it out in the Facebook group, how to start things and how much success
0:04:38 they’ve had for a lot of the people.
0:04:43 And that was kind of my my guideline for how to get things started and just kind of went
0:04:47 from there, you know, started up the business, thought of a name, phone party all stars.
0:04:54 And, you know, did all the starting business stuff, got the logo and the websites, did that
0:04:57 myself, which I don’t know if I had to do it again.
0:05:00 I might have had a professional to start out with that instead of spending so many hours
0:05:02 on something so basic.
0:05:05 But, but, you know, you learn, you learn.
0:05:06 That’s OK.
0:05:07 Everybody starts somewhere.
0:05:11 I think everybody has that struggle of like trying to make a website, make it look a certain
0:05:12 way.
0:05:15 And yeah, that’s that’s like an entrepreneurial rite of passage.
0:05:16 Exactly.
0:05:16 Yeah.
0:05:20 You know, you might save a little money, but you’re spending a lot of time sometimes.
0:05:21 That’s the trade off.
0:05:23 You got away in that situation.
0:05:26 So building the website, do you have any equipment at this point?
0:05:29 Like, or we kind of like, oh, I want to wait and see if we get any bookings.
0:05:30 Like what’s going on here?
0:05:31 Yeah.
0:05:40 So I bought my first phone party set up right around when I had the website go live after
0:05:43 I, you know, get all the business stuff, you know, registered with the state and everything
0:05:44 like that.
0:05:53 And then in, in January, I sent out some postcards to kind of get the ball rolling and as a way
0:05:56 to have people know that we exist.
0:06:03 And we ended up getting quite a few responses and bookings from that, which was awesome.
0:06:06 And since it’s wintertime, people are like, could you come by in May?
0:06:07 Like they’re planning ahead.
0:06:11 And so you don’t necessarily need to have the stuff like ready for that weekend.
0:06:12 Right.
0:06:15 So these aren’t like the, the private birthday party type of things.
0:06:23 These would be interests from daycares, summer camps, park district, churches, schools, things
0:06:27 like that, who book farther in advance than a typical birthday party would.
0:06:27 Okay.
0:06:32 So you build up your own mailing list of the daycares, summer camp, and then you put out kind of a
0:06:34 really targeted mailing just to them, just to those offices.
0:06:35 Right.
0:06:35 Yeah.
0:06:43 So I’d found pretty much any daycare, summer camp, park district, library, elementary school
0:06:51 within about 35 or 40 miles, I made a list and I sent the same postcard to all of them.
0:06:56 Now I kind of break it up with individual marketing for the different types.
0:07:02 So I might, I would send a different postcard to schools than I would to churches or libraries
0:07:03 and things like that.
0:07:08 But back then it was just the one postcard, Vistaprint, send it all.
0:07:13 Hope we get some responses and definitely worked to get the first few responses.
0:07:13 Yeah.
0:07:15 How many, how many did you send out?
0:07:19 I want to say maybe 700 total.
0:07:19 Okay.
0:07:20 Okay.
0:07:24 So, you know, you’re putting a little bit of money into it at that point.
0:07:24 Yeah.
0:07:29 Casting a wide enough net to kind of know if you are shooting completely blank after 700
0:07:31 and maybe, maybe the messaging needs, needs some tweaking.
0:07:33 Might be time to turn it around, right?
0:07:33 Yeah.
0:07:38 So, and at that point I thought, well, if I needed to, if, if it wasn’t going to work,
0:07:42 I could sell the equipment back and I wouldn’t really be all that much of a loss.
0:07:42 Yeah.
0:07:43 Relatively low risk.
0:07:45 What did the equipment cost?
0:07:51 The foam cannon itself, I use a professional grade model that cost at the time about $2,500
0:07:52 for the cannon.
0:07:58 And then I would say for other things that are in the foam party setup, we have these barriers
0:08:05 like PVC and some vinyl with our, our marketing on their barriers to keep the foam from coming
0:08:08 back at the person shooting the foam.
0:08:09 And okay.
0:08:11 I’m picturing like a medieval, like a shield.
0:08:11 Yeah.
0:08:13 In case the wind shifts.
0:08:18 So it’s, it’s kind of like a little wall about four feet high, maybe with our marketing on
0:08:19 the front that they see.
0:08:23 And then it keeps the foam from blowing back at us and getting on our equipment.
0:08:28 And then just little things like, well, we have a five by five tent with our branding on
0:08:30 it that just kind of makes it look professional.
0:08:37 And then a lot of little things like tools that you might need and hoses and electrical cords
0:08:39 and speakers.
0:08:40 Yes.
0:08:46 So you just need a water source and, you know, BYO bubbles basically.
0:08:49 And then in this, this professional cannon at a bare minimum.
0:08:50 Right.
0:08:50 Yeah.
0:08:55 So we, we do need a water source, uh, just a regular hose hookup works.
0:09:00 And then, uh, an electrical outlet, a regular outlet works, uh, if it’s just for one foam
0:09:05 cannon, if it’s multiple foam cannons, or if you’re not close enough to an outlet, then we bring
0:09:10 a generator in that situation for most of like the smaller events, daycares, summer camps
0:09:11 and stuff like that.
0:09:13 It’s just one, one foam cannon.
0:09:20 And so, yeah, I started off with one, got a few bookings before I even did any foam parties,
0:09:26 even though I had some booked, uh, I bought a second setup and it just kind of kept on rolling.
0:09:27 What did the postcard say?
0:09:28 Was there pricing on there?
0:09:33 Was it just like, you know, booking now for, you know, summer 2023 or whenever it was.
0:09:36 It said like, we bring a foam party to you.
0:09:42 And then it said like, foam parties are great for, and then I tried to hit summer camps, daycares,
0:09:48 school events, church events, library, summer reading, kickoffs, block parties, birthday parties.
0:09:55 And then it says like foam party packages include, you know, foam cannon, a foam party leader.
0:09:57 Which is you showing up and leading the thing.
0:09:58 Right.
0:09:59 Which at that point is just me.
0:10:01 I’m the only guy that’s, uh, that’s available.
0:10:02 Okay.
0:10:04 And then, you know, book now at our website.
0:10:10 Uh, we did have pricing on our website for, for basic, like, you know, one hour, one cannon,
0:10:15 or, uh, we also do something called glow foam, which is, looks like the foam is glowing in
0:10:16 the dark for night events.
0:10:19 So we had pricing for that on the website, not on the postcard.
0:10:20 Okay.
0:10:21 What’s it cost to get you to come out?
0:10:24 For a one hour, like a birthday party, it’s 375.
0:10:29 And then most people just, okay, we’ll book you for an hour and then you kind of clean up,
0:10:32 tear down and hopefully you’ve got another one booked for the afternoon.
0:10:32 Right.
0:10:33 Yeah.
0:10:37 So for birthday parties, which is a lot of what we do on the weekends, birthday parties and
0:10:42 block parties, uh, we usually just an hour, which we found is a good amount of time for,
0:10:43 for the kids.
0:10:47 Uh, if you’re doing two hours with the same group of kids, you know, they kind of lose
0:10:48 interest.
0:10:49 That’s, that’s fair.
0:10:50 It’s opposite of an upsell.
0:10:54 A lot of times it’ll be, you know, we want to do two hours for this birthday and it’ll
0:10:58 be me saying, well, we found that one hour is a good amount of time.
0:11:05 And, but, and also if you, uh, do a foam party on a grass surface for two hours, uh, your,
0:11:09 your chance of mud is, is a lot higher than one hour.
0:11:14 You don’t generally see any kind of mud, but I try to warn people this ahead of time.
0:11:14 Okay.
0:11:15 Yeah.
0:11:17 There’s other, other logistics involved.
0:11:17 Okay.
0:11:18 Right.
0:11:23 And it does feel weird to try to, you know, almost, uh, you know, reverse upsell, uh, you
0:11:25 know, you sure you want to do two hours?
0:11:30 I try to do that just to make it the best experience for, for the kids and the parents.
0:11:31 Yeah, that’s fair.
0:11:35 And then, and then it just dissolves, like it just evaporates away and, or you hose it
0:11:36 down.
0:11:41 The foam generally dissipates within, uh, 20 minutes to a half hour, um, depending on if
0:11:47 it’s on grass or, or, you know, asphalt concrete, what, um, that will change it a little bit.
0:11:52 And if it’s windy out and things like that, we can hose down the grass, but really it doesn’t
0:11:53 really make much of a difference.
0:11:56 You wouldn’t even know it was there after, you know, an hour or two.
0:11:58 So, I mean, it’s just wet because it’s mostly water.
0:12:05 Uh, we use about a hundred and 125 gallons of water for a one hour party for one cannon.
0:12:09 So, you know, that in a concentrated area, you can definitely tell that it’s wet.
0:12:10 All right.
0:12:13 So, so you send out all these postcards, 700 postcards.
0:12:17 You start to get some inbound inquiries through the website.
0:12:19 People start calling you, Hey, we want to book this thing.
0:12:21 What kind of questions are they asking you?
0:12:25 Cause you’re like, you know, you’re presenting all the confidence of like, yeah, we’ll bring
0:12:26 the party to you.
0:12:29 But like never having done it before, like what kind of questions come up that now you know
0:12:33 the answer to, but at the time you’re kind of like, uh, yeah, we could totally do that.
0:12:39 Tim’s answer to those initial inbound inquiries plus his first paying gig coming up right
0:12:39 after this.
0:12:46 Yeah, it was definitely a kind of a fake it till you make it type situation where, you
0:12:51 know, you try to be prepared, you know, by researching what other people have done around the country,
0:12:53 but you’ve never really done it before.
0:12:57 So you’re kind of going on the fly and, you know, just being honest.
0:13:01 And if they ask you a question and you don’t know the answer, just let them know that you
0:13:03 will get back to them as soon as you can.
0:13:08 But with the daycares that we initially got, uh, most of the time it would be like, all right,
0:13:09 we have 125 kids.
0:13:11 Like how long do we need a phone party for?
0:13:13 How much is it going to cost?
0:13:14 Is it going to ruin the grass?
0:13:16 Which is normal question that we get.
0:13:17 And then do they get wet?
0:13:18 Do they need a towel?
0:13:20 Do they need a change of clothes?
0:13:22 Does it sting their eyes?
0:13:24 This is a question that we get a lot.
0:13:25 The answer is no.
0:13:26 Got it.
0:13:26 Got it.
0:13:27 All right.
0:13:29 Let’s fast forward to, to party number one.
0:13:33 Then you go and you set this thing up for the daycare or wherever it is.
0:13:36 And it goes off without a hitch.
0:13:38 It goes, there’s, you know, kids crying and screaming.
0:13:41 Like, you know, anything could happen at this point.
0:13:41 What happens?
0:13:42 Yeah.
0:13:44 It’s definitely a learning process.
0:13:49 I mean, I, I, I set it up at my house and, you know, did a party from the kids and the
0:13:49 neighbors.
0:13:50 So that’s right.
0:13:51 I have a trial run.
0:13:51 Yeah.
0:13:52 Right.
0:13:53 Which, which was smart.
0:13:56 Cause that would have been not good if, if I didn’t.
0:14:01 However, my first party that I had booked was actually kind of higher on the difficulty
0:14:02 scale.
0:14:08 It was a school event and it was a two foam cannon glow foam party.
0:14:13 So that is actually much trickier.
0:14:19 So glow foam, there’s a special additive that you put into the foam that makes it glow.
0:14:21 Looks like it’s, you know, glowing UV glow.
0:14:27 Uh, once, uh, once, once it gets dark out, but you also have UV lights that are, that are
0:14:32 hanging from, uh, your tents, uh, which, you know, there’s a lot of, a lot more cords to
0:14:33 deal with.
0:14:45 It’s just, it’s trickier, especially for a, you know, the water containers fast enough with
0:14:48 one water source and two, two cannons.
0:14:53 And, you know, with a huge crowd, I mean, there was a couple of hundred kids there, which looking
0:14:57 back, I would have wanted more than two foam cannons if, if I knew there was that many kids,
0:14:59 but I was just happy to be there at that point.
0:15:06 I showed up and the setup took way longer than it should have spent probably an hour and 15
0:15:10 minutes setting up, which now would be half that for a two foam cannon.
0:15:12 But yeah, it went well.
0:15:14 You get better as you go along, you get more reps in.
0:15:14 Yeah.
0:15:15 Oh, absolutely.
0:15:16 And it went well.
0:15:18 Uh, the kids loved it.
0:15:19 It was definitely a learning experience.
0:15:25 And, you know, each one that you do, you kind of pick up something or might, you might do
0:15:25 something wrong.
0:15:30 I think that one as well, their water source at the school, there was like a pebble somehow
0:15:32 stuck in the water source.
0:15:38 So then I had to run 250 feet of hoses to the next closest water source.
0:15:43 And yeah, so one of those things, you know, they, they didn’t check it beforehand, but which
0:15:47 now I tell people to do, but back then didn’t have the experience.
0:15:48 So, okay.
0:15:48 Yeah.
0:15:54 So learning, learning curve, learning process and a non-zero amount of equipment involved
0:15:58 between the cannons and the speakers and the tents and the hoses and everything else.
0:15:59 It’s helpful to know.
0:15:59 Yeah.
0:16:00 Basically packed.
0:16:06 We, we have a minivan, we fold all the seats down and I could fit two foam setups in the
0:16:08 minivan, but I mean, it’s jam packed.
0:16:14 It’s like, like you probably way too much stuff in there, but yeah, you’re not seeing out the,
0:16:15 at the rear view anymore.
0:16:15 Yeah.
0:16:16 No, definitely not.
0:16:18 Okay.
0:16:22 So you get these initial bookings from the postcards and hopefully some positive feedback
0:16:25 from those and, and maybe some word them out.
0:16:29 But like what happens after that in terms of driving additional traffic?
0:16:34 Cause it is, you know, maybe you can, well, we’re going to book you every year and there’s
0:16:38 some level of recurring revenue here, but it’s, it’s a lot of times it’s got to be kind of
0:16:42 a one and done thing for, uh, you know, onto the next, uh, onto the next gig.
0:16:43 Yeah.
0:16:48 So on a daily occurrence, it’s a one and done thing and onto the next gig, but we definitely
0:16:51 have a lot of recurring, um, customers.
0:16:57 Uh, we found that once we started doing some of the daycare locations, some of the larger
0:17:03 chain daycare locations, once you do one or two and get your foot in the door and you show
0:17:05 that you do a great job, the kids love it.
0:17:11 You’re easy to work with then, you know, it might not happen the same year, but the, the
0:17:16 following year, you know, if we had three of a chain daycare, then the next year we had
0:17:23 12 and, um, it just kind of snowballed in that way, especially with a lot of the larger daycares,
0:17:24 you know, we did a good job for them.
0:17:30 And, um, you know, the following year they would all rebook and then they would tell some of their
0:17:34 neighboring daycares of the same chain and they kind of snowballed in that way.
0:17:34 Okay.
0:17:35 Okay.
0:17:40 Now the other half of the business, I would say is birthday parties and block parties for
0:17:44 that we marketed with Facebook ads.
0:17:53 And, uh, also we, I posted a lot in every neighboring Facebook group that I could find, um, with, you
0:17:58 know, good pictures and an explanation of what a phone party is.
0:18:00 And there was a very positive response with that.
0:18:05 I even use my wife’s, maybe I shouldn’t say this on the air, but I use my wife’s Facebook
0:18:11 account to go into the mom’s pages and I would post from her account since, you know, they don’t
0:18:18 really always allow males to post, but since it was under my wife’s account, I was able to post.
0:18:23 So it would be like city name moms would be like an example of a group that would exist.
0:18:24 Exactly.
0:18:28 And there’s a lot of them for birthday parties, especially 98% of the time.
0:18:35 It’s the mom that is booking the party and the dad, when you get there is asking, are you going
0:18:36 to kill his grass?
0:18:38 But the mom books the party.
0:18:39 So that’s like the target market.
0:18:41 When I run ads, I run the ads to moms.
0:18:43 I really don’t run it to dads.
0:18:46 Yeah, it’s interesting.
0:18:51 We’re seeing all sorts of creative, you know, birthday party, like especially elementary school
0:18:51 age.
0:18:54 You can go to the bounce house place is a really popular one.
0:18:55 You go to the arcade.
0:18:59 We’ve had a couple where our kids have been invited to go.
0:19:01 It’s like a video game truck.
0:19:06 Like a guy shows up in his F-250 and behind it is like this pretty good size, like horse trailer,
0:19:11 but he’s got like a couch in there and like this wall of TVs and he’s got like every console
0:19:14 imaginable as like, it was a pretty cool setup.
0:19:19 And I don’t know how much it costs, but again, it’s like, you know, upfront cost for him in
0:19:24 the setup and then just, you know, do two, three parties a day and it’s slowly, you know, recoup
0:19:24 that.
0:19:28 And after a while, you know, so you maybe got to buy new games every now and again, after
0:19:29 a certain point, it’s all gravy.
0:19:29 Yeah.
0:19:30 I’ve heard of those too.
0:19:31 Those actually look cool.
0:19:35 I would love to check one of those out, but not my business, but it would be cool.
0:19:37 I think, uh, you know, my kids would love it.
0:19:41 The other one that somebody sent me this, it was like a Nerf party rental and it looked like
0:19:44 they were, you know, maybe they would do kids parties, but it was more like corporate team
0:19:49 building where we’re going to set up this like pretty intense, like, you know, with, uh, you
0:19:52 know, inflatable pylons and like almost like a paintball arena, but like, well, could it
0:19:53 come to you?
0:19:54 We’re going to have a Nerf war.
0:19:55 Yeah.
0:19:56 Those look fun too.
0:20:01 I saw this, a similar thing with almost like a Nerf war, but it was with water, water guns.
0:20:05 And somehow on the vest, it registered when you got shot with the water and a similar
0:20:06 type thing.
0:20:08 Oh, like a full on like laser tag type of setup.
0:20:09 Yeah.
0:20:10 I thought that was cool.
0:20:13 So yeah, people, uh, you know, people spend money on this stuff.
0:20:15 It’s an interesting place to play.
0:20:16 And, and I, I think you’re right.
0:20:17 Like, okay.
0:20:22 Especially if there’s a franchise or a chain daycare, well, I got my toe in the door with
0:20:22 this one.
0:20:27 And now you can see how that would snowball and you can see how it would turn into recurring
0:20:27 revenue.
0:20:31 We’ll come back for our field day next year and, and we’ll, you know,
0:20:32 reserve that almost in advance.
0:20:33 Well, let’s pencil you in.
0:20:33 Let’s get on the calendar.
0:20:34 Yeah.
0:20:38 It was, it was hard initially with some of the chain daycares to get in because a lot
0:20:41 of times there, you have to go through their corporate office.
0:20:45 You have to file certain paperwork and like nobody who seems to want to give the, you the
0:20:47 paperwork, they say, Oh, you’re not a registered vendor.
0:20:48 It’s like, Oh, I’ll be a registered vendor.
0:20:50 Just send me the paperwork.
0:20:50 Yeah.
0:20:50 Yeah.
0:20:51 Show me how to register.
0:20:52 Exactly.
0:20:56 So, but once you break through that and you get registered, then it’s like, okay, you know,
0:21:01 people see you do a good job and then it kind of has snowballed for us at least.
0:21:05 And we see the birthday party thing snowball word of mouth wise too, where it’s like the
0:21:06 kid goes to the phone party.
0:21:09 The kid goes to the video game truck rental party.
0:21:10 Well, I want that for my birthday.
0:21:10 Right.
0:21:14 And so this kind of like starts to, uh, starts to spread and then the moms text the other
0:21:17 moms to be like, well, who was the, you know, Timmy really wants the phone party.
0:21:19 You know, who, who did you use?
0:21:19 Yeah.
0:21:27 And in the end, I think really our best marketing is seeing our, our phone parties because, you
0:21:32 know, a lot of times you might see pictures and you might think, well, that’s kind of weird.
0:21:33 I don’t know that maybe that would be fun.
0:21:34 Maybe it wouldn’t.
0:21:39 But then if you see it and it’s kind of like, okay, that’s the kids are really enjoying this.
0:21:39 That’s pretty cool.
0:21:45 And then we have built into, uh, again, we hired a voiceover artist that does like a
0:21:46 promo for us.
0:21:50 Like, Hey, if you want to have your own phone party at a daycare or a school or a birthday
0:21:55 party, you come get a postcard or come get a business card from your phone party leader.
0:21:57 And, you know, and then the next song goes.
0:21:59 So that’s another way that we market.
0:22:04 This is just, it’s like built over the, over the loudspeakers, like into your party playlist.
0:22:05 Exactly.
0:22:08 Like a, you know, a 25 second commercial for our own business.
0:22:10 Uh, during the phone party.
0:22:15 Uh, and that usually drives, you know, several parents over to say, Hey, this is really cool.
0:22:17 Like how much do you charge or can you come to here?
0:22:20 Or so it’s, it’s, it’s been effective for sure.
0:22:23 Now, would you go, would you go all the way into Chicago?
0:22:26 It looks like you’re kind of out in the burbs a little bit, but if I, if I search phone
0:22:28 party Chicago, you’re there on the first page.
0:22:29 Yeah.
0:22:35 So we, we don’t go out to Chicago too much sometimes, but basically if, if we’re not booked around
0:22:37 us, then yes.
0:22:39 Uh, we do some like block parties out there.
0:22:40 Block parties are big.
0:22:41 To be honest with you.
0:22:46 I, I, I really need to change up my, our Google business profile and add Chicago in, but I’m,
0:22:47 I’m worried.
0:22:50 Cause I know sometimes if you change certain things, you can get suspended and I don’t want
0:22:51 that to happen.
0:22:52 Yeah.
0:22:55 Like expand the service area on the little map back.
0:22:55 Right.
0:22:57 So I’ve kind of been on the fence.
0:23:00 And if you don’t have to drive that far, like then that’s, that could be an advantage too.
0:23:04 If it’s a big enough party, like there’s a kid’s museum that we’re doing that’s like an hour
0:23:07 and a half away, but I mean, they’re doing four hours of multi-canon.
0:23:09 So it’s like, yeah, we’ll come to you for sure.
0:23:13 If it was a kid’s birthday up there, it would probably be, no, I can refer you to somebody else
0:23:15 that does phone parties in your area.
0:23:15 Got it.
0:23:20 Are you going to franchise the thing and go, go nationwide and be like, oh, I’ve got a, sure.
0:23:20 Yeah.
0:23:21 We’ve got a guy in that area.
0:23:25 There are a couple of places around the country that are starting to franchise their phone
0:23:26 party business.
0:23:28 I’m not planning to do that myself.
0:23:33 Still have the teaching job, but yeah, there are some that are starting to do that.
0:23:33 Fair enough.
0:23:35 That’s going to be the next private equity roll up.
0:23:37 So we’re going to acquire all these different companies.
0:23:38 HVAC and then phone parties.
0:23:39 Right.
0:23:40 That’ll be the next trendy thing.
0:23:41 I promise.
0:23:41 Yeah.
0:23:41 All right.
0:23:47 So Facebook ads, Facebook groups targeting the local neighborhood groups, the mom groups.
0:23:49 It is just kind of like an introductory post.
0:23:50 If you’re not already a member there.
0:23:54 Hey, we’re, I’m Tim, you know, I’m from this nearby town.
0:23:55 This is what we do.
0:23:57 You know, look at all these happy, smiling kids.
0:23:59 Is there any offer or call to action?
0:24:01 It’s more just kind of like, Hey, you know, if we’re here when you need us.
0:24:02 Yeah.
0:24:07 I don’t really do like an offer as in like a discount offer, but I usually just say, you
0:24:12 know, for party packages and info, go to our website and then kind of leads them there.
0:24:15 And then we have more information on our website.
0:24:17 And then if they have questions, they’ll usually email or call.
0:24:18 Yeah.
0:24:18 Got it.
0:24:23 Is there a like calendar availability, like for somebody to just click and book or it’s
0:24:25 like they go through like a request.
0:24:28 The pricing is on there, but like they got to fill out a form and there’s a little bit
0:24:31 of confirmation that needs to happen for the date availability.
0:24:35 We don’t have like an instant availability option.
0:24:41 We have a form to fill out with, you know, where the phone party is at, how many people
0:24:45 are going to be in attendance and, and things like that.
0:24:49 And then they send that to us, get it to my phone and email immediately.
0:24:54 I say on there that I’ll get back to you with, with availability within 24 hours.
0:24:56 It’s usually way quicker than that.
0:24:59 I, you know, try to set the bar low and beat that expectation.
0:25:01 And then they’re like, Oh, that was quick, you know?
0:25:05 But if we had a full calendar of when we’re available, especially in the beginning of
0:25:07 the season of like, wow, these people are always available.
0:25:09 They must not be too much in demand.
0:25:15 So, you know, which seems crazy, but it’s kind of a, something that people think about it.
0:25:15 Yeah, that’s fair.
0:25:16 I didn’t think about that.
0:25:21 And then sometimes it’s a little bit complicated with the schedule because now that we have nine
0:25:25 phone party setups, we could technically be doing nine phone parties at a time, but most
0:25:30 of the time we’ll have, you know, employee that’s not available that day, or you got to drive
0:25:33 from this party in the Southern suburbs to the Northern suburbs.
0:25:34 And you got to take all that into account.
0:25:37 So it’s hard to just make it a one size fits all calendar.
0:25:39 So I kind of do that manually.
0:25:41 Nine phone party setups.
0:25:44 More with Tim in just a moment, including how he’s grown his team.
0:25:46 So he doesn’t have to run every party by himself.
0:25:51 In the smart way, he was able to fund some of that new equipment coming up right after this.
0:25:54 Nine phone party setups.
0:25:56 So clearly there was demand for this.
0:26:00 And I imagine you started to get the inquiries where you need to be two places at once.
0:26:02 I’m turning down money here.
0:26:03 So there we go.
0:26:04 Buy setup number two, number three.
0:26:09 And you got to replicate yourself too, to go have somebody else deliver the experience.
0:26:10 Yeah.
0:26:15 And to be honest with you, I think replicating myself and learning to delegate as has been
0:26:18 one of the lessons that I wish I had learned initially.
0:26:22 Although at some point when you’re starting out, you don’t have the luxury of that.
0:26:26 You don’t necessarily have the money to pay people to do the actual phone party, the actual
0:26:27 job.
0:26:30 And you just need to be the jack of all trades.
0:26:37 Now I’m trying to still trying to work in progress, more so eliminate myself from the,
0:26:40 you know, regular birthday parties where we might have four or five at a time.
0:26:47 And I usually will only go to the larger multi-canon events unless I’m needed in an emergency or
0:26:47 something like that.
0:26:53 But, you know, I also have to man the phones and emails and, you know, invoices.
0:26:58 And if it rains on a Saturday and we have 10 parties, I’m going to be on the phone all day
0:27:02 because, you know, well, now it looks like 60% chance.
0:27:02 I don’t know.
0:27:03 Let’s keep you posted.
0:27:04 Okay.
0:27:07 Now in my area, it looks like 30% chance.
0:27:12 And, but, uh, you know, so it’s, it’s, uh, it luckily it doesn’t rain that often, but it
0:27:13 throws a wrench.
0:27:14 I didn’t even think about that.
0:27:17 It was just like, you just have to postpone or what do you, what do you do?
0:27:20 So you, you can do a phone party in the rain.
0:27:21 Don’t do it.
0:27:23 Obviously if it’s lightning anywhere in the area.
0:27:28 So we have a lightning apps where it alerts us if there’s lightning anywhere in the area.
0:27:32 It’s not fun for the person doing the phone party if it’s raining, but for the kids
0:27:35 they’re wet anyway, so they don’t, yeah, they don’t care generally seem to care.
0:27:41 Um, I would say a lot more people end up just doing the phone party in the rain as opposed
0:27:46 to rescheduling or canceling, especially with birthday parties, because they might not be
0:27:50 able to reschedule with, you know, invitations going out a month or two in advance.
0:27:52 So a lot of them will just say, let’s just do it.
0:27:57 And we go ahead with it as long as there’s no lightning or anything like that.
0:27:58 Yeah, that’s true.
0:27:58 Yeah.
0:28:01 It’s, it’s, you’re, you’re, you’re committed.
0:28:03 You’re up to like, you know, hope for good weather that day.
0:28:03 Yeah.
0:28:09 How long was it before you needed to expand to the second set, the third set and, and hire
0:28:10 additional team members?
0:28:15 I think I might’ve even gotten the third set up before we even did any parties because
0:28:21 it’s a very seasonal business around us, especially because we’re in, in the Midwest Chicago suburbs.
0:28:27 So it really doesn’t get warm enough to, to do a phone party until at least late April, even
0:28:29 then it’s kind of spotty depending on the day.
0:28:34 So, you know, when you start marketing in January, you kind of get a feel for, you know, how many
0:28:42 bookings you have and, and I realized that I need to just reinvest these, uh, deposits into
0:28:44 some more phone party equipment.
0:28:44 Oh, okay.
0:28:49 This is going back to some of the initial postcard mailings where they would, they would book it,
0:28:50 they would put down a deposit.
0:28:54 So you’re, you’re collecting some cashflow right away and then, okay, we’ll take the balance
0:28:57 upon delivery or, you know, a day of.
0:29:01 And so you could, you could pay that forward into like, oh, there’s clearly some demand here.
0:29:03 We’re getting multiple inquiries for the same day.
0:29:09 And I didn’t want to be stuck where, you know, turning away too many parties, which I mean,
0:29:16 as much as I try not to, it still happens for various reasons, but I tried to expand as quickly
0:29:20 as possible and to be able to keep up with the demand that I was seeing.
0:29:26 And it’s just kind of kept expanding, you know, for the last couple of years that I’ve been doing
0:29:26 it.
0:29:31 A lot of the people that run phone parties for us are teachers that I know since they
0:29:35 have summers off at, you know, the schedule aligns with their schedule.
0:29:41 And then sometimes college students that are home for even a larger timeframe than the teachers
0:29:41 are.
0:29:42 So.
0:29:42 Okay.
0:29:43 Yeah.
0:29:44 Here’s, here’s a fun summer job.
0:29:46 Come hang out at this phone party, be the DJ for a little bit.
0:29:47 And it is fun.
0:29:49 I’ll be, I mean, I love running the party still.
0:29:53 I try to step back from doing as many as I did last year.
0:29:59 I did almost a hundred myself, which I, again, I enjoy it, but I have three young kids at home
0:30:02 and I also have to answer the phones, emails and everything.
0:30:06 So more of a, you know, work on your business, not in your business type of thing.
0:30:12 I feel like I’m best served to just train the people that are running the phone parties and
0:30:14 try to step back from doing as many myself.
0:30:15 Yeah.
0:30:16 And it’s great.
0:30:19 It’s not, you know, phone parties by Tim, it’s phone party all-stars, right?
0:30:23 So you have set it up in such a way where you don’t need to be there.
0:30:29 And I imagine most of the people calling don’t, don’t expect the owner of the business to show
0:30:29 up.
0:30:32 They expect you to have a team in place or a team member come and do it.
0:30:32 Yeah.
0:30:37 Unless they had me the first year where I did, you know, a majority of them almost not a
0:30:42 majority, but a large, large chunk than they might, but no, I think people understand and
0:30:43 it’s gone well.
0:30:47 I’ve met a lot of great people and you know, there’s been ups and downs.
0:30:53 We’ve had a couple of events where the foam cannon broke and it was no fault of ours,
0:30:57 but you know, it’s, it’s not a good feeling when you’re, you know, you have the countdown.
0:30:58 All right.
0:30:58 Are you ready?
0:31:01 Five, four, three, two.
0:31:05 And then just, oh no, like nothing comes out.
0:31:08 Like, oh boy, kids are chanting.
0:31:09 We want foam.
0:31:12 That’s, it’s not a good feeling for that reason.
0:31:17 I usually bring a whole backup set in my own car just in case, but it’s happened a couple
0:31:17 of times.
0:31:20 And I don’t know, six, 600 plus parties that we’ve done.
0:31:22 So right, right.
0:31:23 Have some backup and redundancy.
0:31:25 If you’ve got two, you got one.
0:31:26 If you got one, you got none.
0:31:27 But yeah, that’s okay.
0:31:28 Time out.
0:31:29 Put a pause in that.
0:31:30 We’ll be, just give me 15 minutes.
0:31:32 We’ll set up the other one and we’re good to go.
0:31:33 Yeah.
0:31:33 Yeah.
0:31:36 I’m going to run my car or just have it with you.
0:31:40 But yeah, it’s happened a couple of times, not fun, but the people have been, twice it
0:31:42 was at a daycare and they were very understanding.
0:31:47 I was just like, you know what, I’m just, I’m going to, can we find a day for me to come back
0:31:49 and I will, I will do it for free.
0:31:53 Cause this is obviously, you know, don’t want to do anything for free, but inconvenience
0:31:54 them.
0:31:54 Yeah.
0:31:58 But you got to preserve that reputation and keep customers happy.
0:32:02 That’s one of the things that I’ve noticed here is like dozens and dozens of, you know,
0:32:04 positive five-star reviews for foam party all-stars.
0:32:10 You do anything specific or proactive to collect those after a, a party gone well?
0:32:16 Um, you know, I just send, uh, an email, uh, which I should also be sending texts to be
0:32:18 honest with you, but I, I send a email.
0:32:21 Thank you for having a phone party with foam party all-stars.
0:32:26 If you felt you had a five-star experience, you know, please click this link and leave us
0:32:26 a review.
0:32:32 If you have any, I don’t phrase it this way, but if any negative feedback, you know, please
0:32:35 email the owner, Tim at this email and, or call.
0:32:39 And we’ve really only had one that got back to me and said, Hey, I wanted to say some, there
0:32:41 was some stuff that I wanted, wasn’t a hundred percent happy with.
0:32:44 And it was good because I was glad that they brought it to my attention.
0:32:49 That was one that one of my workers was doing and I would never have known, uh, it was nothing
0:32:54 major, but just, you know, it’s good to be able to give feedback to the, uh, the worker,
0:32:57 even though I’m not there and I didn’t get a negative review out of it.
0:32:58 Yeah.
0:33:01 I can collect some, if you felt you had a five-star experience, here’s what you can do.
0:33:02 Yeah, exactly.
0:33:03 Exactly.
0:33:07 And if you have some constructive criticism, um, we’d, we’d, we’d love to hear it too.
0:33:07 Exactly.
0:33:08 Cause that’s, that’s how we get better.
0:33:09 All right.
0:33:13 So we have several different varieties of foam parties.
0:33:16 Sounds like most of the time we’ve got other people going out to deliver those.
0:33:19 Now the website says we could accommodate up to a thousand participants.
0:33:20 That’s a lot of foam.
0:33:22 Is that all nine cannons going at once?
0:33:23 Well, now we can.
0:33:24 Yeah.
0:33:25 I mean, we, yeah, probably.
0:33:31 And that, that would be more so for like a community event or festival, which, you know,
0:33:35 we’ve partnered with a few neighboring towns and, and done community events that are, that
0:33:36 are larger.
0:33:41 Uh, we’ve also a lot of fun runs that either through an elementary school or a park district.
0:33:46 Some of those get pretty large where we are bringing a lot of cannons to those.
0:33:51 And then the kind of the niche glow foam, different colors of foam we can do.
0:33:56 And then, uh, even have gender reveal on there, which we don’t get a lot of interest for.
0:33:59 Uh, I should probably just take it off the website, but definitely intriguing.
0:34:04 And I think it would be cool, but it’s, it’s a lot of money for colored foam for your gender
0:34:04 reveal.
0:34:11 Well, I saw one the other day was like college bed parties, which was not what I thought it
0:34:12 was going to be.
0:34:17 Once I clicked on it, it was like you decorating your bed with like a blanket for the school
0:34:21 that you got accepted into and a bunch of pillows and sweatshirts and stuff.
0:34:27 And it’s like, Oh, could you blast off cannons in, in purple and gold for, for Washington
0:34:27 Huskies or something?
0:34:32 Maybe the gender reveal thing, maybe there is a something to that or, or something similar.
0:34:34 I saw that same thing actually.
0:34:40 And there’s also along a similar vein of bedding, but, uh, there’s like kids sleepover parties
0:34:45 now where they set up like elaborate tents and set up, I think mostly indoor, but I think
0:34:46 might be outdoor too.
0:34:51 And like a company actually comes out and decorates it with your theme and, you know,
0:34:52 Taylor Swift sleepover.
0:34:54 And I mean, it’s kind of amazing.
0:34:55 Yeah.
0:34:55 Yeah.
0:34:55 Yeah.
0:34:55 Yeah.
0:34:58 It’s like a party in a box, like a prepackaged type of thing.
0:34:59 Yeah, definitely.
0:35:04 I mean, one of the risks be like, well, is this just a, do I go in all in on this business
0:35:07 that like happens to be a, an 18 month fad and then it’s over?
0:35:12 Like, do you see any of that with, with phone parties or is it like, yeah, I think this is
0:35:12 here to stay.
0:35:13 You know what?
0:35:15 I’ve always had that in the back of my mind, especially starting now.
0:35:18 Like I was kind of skeptical, like, is this really going to be a thing?
0:35:21 But it honestly seems to be picking up traction.
0:35:27 I have more competitors now, definitely, which honestly I’m on good, good terms.
0:35:31 And we actually refer parties to each other if we’re fully booked, you know, if I know they
0:35:32 do a good job.
0:35:32 Yeah.
0:35:34 Caught it on the upswing.
0:35:34 Yeah.
0:35:39 So a lot more competitors, but our sales are still going up from where we were last year,
0:35:40 which went up from the year before.
0:35:43 So I would say it’s definitely a growing trend.
0:35:47 And I know I don’t want to knock on bounce house, but I’m an elementary school teacher
0:35:49 and our district, we can’t even do bounce houses anymore.
0:35:52 There was an injury at another school or something like that.
0:35:56 So a lot, a lot of daycares are the same way where they’re risk management.
0:35:59 I mean, people say that phone parties are fine, but bounce houses are not.
0:36:01 Honestly, I think both are safe, but that’s just me.
0:36:03 Yeah.
0:36:05 The insurance for the bounce house thing was too expensive.
0:36:07 What’s insurance costs for phone parties?
0:36:08 Yeah.
0:36:08 It’s not bad.
0:36:10 Just for a 1 million, 2 million policy.
0:36:14 It was, I want to say about 12, 1300 bucks.
0:36:15 It’s not too bad.
0:36:16 It’s like an annual premium.
0:36:17 Right.
0:36:18 Yeah.
0:36:19 We can tolerate that.
0:36:20 We can make that back in a few parties.
0:36:21 Absolutely.
0:36:21 Yeah.
0:36:23 That’s, that’s reasonable.
0:36:27 The 5,000 for the bounce houses, that was a little much, but.
0:36:28 Right.
0:36:34 I mean, it’s all, it’s all kind of this equation of, well, what’s my pathway to break even here?
0:36:39 And I love the, we’re going to make some investment in marketing in these postcards, but we’re going
0:36:40 to collect the deposit up front.
0:36:44 Even if it’s going to be several months, we can use the deposits to buy the equipment or pay
0:36:49 for the equipment and kind of a creative way to, to go about it and see if there’s any,
0:36:50 any demand here.
0:36:54 Well, I mean, especially starting out, you know, my wife and I both have W2 jobs.
0:36:55 We’re doing fine.
0:37:00 So for me, it was more like, you know what, if I see the opportunity here, I need to go,
0:37:02 you know, strike while the iron is hot type of thing.
0:37:07 You know, I need to expand as quickly as I can.
0:37:11 And I don’t want to hold back, you know, just because I don’t want to spend the money
0:37:13 if I know that we’ll make money on the back end.
0:37:16 Have you gotten the kids involved in the business at all?
0:37:21 So my kids are, uh, my youngest turned four, so four, five, and seven.
0:37:26 So they have been to a ton of phone parties, but it’s funny.
0:37:27 They still like it.
0:37:31 And like, I’ve, they’ve done at least 20 because every time, you know, it’s like, Hey, uh, you
0:37:34 know, the girl scout troops coming over, let’s do a phone party.
0:37:37 Um, my, my wife’s like, Hey, they haven’t done a phone party before.
0:37:39 Let’s bring the baseball team over.
0:37:40 And it’s like, yeah, sure.
0:37:40 No problem.
0:37:42 But they still enjoy it.
0:37:47 So to me, it’s like, maybe this has some staying power if they’ve done this so many times and
0:37:48 they still like it.
0:37:49 So, okay.
0:37:49 Yeah.
0:37:54 They’re a little bit young to hire them to run the DJ booth or set up the equipment, but
0:37:59 it’s cool that they’re exposed to this, uh, entrepreneurial side of mom and dad.
0:38:00 Yeah.
0:38:00 Not quite yet.
0:38:05 I need to talk to my accountant about, you know, can I start up a, uh, Roth IRA for them,
0:38:08 you know, type of thing, but we’ll see.
0:38:08 Yeah.
0:38:12 You know, a couple of years, it’d be hauling equipment for you and yeah, absolutely.
0:38:13 Get them paid.
0:38:13 Yeah.
0:38:17 I mean, they’re in some of the promotional pictures since, you know, I’ve done a lot of
0:38:18 phone parties with them.
0:38:22 So I think it would probably be legal, but I need to consult with my accountant.
0:38:24 Yes.
0:38:26 Child modeling contracts, licensing rights, usage rights.
0:38:27 Exactly.
0:38:28 Exactly.
0:38:28 Yeah.
0:38:31 We’re going to do social media for you and maybe there is something to that.
0:38:37 Any big surprises along the way or, you know, you know, disaster stories aside from the things
0:38:39 not working, but anything else that stands out?
0:38:45 It’s been surprising and this isn’t maybe not the best answer, but just the amount of great
0:38:46 people that I’ve met along the way.
0:38:48 I didn’t think it would be that way.
0:38:51 I thought it would be like a lot more negative experiences.
0:38:58 And when things have gone wrong, people have been very understanding and I didn’t expect
0:38:58 that.
0:39:03 I thought it would be more cutthroat type thing, but I’ve definitely learned a mistake that I’ve
0:39:07 definitely learned is the old adage, like hire slow, fire fast.
0:39:13 I’ve come to find out not through many people that have worked for me, but just a couple that,
0:39:19 you know, if somebody’s, you know, showing when they first take the job that they’re not doing
0:39:24 things the right way, not showing up on time or there are any kind of issues, you need
0:39:25 to take care of that right away.
0:39:31 Otherwise, it could have the potential to kind of take your brand down with you and your company
0:39:31 will suffer.
0:39:35 That was definitely, you know, an issue, especially the first year.
0:39:39 Again, that kind of led to me as the owner stepping in and doing a lot more parties than
0:39:46 I probably should have needed to, but you got to kind of rescue things if, if nobody else
0:39:46 is available.
0:39:46 Yeah.
0:39:52 It’s on you to pick up the slack, but yeah, if, if people aren’t performing early on, given
0:39:56 the guidelines and the expectations, like you have to think like the first couple of weeks
0:39:57 on the job is going to be their best foot forward.
0:40:01 If it’s not going well, it’s like, oh, how are they going to be in three months?
0:40:02 Exactly.
0:40:05 Don’t think that they’re going to turn it all around.
0:40:08 Like if there’s, I mean, obviously give them a chance.
0:40:09 Mistakes happen.
0:40:15 However, if you see some pattern of something, you need to cut ties quickly.
0:40:19 You know, otherwise, you know, that with a new business, one bad Google review.
0:40:20 Now we haven’t really had any, luckily.
0:40:21 Yeah.
0:40:24 So it’s like, it’s super fragile early on, right?
0:40:25 It’s like the reputation is everything.
0:40:28 You end up getting somebody upset.
0:40:28 Exactly.
0:40:34 Is there a revenue target you’re shooting for this season or where, where do you want
0:40:34 to take this thing?
0:40:38 Is it, does it become a full-time thing aside from the teaching gig?
0:40:38 Definitely.
0:40:44 We’re going to try to hit 200,000 this year, which is cool.
0:40:47 I mean, especially because it’s basically May through end of September.
0:40:51 So it’s kind of jam packed in just a few months.
0:40:52 Yeah, that’s great.
0:40:56 I think we should be able to get there, but that’s the goal for revenue side.
0:41:02 And then while simultaneously trying to kind of remove myself from doing as many of the
0:41:03 day-to-day parties.
0:41:06 So those are my, my main goals for, for foam this year.
0:41:11 I’ll probably keep doing both jobs for at least the foreseeable future and then just kind
0:41:12 of see where we’re at.
0:41:16 The one thing that could cause me to step back from one or the other, just my kids are getting
0:41:21 to the age where they’re starting to be in t-ball, soccer, dance classes.
0:41:25 And I want to make sure that I’m there to be able to see all of that.
0:41:30 I don’t want to be the dad that is off to work instead of seeing all their, their things.
0:41:30 Right.
0:41:31 Yeah.
0:41:34 You’re like, that was, that was the whole point of this to have extra time freedom down the
0:41:34 road.
0:41:35 Right.
0:41:39 So that’s where the kind of the rubber meets the road with that decision with me, but for
0:41:42 the foreseeable future, going to keep doing both.
0:41:47 It’s definitely challenging to, to balance both with the young kids, but doing the best I can.
0:41:48 Yeah.
0:41:52 I think it’s really cool what you’ve built in the example that you set and saying, well,
0:41:54 my income doesn’t have to be fixed.
0:41:59 You know, we could start this thing on the side and, and grow it in a kind of organic and
0:42:00 low risk way.
0:42:02 So I’m pretty excited by that.
0:42:05 So foam party, all stars.com is where you can find Tim.
0:42:09 If you’re in the Chicago area, go book him for a party, do him a favor.
0:42:10 Foam party, all stars.com.
0:42:14 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
0:42:19 If you see an opportunity to open a business, go do it.
0:42:25 Sometimes I think I am sort of a paralysis by analysis type of person, although it might
0:42:29 not seem like it from when I said that I keep kept reinvesting in the business.
0:42:33 But if you see the opportunity to open a business, go do it.
0:42:39 There are so many resources, whether it be listening to people on side hustle nation that have already,
0:42:44 you know, entered the same niche or Facebook groups where people are running the same type
0:42:46 of business or YouTube videos.
0:42:52 There’s a YouTube video to describe how to do every step of opening a business.
0:42:55 I have no formal background of business.
0:43:01 You know, I’ve sold on eBay and Amazon a little bit, but, and I was able to learn everything that
0:43:04 I needed to know, obviously with some trial and error along the way.
0:43:07 But if you see an opportunity, definitely take it.
0:43:12 Well, I think it’s a really cool case study on the marketing side, going back to your 700
0:43:13 postcards, right?
0:43:18 We talk about, you know, the dream 100 strategy was like, well, and some people kind of struggle.
0:43:18 Well, I don’t know.
0:43:20 I don’t know who my dream 100 customers would be.
0:43:26 You were able to come up with 700 potential customers within a, whatever, 35 mile radius.
0:43:29 It’s like, they’re out there and they don’t know you exist yet.
0:43:32 So you got to go get on their radar and be front and center about it.
0:43:34 And I thought that was really cool.
0:43:40 And then the other takeaway that I wrote down was kind of intentionally be the business owner
0:43:40 here.
0:43:45 And you’re going to have to go in and pick up the slack if something falls through, but like
0:43:51 trying to, from early on, hire other people to go deliver the product to be on the fulfillment
0:43:52 side.
0:43:57 So you can be the marketing arm, the administrative arm that you need to be to kind of position
0:44:02 the brand and move it forward and go out and, you know, land bigger and bigger events and
0:44:03 continue to grow that way.
0:44:04 So I think it’s really cool.
0:44:06 Again, phonepartyallstars.com.
0:44:07 You can find Tim over there.
0:44:11 Your free listener bonus this week is my local marketing checklist.
0:44:15 We talked about a few local marketing ideas inside this checklist.
0:44:20 You’ll find 10 proven ideas to get more lead flow to your local business.
0:44:24 You can download it there for free at the show notes for this episode, sidehustlenation.com
0:44:30 slash Tim, which is shocking after 650 episodes that Tim was available.
0:44:30 I don’t know.
0:44:31 I’m sure we’ve had another Tim, but who knows?
0:44:36 Sidehustlenation.com slash Tim, or just follow the show notes link in the episode description.
0:44:37 It’ll get you right over there.
0:44:40 Big thanks to Tim for sharing his insight.
0:44:44 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:44:49 Sidehustlenation.com slash deals is where you’ll find all the latest offers from our sponsors
0:44:50 in one place.
0:44:51 That is it for me.
0:44:53 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:44:57 If you’re finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:45:02 Fire off that text message to that friend of yours who might appreciate a little money-making
0:45:03 phone party in their day.
0:45:07 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen, and I’ll catch you in the
0:45:09 next edition of the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:09 In this episode, you’ll learn the fun, unique business he chose, how he got his first customers,
0:00:14 and how he’s scaled it to a pretty serious income stream all on the side.
0:00:20 From foampartyallstars.com, Tim Karstensen, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:20 Hey, Nick.
0:00:21 Thanks for having me.
0:00:23 I’ve been listening to your podcast for quite a while.
0:00:24 Love it.
0:00:27 And I thought, why not come on and tell our story here?
0:00:28 What a cool example.
0:00:29 I guess I just gave it away.
0:00:31 It’s a foam party business.
0:00:32 Let’s stick around.
0:00:37 We’re covering the startup costs, the marketing tactics, the pricing and delivery, all that
0:00:37 good stuff.
0:00:44 So you might be able to borrow Tim’s idea or a similar local service and spin it up in your
0:00:44 own town.
0:00:46 But I got to start off at the beginning.
0:00:48 Like, out of all the side hustles, why foam parties?
0:00:49 How’d you come up with this?
0:00:49 Yeah.
0:00:57 So I’ve been an elementary PE teacher for the past 18 years and always in my summers off,
0:00:59 I have either another job or another business.
0:01:05 I used to teach and coach in the summers, driver’s ed, stuff like that, which has its own stories.
0:01:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:01:07 I got the whole summer off.
0:01:08 I might as well take advantage.
0:01:09 Yeah, yeah.
0:01:15 So in 2022, in the summer, I was kind of looking for something else.
0:01:21 And at first I stumbled upon the bounce house business and I kind of did a deep dive on that.
0:01:23 But for me, it was a little too saturated.
0:01:29 I found out that the floor for insurance in the bounce house business is pretty high when
0:01:32 you’re just starting out and it’s hard to make money in the beginning.
0:01:33 Oh, okay.
0:01:34 Interesting.
0:01:38 Do you find like you’re going to need a lot of inventory, multiple bounce houses, like
0:01:41 to make the insurance pencil out for somebody like starting in that space?
0:01:46 Even if you had one or two bounce houses to start, your floor for insurance might be, let’s
0:01:51 say, $5,000, $6,000, which, you know, if you’re renting out a bounce house for a couple
0:01:54 hundred bucks, it’s going to take a while to get that back.
0:01:58 I found some people that were doing bounce houses down there in the Southern states, Arizona,
0:02:03 Florida, California, Texas, were also doing foam parties for kids.
0:02:09 And I think it was a party rental Facebook group that I stumbled upon that.
0:02:12 And I thought, oh, okay, that’s interesting.
0:02:14 Foam parties for kids.
0:02:18 I mean, I remember when I was in college, I went to a foam party, but I don’t think that’s
0:02:19 not really a kid’s thing.
0:02:24 So, you know, it picked my interest and I was like, okay, I’m good at working with
0:02:26 kids, 18 years teaching, you know, elementary PE.
0:02:31 And then I, you know, looked around here, around the Chicagoland area.
0:02:36 And I found out at that point, there was only one other place and they were about 50 miles
0:02:37 north of me.
0:02:40 So that was really the only competition I could find.
0:02:42 So I thought, okay, this looks doable.
0:02:43 Okay.
0:02:43 Okay.
0:02:44 And maybe we should pause.
0:02:46 Like, I kind of have a vision and I’ve been on your website.
0:02:50 Like, it’s just like kids running through walls of bubbles, like, you know, sometimes
0:02:51 up to the shoulders in bubbles.
0:02:53 And like, it just looks like a lot of fun.
0:02:54 Yeah.
0:02:56 Cast that visual of like what we’re talking about here.
0:02:56 Right.
0:03:01 We play kid-friendly music, even hire a voiceover artist to do like a countdown to the foam
0:03:05 party, you know, like a New Year’s Eve countdown, get them excited.
0:03:08 There’s rules of the foam all over the speakers.
0:03:13 And we have these giant, we call them foam cannons and they shoot foam around.
0:03:17 You can pretty much fill up like a 30 foot by 30 foot area.
0:03:21 And depending on the size and the age of the kid, you could keep it low if it’s a little
0:03:25 kid or you could bury them up high if it’s a teenage type kid.
0:03:27 It totally depends on the situation.
0:03:32 But the kids just like dancing around and frolicking around with their friends and enjoying
0:03:33 it, exploring it and things like that.
0:03:38 So it sounds like it was born from this research of looking at the inflatables business, the
0:03:42 bounce house rental side hustle and saying, oh, it’s interesting.
0:03:46 As I’m on the websites of some of these other service providers, here’s something else that
0:03:46 they offer.
0:03:49 Like maybe we could just spin up only that part.
0:03:52 There’s got to be lower liability or something like that.
0:03:54 And maybe that might make sense.
0:03:54 Yeah.
0:04:00 Since it was kind of a novel idea to me and I ran it by my wife who shut down my bounce
0:04:01 house business idea.
0:04:03 And she said, that’s interesting.
0:04:04 Tell me more about that.
0:04:05 OK, OK.
0:04:10 From that point, I was like, OK, well, I might have an OK from my wife, which is good.
0:04:11 We have three young kids.
0:04:16 So she’s an angel and stays at home with the kids a lot when I’m out doing phone parties.
0:04:21 So I kept looking into it and looking at the, you know, the competition that was there.
0:04:26 And then I found a Facebook group of phone party providers around the country and studied
0:04:29 every post that I could from from that Facebook group.
0:04:30 There’s a Facebook group for everything.
0:04:31 That’s crazy.
0:04:32 Yeah, there really is.
0:04:37 And they kind of lay it out in the Facebook group, how to start things and how much success
0:04:38 they’ve had for a lot of the people.
0:04:43 And that was kind of my my guideline for how to get things started and just kind of went
0:04:47 from there, you know, started up the business, thought of a name, phone party all stars.
0:04:54 And, you know, did all the starting business stuff, got the logo and the websites, did that
0:04:57 myself, which I don’t know if I had to do it again.
0:05:00 I might have had a professional to start out with that instead of spending so many hours
0:05:02 on something so basic.
0:05:05 But, but, you know, you learn, you learn.
0:05:06 That’s OK.
0:05:07 Everybody starts somewhere.
0:05:11 I think everybody has that struggle of like trying to make a website, make it look a certain
0:05:12 way.
0:05:15 And yeah, that’s that’s like an entrepreneurial rite of passage.
0:05:16 Exactly.
0:05:16 Yeah.
0:05:20 You know, you might save a little money, but you’re spending a lot of time sometimes.
0:05:21 That’s the trade off.
0:05:23 You got away in that situation.
0:05:26 So building the website, do you have any equipment at this point?
0:05:29 Like, or we kind of like, oh, I want to wait and see if we get any bookings.
0:05:30 Like what’s going on here?
0:05:31 Yeah.
0:05:40 So I bought my first phone party set up right around when I had the website go live after
0:05:43 I, you know, get all the business stuff, you know, registered with the state and everything
0:05:44 like that.
0:05:53 And then in, in January, I sent out some postcards to kind of get the ball rolling and as a way
0:05:56 to have people know that we exist.
0:06:03 And we ended up getting quite a few responses and bookings from that, which was awesome.
0:06:06 And since it’s wintertime, people are like, could you come by in May?
0:06:07 Like they’re planning ahead.
0:06:11 And so you don’t necessarily need to have the stuff like ready for that weekend.
0:06:12 Right.
0:06:15 So these aren’t like the, the private birthday party type of things.
0:06:23 These would be interests from daycares, summer camps, park district, churches, schools, things
0:06:27 like that, who book farther in advance than a typical birthday party would.
0:06:27 Okay.
0:06:32 So you build up your own mailing list of the daycares, summer camp, and then you put out kind of a
0:06:34 really targeted mailing just to them, just to those offices.
0:06:35 Right.
0:06:35 Yeah.
0:06:43 So I’d found pretty much any daycare, summer camp, park district, library, elementary school
0:06:51 within about 35 or 40 miles, I made a list and I sent the same postcard to all of them.
0:06:56 Now I kind of break it up with individual marketing for the different types.
0:07:02 So I might, I would send a different postcard to schools than I would to churches or libraries
0:07:03 and things like that.
0:07:08 But back then it was just the one postcard, Vistaprint, send it all.
0:07:13 Hope we get some responses and definitely worked to get the first few responses.
0:07:13 Yeah.
0:07:15 How many, how many did you send out?
0:07:19 I want to say maybe 700 total.
0:07:19 Okay.
0:07:20 Okay.
0:07:24 So, you know, you’re putting a little bit of money into it at that point.
0:07:24 Yeah.
0:07:29 Casting a wide enough net to kind of know if you are shooting completely blank after 700
0:07:31 and maybe, maybe the messaging needs, needs some tweaking.
0:07:33 Might be time to turn it around, right?
0:07:33 Yeah.
0:07:38 So, and at that point I thought, well, if I needed to, if, if it wasn’t going to work,
0:07:42 I could sell the equipment back and I wouldn’t really be all that much of a loss.
0:07:42 Yeah.
0:07:43 Relatively low risk.
0:07:45 What did the equipment cost?
0:07:51 The foam cannon itself, I use a professional grade model that cost at the time about $2,500
0:07:52 for the cannon.
0:07:58 And then I would say for other things that are in the foam party setup, we have these barriers
0:08:05 like PVC and some vinyl with our, our marketing on their barriers to keep the foam from coming
0:08:08 back at the person shooting the foam.
0:08:09 And okay.
0:08:11 I’m picturing like a medieval, like a shield.
0:08:11 Yeah.
0:08:13 In case the wind shifts.
0:08:18 So it’s, it’s kind of like a little wall about four feet high, maybe with our marketing on
0:08:19 the front that they see.
0:08:23 And then it keeps the foam from blowing back at us and getting on our equipment.
0:08:28 And then just little things like, well, we have a five by five tent with our branding on
0:08:30 it that just kind of makes it look professional.
0:08:37 And then a lot of little things like tools that you might need and hoses and electrical cords
0:08:39 and speakers.
0:08:40 Yes.
0:08:46 So you just need a water source and, you know, BYO bubbles basically.
0:08:49 And then in this, this professional cannon at a bare minimum.
0:08:50 Right.
0:08:50 Yeah.
0:08:55 So we, we do need a water source, uh, just a regular hose hookup works.
0:09:00 And then, uh, an electrical outlet, a regular outlet works, uh, if it’s just for one foam
0:09:05 cannon, if it’s multiple foam cannons, or if you’re not close enough to an outlet, then we bring
0:09:10 a generator in that situation for most of like the smaller events, daycares, summer camps
0:09:11 and stuff like that.
0:09:13 It’s just one, one foam cannon.
0:09:20 And so, yeah, I started off with one, got a few bookings before I even did any foam parties,
0:09:26 even though I had some booked, uh, I bought a second setup and it just kind of kept on rolling.
0:09:27 What did the postcard say?
0:09:28 Was there pricing on there?
0:09:33 Was it just like, you know, booking now for, you know, summer 2023 or whenever it was.
0:09:36 It said like, we bring a foam party to you.
0:09:42 And then it said like, foam parties are great for, and then I tried to hit summer camps, daycares,
0:09:48 school events, church events, library, summer reading, kickoffs, block parties, birthday parties.
0:09:55 And then it says like foam party packages include, you know, foam cannon, a foam party leader.
0:09:57 Which is you showing up and leading the thing.
0:09:58 Right.
0:09:59 Which at that point is just me.
0:10:01 I’m the only guy that’s, uh, that’s available.
0:10:02 Okay.
0:10:04 And then, you know, book now at our website.
0:10:10 Uh, we did have pricing on our website for, for basic, like, you know, one hour, one cannon,
0:10:15 or, uh, we also do something called glow foam, which is, looks like the foam is glowing in
0:10:16 the dark for night events.
0:10:19 So we had pricing for that on the website, not on the postcard.
0:10:20 Okay.
0:10:21 What’s it cost to get you to come out?
0:10:24 For a one hour, like a birthday party, it’s 375.
0:10:29 And then most people just, okay, we’ll book you for an hour and then you kind of clean up,
0:10:32 tear down and hopefully you’ve got another one booked for the afternoon.
0:10:32 Right.
0:10:33 Yeah.
0:10:37 So for birthday parties, which is a lot of what we do on the weekends, birthday parties and
0:10:42 block parties, uh, we usually just an hour, which we found is a good amount of time for,
0:10:43 for the kids.
0:10:47 Uh, if you’re doing two hours with the same group of kids, you know, they kind of lose
0:10:48 interest.
0:10:49 That’s, that’s fair.
0:10:50 It’s opposite of an upsell.
0:10:54 A lot of times it’ll be, you know, we want to do two hours for this birthday and it’ll
0:10:58 be me saying, well, we found that one hour is a good amount of time.
0:11:05 And, but, and also if you, uh, do a foam party on a grass surface for two hours, uh, your,
0:11:09 your chance of mud is, is a lot higher than one hour.
0:11:14 You don’t generally see any kind of mud, but I try to warn people this ahead of time.
0:11:14 Okay.
0:11:15 Yeah.
0:11:17 There’s other, other logistics involved.
0:11:17 Okay.
0:11:18 Right.
0:11:23 And it does feel weird to try to, you know, almost, uh, you know, reverse upsell, uh, you
0:11:25 know, you sure you want to do two hours?
0:11:30 I try to do that just to make it the best experience for, for the kids and the parents.
0:11:31 Yeah, that’s fair.
0:11:35 And then, and then it just dissolves, like it just evaporates away and, or you hose it
0:11:36 down.
0:11:41 The foam generally dissipates within, uh, 20 minutes to a half hour, um, depending on if
0:11:47 it’s on grass or, or, you know, asphalt concrete, what, um, that will change it a little bit.
0:11:52 And if it’s windy out and things like that, we can hose down the grass, but really it doesn’t
0:11:53 really make much of a difference.
0:11:56 You wouldn’t even know it was there after, you know, an hour or two.
0:11:58 So, I mean, it’s just wet because it’s mostly water.
0:12:05 Uh, we use about a hundred and 125 gallons of water for a one hour party for one cannon.
0:12:09 So, you know, that in a concentrated area, you can definitely tell that it’s wet.
0:12:10 All right.
0:12:13 So, so you send out all these postcards, 700 postcards.
0:12:17 You start to get some inbound inquiries through the website.
0:12:19 People start calling you, Hey, we want to book this thing.
0:12:21 What kind of questions are they asking you?
0:12:25 Cause you’re like, you know, you’re presenting all the confidence of like, yeah, we’ll bring
0:12:26 the party to you.
0:12:29 But like never having done it before, like what kind of questions come up that now you know
0:12:33 the answer to, but at the time you’re kind of like, uh, yeah, we could totally do that.
0:12:39 Tim’s answer to those initial inbound inquiries plus his first paying gig coming up right
0:12:39 after this.
0:12:46 Yeah, it was definitely a kind of a fake it till you make it type situation where, you
0:12:51 know, you try to be prepared, you know, by researching what other people have done around the country,
0:12:53 but you’ve never really done it before.
0:12:57 So you’re kind of going on the fly and, you know, just being honest.
0:13:01 And if they ask you a question and you don’t know the answer, just let them know that you
0:13:03 will get back to them as soon as you can.
0:13:08 But with the daycares that we initially got, uh, most of the time it would be like, all right,
0:13:09 we have 125 kids.
0:13:11 Like how long do we need a phone party for?
0:13:13 How much is it going to cost?
0:13:14 Is it going to ruin the grass?
0:13:16 Which is normal question that we get.
0:13:17 And then do they get wet?
0:13:18 Do they need a towel?
0:13:20 Do they need a change of clothes?
0:13:22 Does it sting their eyes?
0:13:24 This is a question that we get a lot.
0:13:25 The answer is no.
0:13:26 Got it.
0:13:26 Got it.
0:13:27 All right.
0:13:29 Let’s fast forward to, to party number one.
0:13:33 Then you go and you set this thing up for the daycare or wherever it is.
0:13:36 And it goes off without a hitch.
0:13:38 It goes, there’s, you know, kids crying and screaming.
0:13:41 Like, you know, anything could happen at this point.
0:13:41 What happens?
0:13:42 Yeah.
0:13:44 It’s definitely a learning process.
0:13:49 I mean, I, I, I set it up at my house and, you know, did a party from the kids and the
0:13:49 neighbors.
0:13:50 So that’s right.
0:13:51 I have a trial run.
0:13:51 Yeah.
0:13:52 Right.
0:13:53 Which, which was smart.
0:13:56 Cause that would have been not good if, if I didn’t.
0:14:01 However, my first party that I had booked was actually kind of higher on the difficulty
0:14:02 scale.
0:14:08 It was a school event and it was a two foam cannon glow foam party.
0:14:13 So that is actually much trickier.
0:14:19 So glow foam, there’s a special additive that you put into the foam that makes it glow.
0:14:21 Looks like it’s, you know, glowing UV glow.
0:14:27 Uh, once, uh, once, once it gets dark out, but you also have UV lights that are, that are
0:14:32 hanging from, uh, your tents, uh, which, you know, there’s a lot of, a lot more cords to
0:14:33 deal with.
0:14:45 It’s just, it’s trickier, especially for a, you know, the water containers fast enough with
0:14:48 one water source and two, two cannons.
0:14:53 And, you know, with a huge crowd, I mean, there was a couple of hundred kids there, which looking
0:14:57 back, I would have wanted more than two foam cannons if, if I knew there was that many kids,
0:14:59 but I was just happy to be there at that point.
0:15:06 I showed up and the setup took way longer than it should have spent probably an hour and 15
0:15:10 minutes setting up, which now would be half that for a two foam cannon.
0:15:12 But yeah, it went well.
0:15:14 You get better as you go along, you get more reps in.
0:15:14 Yeah.
0:15:15 Oh, absolutely.
0:15:16 And it went well.
0:15:18 Uh, the kids loved it.
0:15:19 It was definitely a learning experience.
0:15:25 And, you know, each one that you do, you kind of pick up something or might, you might do
0:15:25 something wrong.
0:15:30 I think that one as well, their water source at the school, there was like a pebble somehow
0:15:32 stuck in the water source.
0:15:38 So then I had to run 250 feet of hoses to the next closest water source.
0:15:43 And yeah, so one of those things, you know, they, they didn’t check it beforehand, but which
0:15:47 now I tell people to do, but back then didn’t have the experience.
0:15:48 So, okay.
0:15:48 Yeah.
0:15:54 So learning, learning curve, learning process and a non-zero amount of equipment involved
0:15:58 between the cannons and the speakers and the tents and the hoses and everything else.
0:15:59 It’s helpful to know.
0:15:59 Yeah.
0:16:00 Basically packed.
0:16:06 We, we have a minivan, we fold all the seats down and I could fit two foam setups in the
0:16:08 minivan, but I mean, it’s jam packed.
0:16:14 It’s like, like you probably way too much stuff in there, but yeah, you’re not seeing out the,
0:16:15 at the rear view anymore.
0:16:15 Yeah.
0:16:16 No, definitely not.
0:16:18 Okay.
0:16:22 So you get these initial bookings from the postcards and hopefully some positive feedback
0:16:25 from those and, and maybe some word them out.
0:16:29 But like what happens after that in terms of driving additional traffic?
0:16:34 Cause it is, you know, maybe you can, well, we’re going to book you every year and there’s
0:16:38 some level of recurring revenue here, but it’s, it’s a lot of times it’s got to be kind of
0:16:42 a one and done thing for, uh, you know, onto the next, uh, onto the next gig.
0:16:43 Yeah.
0:16:48 So on a daily occurrence, it’s a one and done thing and onto the next gig, but we definitely
0:16:51 have a lot of recurring, um, customers.
0:16:57 Uh, we found that once we started doing some of the daycare locations, some of the larger
0:17:03 chain daycare locations, once you do one or two and get your foot in the door and you show
0:17:05 that you do a great job, the kids love it.
0:17:11 You’re easy to work with then, you know, it might not happen the same year, but the, the
0:17:16 following year, you know, if we had three of a chain daycare, then the next year we had
0:17:23 12 and, um, it just kind of snowballed in that way, especially with a lot of the larger daycares,
0:17:24 you know, we did a good job for them.
0:17:30 And, um, you know, the following year they would all rebook and then they would tell some of their
0:17:34 neighboring daycares of the same chain and they kind of snowballed in that way.
0:17:34 Okay.
0:17:35 Okay.
0:17:40 Now the other half of the business, I would say is birthday parties and block parties for
0:17:44 that we marketed with Facebook ads.
0:17:53 And, uh, also we, I posted a lot in every neighboring Facebook group that I could find, um, with, you
0:17:58 know, good pictures and an explanation of what a phone party is.
0:18:00 And there was a very positive response with that.
0:18:05 I even use my wife’s, maybe I shouldn’t say this on the air, but I use my wife’s Facebook
0:18:11 account to go into the mom’s pages and I would post from her account since, you know, they don’t
0:18:18 really always allow males to post, but since it was under my wife’s account, I was able to post.
0:18:23 So it would be like city name moms would be like an example of a group that would exist.
0:18:24 Exactly.
0:18:28 And there’s a lot of them for birthday parties, especially 98% of the time.
0:18:35 It’s the mom that is booking the party and the dad, when you get there is asking, are you going
0:18:36 to kill his grass?
0:18:38 But the mom books the party.
0:18:39 So that’s like the target market.
0:18:41 When I run ads, I run the ads to moms.
0:18:43 I really don’t run it to dads.
0:18:46 Yeah, it’s interesting.
0:18:51 We’re seeing all sorts of creative, you know, birthday party, like especially elementary school
0:18:51 age.
0:18:54 You can go to the bounce house place is a really popular one.
0:18:55 You go to the arcade.
0:18:59 We’ve had a couple where our kids have been invited to go.
0:19:01 It’s like a video game truck.
0:19:06 Like a guy shows up in his F-250 and behind it is like this pretty good size, like horse trailer,
0:19:11 but he’s got like a couch in there and like this wall of TVs and he’s got like every console
0:19:14 imaginable as like, it was a pretty cool setup.
0:19:19 And I don’t know how much it costs, but again, it’s like, you know, upfront cost for him in
0:19:24 the setup and then just, you know, do two, three parties a day and it’s slowly, you know, recoup
0:19:24 that.
0:19:28 And after a while, you know, so you maybe got to buy new games every now and again, after
0:19:29 a certain point, it’s all gravy.
0:19:29 Yeah.
0:19:30 I’ve heard of those too.
0:19:31 Those actually look cool.
0:19:35 I would love to check one of those out, but not my business, but it would be cool.
0:19:37 I think, uh, you know, my kids would love it.
0:19:41 The other one that somebody sent me this, it was like a Nerf party rental and it looked like
0:19:44 they were, you know, maybe they would do kids parties, but it was more like corporate team
0:19:49 building where we’re going to set up this like pretty intense, like, you know, with, uh, you
0:19:52 know, inflatable pylons and like almost like a paintball arena, but like, well, could it
0:19:53 come to you?
0:19:54 We’re going to have a Nerf war.
0:19:55 Yeah.
0:19:56 Those look fun too.
0:20:01 I saw this, a similar thing with almost like a Nerf war, but it was with water, water guns.
0:20:05 And somehow on the vest, it registered when you got shot with the water and a similar
0:20:06 type thing.
0:20:08 Oh, like a full on like laser tag type of setup.
0:20:09 Yeah.
0:20:10 I thought that was cool.
0:20:13 So yeah, people, uh, you know, people spend money on this stuff.
0:20:15 It’s an interesting place to play.
0:20:16 And, and I, I think you’re right.
0:20:17 Like, okay.
0:20:22 Especially if there’s a franchise or a chain daycare, well, I got my toe in the door with
0:20:22 this one.
0:20:27 And now you can see how that would snowball and you can see how it would turn into recurring
0:20:27 revenue.
0:20:31 We’ll come back for our field day next year and, and we’ll, you know,
0:20:32 reserve that almost in advance.
0:20:33 Well, let’s pencil you in.
0:20:33 Let’s get on the calendar.
0:20:34 Yeah.
0:20:38 It was, it was hard initially with some of the chain daycares to get in because a lot
0:20:41 of times there, you have to go through their corporate office.
0:20:45 You have to file certain paperwork and like nobody who seems to want to give the, you the
0:20:47 paperwork, they say, Oh, you’re not a registered vendor.
0:20:48 It’s like, Oh, I’ll be a registered vendor.
0:20:50 Just send me the paperwork.
0:20:50 Yeah.
0:20:50 Yeah.
0:20:51 Show me how to register.
0:20:52 Exactly.
0:20:56 So, but once you break through that and you get registered, then it’s like, okay, you know,
0:21:01 people see you do a good job and then it kind of has snowballed for us at least.
0:21:05 And we see the birthday party thing snowball word of mouth wise too, where it’s like the
0:21:06 kid goes to the phone party.
0:21:09 The kid goes to the video game truck rental party.
0:21:10 Well, I want that for my birthday.
0:21:10 Right.
0:21:14 And so this kind of like starts to, uh, starts to spread and then the moms text the other
0:21:17 moms to be like, well, who was the, you know, Timmy really wants the phone party.
0:21:19 You know, who, who did you use?
0:21:19 Yeah.
0:21:27 And in the end, I think really our best marketing is seeing our, our phone parties because, you
0:21:32 know, a lot of times you might see pictures and you might think, well, that’s kind of weird.
0:21:33 I don’t know that maybe that would be fun.
0:21:34 Maybe it wouldn’t.
0:21:39 But then if you see it and it’s kind of like, okay, that’s the kids are really enjoying this.
0:21:39 That’s pretty cool.
0:21:45 And then we have built into, uh, again, we hired a voiceover artist that does like a
0:21:46 promo for us.
0:21:50 Like, Hey, if you want to have your own phone party at a daycare or a school or a birthday
0:21:55 party, you come get a postcard or come get a business card from your phone party leader.
0:21:57 And, you know, and then the next song goes.
0:21:59 So that’s another way that we market.
0:22:04 This is just, it’s like built over the, over the loudspeakers, like into your party playlist.
0:22:05 Exactly.
0:22:08 Like a, you know, a 25 second commercial for our own business.
0:22:10 Uh, during the phone party.
0:22:15 Uh, and that usually drives, you know, several parents over to say, Hey, this is really cool.
0:22:17 Like how much do you charge or can you come to here?
0:22:20 Or so it’s, it’s, it’s been effective for sure.
0:22:23 Now, would you go, would you go all the way into Chicago?
0:22:26 It looks like you’re kind of out in the burbs a little bit, but if I, if I search phone
0:22:28 party Chicago, you’re there on the first page.
0:22:29 Yeah.
0:22:35 So we, we don’t go out to Chicago too much sometimes, but basically if, if we’re not booked around
0:22:37 us, then yes.
0:22:39 Uh, we do some like block parties out there.
0:22:40 Block parties are big.
0:22:41 To be honest with you.
0:22:46 I, I, I really need to change up my, our Google business profile and add Chicago in, but I’m,
0:22:47 I’m worried.
0:22:50 Cause I know sometimes if you change certain things, you can get suspended and I don’t want
0:22:51 that to happen.
0:22:52 Yeah.
0:22:55 Like expand the service area on the little map back.
0:22:55 Right.
0:22:57 So I’ve kind of been on the fence.
0:23:00 And if you don’t have to drive that far, like then that’s, that could be an advantage too.
0:23:04 If it’s a big enough party, like there’s a kid’s museum that we’re doing that’s like an hour
0:23:07 and a half away, but I mean, they’re doing four hours of multi-canon.
0:23:09 So it’s like, yeah, we’ll come to you for sure.
0:23:13 If it was a kid’s birthday up there, it would probably be, no, I can refer you to somebody else
0:23:15 that does phone parties in your area.
0:23:15 Got it.
0:23:20 Are you going to franchise the thing and go, go nationwide and be like, oh, I’ve got a, sure.
0:23:20 Yeah.
0:23:21 We’ve got a guy in that area.
0:23:25 There are a couple of places around the country that are starting to franchise their phone
0:23:26 party business.
0:23:28 I’m not planning to do that myself.
0:23:33 Still have the teaching job, but yeah, there are some that are starting to do that.
0:23:33 Fair enough.
0:23:35 That’s going to be the next private equity roll up.
0:23:37 So we’re going to acquire all these different companies.
0:23:38 HVAC and then phone parties.
0:23:39 Right.
0:23:40 That’ll be the next trendy thing.
0:23:41 I promise.
0:23:41 Yeah.
0:23:41 All right.
0:23:47 So Facebook ads, Facebook groups targeting the local neighborhood groups, the mom groups.
0:23:49 It is just kind of like an introductory post.
0:23:50 If you’re not already a member there.
0:23:54 Hey, we’re, I’m Tim, you know, I’m from this nearby town.
0:23:55 This is what we do.
0:23:57 You know, look at all these happy, smiling kids.
0:23:59 Is there any offer or call to action?
0:24:01 It’s more just kind of like, Hey, you know, if we’re here when you need us.
0:24:02 Yeah.
0:24:07 I don’t really do like an offer as in like a discount offer, but I usually just say, you
0:24:12 know, for party packages and info, go to our website and then kind of leads them there.
0:24:15 And then we have more information on our website.
0:24:17 And then if they have questions, they’ll usually email or call.
0:24:18 Yeah.
0:24:18 Got it.
0:24:23 Is there a like calendar availability, like for somebody to just click and book or it’s
0:24:25 like they go through like a request.
0:24:28 The pricing is on there, but like they got to fill out a form and there’s a little bit
0:24:31 of confirmation that needs to happen for the date availability.
0:24:35 We don’t have like an instant availability option.
0:24:41 We have a form to fill out with, you know, where the phone party is at, how many people
0:24:45 are going to be in attendance and, and things like that.
0:24:49 And then they send that to us, get it to my phone and email immediately.
0:24:54 I say on there that I’ll get back to you with, with availability within 24 hours.
0:24:56 It’s usually way quicker than that.
0:24:59 I, you know, try to set the bar low and beat that expectation.
0:25:01 And then they’re like, Oh, that was quick, you know?
0:25:05 But if we had a full calendar of when we’re available, especially in the beginning of
0:25:07 the season of like, wow, these people are always available.
0:25:09 They must not be too much in demand.
0:25:15 So, you know, which seems crazy, but it’s kind of a, something that people think about it.
0:25:15 Yeah, that’s fair.
0:25:16 I didn’t think about that.
0:25:21 And then sometimes it’s a little bit complicated with the schedule because now that we have nine
0:25:25 phone party setups, we could technically be doing nine phone parties at a time, but most
0:25:30 of the time we’ll have, you know, employee that’s not available that day, or you got to drive
0:25:33 from this party in the Southern suburbs to the Northern suburbs.
0:25:34 And you got to take all that into account.
0:25:37 So it’s hard to just make it a one size fits all calendar.
0:25:39 So I kind of do that manually.
0:25:41 Nine phone party setups.
0:25:44 More with Tim in just a moment, including how he’s grown his team.
0:25:46 So he doesn’t have to run every party by himself.
0:25:51 In the smart way, he was able to fund some of that new equipment coming up right after this.
0:25:54 Nine phone party setups.
0:25:56 So clearly there was demand for this.
0:26:00 And I imagine you started to get the inquiries where you need to be two places at once.
0:26:02 I’m turning down money here.
0:26:03 So there we go.
0:26:04 Buy setup number two, number three.
0:26:09 And you got to replicate yourself too, to go have somebody else deliver the experience.
0:26:10 Yeah.
0:26:15 And to be honest with you, I think replicating myself and learning to delegate as has been
0:26:18 one of the lessons that I wish I had learned initially.
0:26:22 Although at some point when you’re starting out, you don’t have the luxury of that.
0:26:26 You don’t necessarily have the money to pay people to do the actual phone party, the actual
0:26:27 job.
0:26:30 And you just need to be the jack of all trades.
0:26:37 Now I’m trying to still trying to work in progress, more so eliminate myself from the,
0:26:40 you know, regular birthday parties where we might have four or five at a time.
0:26:47 And I usually will only go to the larger multi-canon events unless I’m needed in an emergency or
0:26:47 something like that.
0:26:53 But, you know, I also have to man the phones and emails and, you know, invoices.
0:26:58 And if it rains on a Saturday and we have 10 parties, I’m going to be on the phone all day
0:27:02 because, you know, well, now it looks like 60% chance.
0:27:02 I don’t know.
0:27:03 Let’s keep you posted.
0:27:04 Okay.
0:27:07 Now in my area, it looks like 30% chance.
0:27:12 And, but, uh, you know, so it’s, it’s, uh, it luckily it doesn’t rain that often, but it
0:27:13 throws a wrench.
0:27:14 I didn’t even think about that.
0:27:17 It was just like, you just have to postpone or what do you, what do you do?
0:27:20 So you, you can do a phone party in the rain.
0:27:21 Don’t do it.
0:27:23 Obviously if it’s lightning anywhere in the area.
0:27:28 So we have a lightning apps where it alerts us if there’s lightning anywhere in the area.
0:27:32 It’s not fun for the person doing the phone party if it’s raining, but for the kids
0:27:35 they’re wet anyway, so they don’t, yeah, they don’t care generally seem to care.
0:27:41 Um, I would say a lot more people end up just doing the phone party in the rain as opposed
0:27:46 to rescheduling or canceling, especially with birthday parties, because they might not be
0:27:50 able to reschedule with, you know, invitations going out a month or two in advance.
0:27:52 So a lot of them will just say, let’s just do it.
0:27:57 And we go ahead with it as long as there’s no lightning or anything like that.
0:27:58 Yeah, that’s true.
0:27:58 Yeah.
0:28:01 It’s, it’s, you’re, you’re, you’re committed.
0:28:03 You’re up to like, you know, hope for good weather that day.
0:28:03 Yeah.
0:28:09 How long was it before you needed to expand to the second set, the third set and, and hire
0:28:10 additional team members?
0:28:15 I think I might’ve even gotten the third set up before we even did any parties because
0:28:21 it’s a very seasonal business around us, especially because we’re in, in the Midwest Chicago suburbs.
0:28:27 So it really doesn’t get warm enough to, to do a phone party until at least late April, even
0:28:29 then it’s kind of spotty depending on the day.
0:28:34 So, you know, when you start marketing in January, you kind of get a feel for, you know, how many
0:28:42 bookings you have and, and I realized that I need to just reinvest these, uh, deposits into
0:28:44 some more phone party equipment.
0:28:44 Oh, okay.
0:28:49 This is going back to some of the initial postcard mailings where they would, they would book it,
0:28:50 they would put down a deposit.
0:28:54 So you’re, you’re collecting some cashflow right away and then, okay, we’ll take the balance
0:28:57 upon delivery or, you know, a day of.
0:29:01 And so you could, you could pay that forward into like, oh, there’s clearly some demand here.
0:29:03 We’re getting multiple inquiries for the same day.
0:29:09 And I didn’t want to be stuck where, you know, turning away too many parties, which I mean,
0:29:16 as much as I try not to, it still happens for various reasons, but I tried to expand as quickly
0:29:20 as possible and to be able to keep up with the demand that I was seeing.
0:29:26 And it’s just kind of kept expanding, you know, for the last couple of years that I’ve been doing
0:29:26 it.
0:29:31 A lot of the people that run phone parties for us are teachers that I know since they
0:29:35 have summers off at, you know, the schedule aligns with their schedule.
0:29:41 And then sometimes college students that are home for even a larger timeframe than the teachers
0:29:41 are.
0:29:42 So.
0:29:42 Okay.
0:29:43 Yeah.
0:29:44 Here’s, here’s a fun summer job.
0:29:46 Come hang out at this phone party, be the DJ for a little bit.
0:29:47 And it is fun.
0:29:49 I’ll be, I mean, I love running the party still.
0:29:53 I try to step back from doing as many as I did last year.
0:29:59 I did almost a hundred myself, which I, again, I enjoy it, but I have three young kids at home
0:30:02 and I also have to answer the phones, emails and everything.
0:30:06 So more of a, you know, work on your business, not in your business type of thing.
0:30:12 I feel like I’m best served to just train the people that are running the phone parties and
0:30:14 try to step back from doing as many myself.
0:30:15 Yeah.
0:30:16 And it’s great.
0:30:19 It’s not, you know, phone parties by Tim, it’s phone party all-stars, right?
0:30:23 So you have set it up in such a way where you don’t need to be there.
0:30:29 And I imagine most of the people calling don’t, don’t expect the owner of the business to show
0:30:29 up.
0:30:32 They expect you to have a team in place or a team member come and do it.
0:30:32 Yeah.
0:30:37 Unless they had me the first year where I did, you know, a majority of them almost not a
0:30:42 majority, but a large, large chunk than they might, but no, I think people understand and
0:30:43 it’s gone well.
0:30:47 I’ve met a lot of great people and you know, there’s been ups and downs.
0:30:53 We’ve had a couple of events where the foam cannon broke and it was no fault of ours,
0:30:57 but you know, it’s, it’s not a good feeling when you’re, you know, you have the countdown.
0:30:58 All right.
0:30:58 Are you ready?
0:31:01 Five, four, three, two.
0:31:05 And then just, oh no, like nothing comes out.
0:31:08 Like, oh boy, kids are chanting.
0:31:09 We want foam.
0:31:12 That’s, it’s not a good feeling for that reason.
0:31:17 I usually bring a whole backup set in my own car just in case, but it’s happened a couple
0:31:17 of times.
0:31:20 And I don’t know, six, 600 plus parties that we’ve done.
0:31:22 So right, right.
0:31:23 Have some backup and redundancy.
0:31:25 If you’ve got two, you got one.
0:31:26 If you got one, you got none.
0:31:27 But yeah, that’s okay.
0:31:28 Time out.
0:31:29 Put a pause in that.
0:31:30 We’ll be, just give me 15 minutes.
0:31:32 We’ll set up the other one and we’re good to go.
0:31:33 Yeah.
0:31:33 Yeah.
0:31:36 I’m going to run my car or just have it with you.
0:31:40 But yeah, it’s happened a couple of times, not fun, but the people have been, twice it
0:31:42 was at a daycare and they were very understanding.
0:31:47 I was just like, you know what, I’m just, I’m going to, can we find a day for me to come back
0:31:49 and I will, I will do it for free.
0:31:53 Cause this is obviously, you know, don’t want to do anything for free, but inconvenience
0:31:54 them.
0:31:54 Yeah.
0:31:58 But you got to preserve that reputation and keep customers happy.
0:32:02 That’s one of the things that I’ve noticed here is like dozens and dozens of, you know,
0:32:04 positive five-star reviews for foam party all-stars.
0:32:10 You do anything specific or proactive to collect those after a, a party gone well?
0:32:16 Um, you know, I just send, uh, an email, uh, which I should also be sending texts to be
0:32:18 honest with you, but I, I send a email.
0:32:21 Thank you for having a phone party with foam party all-stars.
0:32:26 If you felt you had a five-star experience, you know, please click this link and leave us
0:32:26 a review.
0:32:32 If you have any, I don’t phrase it this way, but if any negative feedback, you know, please
0:32:35 email the owner, Tim at this email and, or call.
0:32:39 And we’ve really only had one that got back to me and said, Hey, I wanted to say some, there
0:32:41 was some stuff that I wanted, wasn’t a hundred percent happy with.
0:32:44 And it was good because I was glad that they brought it to my attention.
0:32:49 That was one that one of my workers was doing and I would never have known, uh, it was nothing
0:32:54 major, but just, you know, it’s good to be able to give feedback to the, uh, the worker,
0:32:57 even though I’m not there and I didn’t get a negative review out of it.
0:32:58 Yeah.
0:33:01 I can collect some, if you felt you had a five-star experience, here’s what you can do.
0:33:02 Yeah, exactly.
0:33:03 Exactly.
0:33:07 And if you have some constructive criticism, um, we’d, we’d, we’d love to hear it too.
0:33:07 Exactly.
0:33:08 Cause that’s, that’s how we get better.
0:33:09 All right.
0:33:13 So we have several different varieties of foam parties.
0:33:16 Sounds like most of the time we’ve got other people going out to deliver those.
0:33:19 Now the website says we could accommodate up to a thousand participants.
0:33:20 That’s a lot of foam.
0:33:22 Is that all nine cannons going at once?
0:33:23 Well, now we can.
0:33:24 Yeah.
0:33:25 I mean, we, yeah, probably.
0:33:31 And that, that would be more so for like a community event or festival, which, you know,
0:33:35 we’ve partnered with a few neighboring towns and, and done community events that are, that
0:33:36 are larger.
0:33:41 Uh, we’ve also a lot of fun runs that either through an elementary school or a park district.
0:33:46 Some of those get pretty large where we are bringing a lot of cannons to those.
0:33:51 And then the kind of the niche glow foam, different colors of foam we can do.
0:33:56 And then, uh, even have gender reveal on there, which we don’t get a lot of interest for.
0:33:59 Uh, I should probably just take it off the website, but definitely intriguing.
0:34:04 And I think it would be cool, but it’s, it’s a lot of money for colored foam for your gender
0:34:04 reveal.
0:34:11 Well, I saw one the other day was like college bed parties, which was not what I thought it
0:34:12 was going to be.
0:34:17 Once I clicked on it, it was like you decorating your bed with like a blanket for the school
0:34:21 that you got accepted into and a bunch of pillows and sweatshirts and stuff.
0:34:27 And it’s like, Oh, could you blast off cannons in, in purple and gold for, for Washington
0:34:27 Huskies or something?
0:34:32 Maybe the gender reveal thing, maybe there is a something to that or, or something similar.
0:34:34 I saw that same thing actually.
0:34:40 And there’s also along a similar vein of bedding, but, uh, there’s like kids sleepover parties
0:34:45 now where they set up like elaborate tents and set up, I think mostly indoor, but I think
0:34:46 might be outdoor too.
0:34:51 And like a company actually comes out and decorates it with your theme and, you know,
0:34:52 Taylor Swift sleepover.
0:34:54 And I mean, it’s kind of amazing.
0:34:55 Yeah.
0:34:55 Yeah.
0:34:55 Yeah.
0:34:55 Yeah.
0:34:58 It’s like a party in a box, like a prepackaged type of thing.
0:34:59 Yeah, definitely.
0:35:04 I mean, one of the risks be like, well, is this just a, do I go in all in on this business
0:35:07 that like happens to be a, an 18 month fad and then it’s over?
0:35:12 Like, do you see any of that with, with phone parties or is it like, yeah, I think this is
0:35:12 here to stay.
0:35:13 You know what?
0:35:15 I’ve always had that in the back of my mind, especially starting now.
0:35:18 Like I was kind of skeptical, like, is this really going to be a thing?
0:35:21 But it honestly seems to be picking up traction.
0:35:27 I have more competitors now, definitely, which honestly I’m on good, good terms.
0:35:31 And we actually refer parties to each other if we’re fully booked, you know, if I know they
0:35:32 do a good job.
0:35:32 Yeah.
0:35:34 Caught it on the upswing.
0:35:34 Yeah.
0:35:39 So a lot more competitors, but our sales are still going up from where we were last year,
0:35:40 which went up from the year before.
0:35:43 So I would say it’s definitely a growing trend.
0:35:47 And I know I don’t want to knock on bounce house, but I’m an elementary school teacher
0:35:49 and our district, we can’t even do bounce houses anymore.
0:35:52 There was an injury at another school or something like that.
0:35:56 So a lot, a lot of daycares are the same way where they’re risk management.
0:35:59 I mean, people say that phone parties are fine, but bounce houses are not.
0:36:01 Honestly, I think both are safe, but that’s just me.
0:36:03 Yeah.
0:36:05 The insurance for the bounce house thing was too expensive.
0:36:07 What’s insurance costs for phone parties?
0:36:08 Yeah.
0:36:08 It’s not bad.
0:36:10 Just for a 1 million, 2 million policy.
0:36:14 It was, I want to say about 12, 1300 bucks.
0:36:15 It’s not too bad.
0:36:16 It’s like an annual premium.
0:36:17 Right.
0:36:18 Yeah.
0:36:19 We can tolerate that.
0:36:20 We can make that back in a few parties.
0:36:21 Absolutely.
0:36:21 Yeah.
0:36:23 That’s, that’s reasonable.
0:36:27 The 5,000 for the bounce houses, that was a little much, but.
0:36:28 Right.
0:36:34 I mean, it’s all, it’s all kind of this equation of, well, what’s my pathway to break even here?
0:36:39 And I love the, we’re going to make some investment in marketing in these postcards, but we’re going
0:36:40 to collect the deposit up front.
0:36:44 Even if it’s going to be several months, we can use the deposits to buy the equipment or pay
0:36:49 for the equipment and kind of a creative way to, to go about it and see if there’s any,
0:36:50 any demand here.
0:36:54 Well, I mean, especially starting out, you know, my wife and I both have W2 jobs.
0:36:55 We’re doing fine.
0:37:00 So for me, it was more like, you know what, if I see the opportunity here, I need to go,
0:37:02 you know, strike while the iron is hot type of thing.
0:37:07 You know, I need to expand as quickly as I can.
0:37:11 And I don’t want to hold back, you know, just because I don’t want to spend the money
0:37:13 if I know that we’ll make money on the back end.
0:37:16 Have you gotten the kids involved in the business at all?
0:37:21 So my kids are, uh, my youngest turned four, so four, five, and seven.
0:37:26 So they have been to a ton of phone parties, but it’s funny.
0:37:27 They still like it.
0:37:31 And like, I’ve, they’ve done at least 20 because every time, you know, it’s like, Hey, uh, you
0:37:34 know, the girl scout troops coming over, let’s do a phone party.
0:37:37 Um, my, my wife’s like, Hey, they haven’t done a phone party before.
0:37:39 Let’s bring the baseball team over.
0:37:40 And it’s like, yeah, sure.
0:37:40 No problem.
0:37:42 But they still enjoy it.
0:37:47 So to me, it’s like, maybe this has some staying power if they’ve done this so many times and
0:37:48 they still like it.
0:37:49 So, okay.
0:37:49 Yeah.
0:37:54 They’re a little bit young to hire them to run the DJ booth or set up the equipment, but
0:37:59 it’s cool that they’re exposed to this, uh, entrepreneurial side of mom and dad.
0:38:00 Yeah.
0:38:00 Not quite yet.
0:38:05 I need to talk to my accountant about, you know, can I start up a, uh, Roth IRA for them,
0:38:08 you know, type of thing, but we’ll see.
0:38:08 Yeah.
0:38:12 You know, a couple of years, it’d be hauling equipment for you and yeah, absolutely.
0:38:13 Get them paid.
0:38:13 Yeah.
0:38:17 I mean, they’re in some of the promotional pictures since, you know, I’ve done a lot of
0:38:18 phone parties with them.
0:38:22 So I think it would probably be legal, but I need to consult with my accountant.
0:38:24 Yes.
0:38:26 Child modeling contracts, licensing rights, usage rights.
0:38:27 Exactly.
0:38:28 Exactly.
0:38:28 Yeah.
0:38:31 We’re going to do social media for you and maybe there is something to that.
0:38:37 Any big surprises along the way or, you know, you know, disaster stories aside from the things
0:38:39 not working, but anything else that stands out?
0:38:45 It’s been surprising and this isn’t maybe not the best answer, but just the amount of great
0:38:46 people that I’ve met along the way.
0:38:48 I didn’t think it would be that way.
0:38:51 I thought it would be like a lot more negative experiences.
0:38:58 And when things have gone wrong, people have been very understanding and I didn’t expect
0:38:58 that.
0:39:03 I thought it would be more cutthroat type thing, but I’ve definitely learned a mistake that I’ve
0:39:07 definitely learned is the old adage, like hire slow, fire fast.
0:39:13 I’ve come to find out not through many people that have worked for me, but just a couple that,
0:39:19 you know, if somebody’s, you know, showing when they first take the job that they’re not doing
0:39:24 things the right way, not showing up on time or there are any kind of issues, you need
0:39:25 to take care of that right away.
0:39:31 Otherwise, it could have the potential to kind of take your brand down with you and your company
0:39:31 will suffer.
0:39:35 That was definitely, you know, an issue, especially the first year.
0:39:39 Again, that kind of led to me as the owner stepping in and doing a lot more parties than
0:39:46 I probably should have needed to, but you got to kind of rescue things if, if nobody else
0:39:46 is available.
0:39:46 Yeah.
0:39:52 It’s on you to pick up the slack, but yeah, if, if people aren’t performing early on, given
0:39:56 the guidelines and the expectations, like you have to think like the first couple of weeks
0:39:57 on the job is going to be their best foot forward.
0:40:01 If it’s not going well, it’s like, oh, how are they going to be in three months?
0:40:02 Exactly.
0:40:05 Don’t think that they’re going to turn it all around.
0:40:08 Like if there’s, I mean, obviously give them a chance.
0:40:09 Mistakes happen.
0:40:15 However, if you see some pattern of something, you need to cut ties quickly.
0:40:19 You know, otherwise, you know, that with a new business, one bad Google review.
0:40:20 Now we haven’t really had any, luckily.
0:40:21 Yeah.
0:40:24 So it’s like, it’s super fragile early on, right?
0:40:25 It’s like the reputation is everything.
0:40:28 You end up getting somebody upset.
0:40:28 Exactly.
0:40:34 Is there a revenue target you’re shooting for this season or where, where do you want
0:40:34 to take this thing?
0:40:38 Is it, does it become a full-time thing aside from the teaching gig?
0:40:38 Definitely.
0:40:44 We’re going to try to hit 200,000 this year, which is cool.
0:40:47 I mean, especially because it’s basically May through end of September.
0:40:51 So it’s kind of jam packed in just a few months.
0:40:52 Yeah, that’s great.
0:40:56 I think we should be able to get there, but that’s the goal for revenue side.
0:41:02 And then while simultaneously trying to kind of remove myself from doing as many of the
0:41:03 day-to-day parties.
0:41:06 So those are my, my main goals for, for foam this year.
0:41:11 I’ll probably keep doing both jobs for at least the foreseeable future and then just kind
0:41:12 of see where we’re at.
0:41:16 The one thing that could cause me to step back from one or the other, just my kids are getting
0:41:21 to the age where they’re starting to be in t-ball, soccer, dance classes.
0:41:25 And I want to make sure that I’m there to be able to see all of that.
0:41:30 I don’t want to be the dad that is off to work instead of seeing all their, their things.
0:41:30 Right.
0:41:31 Yeah.
0:41:34 You’re like, that was, that was the whole point of this to have extra time freedom down the
0:41:34 road.
0:41:35 Right.
0:41:39 So that’s where the kind of the rubber meets the road with that decision with me, but for
0:41:42 the foreseeable future, going to keep doing both.
0:41:47 It’s definitely challenging to, to balance both with the young kids, but doing the best I can.
0:41:48 Yeah.
0:41:52 I think it’s really cool what you’ve built in the example that you set and saying, well,
0:41:54 my income doesn’t have to be fixed.
0:41:59 You know, we could start this thing on the side and, and grow it in a kind of organic and
0:42:00 low risk way.
0:42:02 So I’m pretty excited by that.
0:42:05 So foam party, all stars.com is where you can find Tim.
0:42:09 If you’re in the Chicago area, go book him for a party, do him a favor.
0:42:10 Foam party, all stars.com.
0:42:14 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
0:42:19 If you see an opportunity to open a business, go do it.
0:42:25 Sometimes I think I am sort of a paralysis by analysis type of person, although it might
0:42:29 not seem like it from when I said that I keep kept reinvesting in the business.
0:42:33 But if you see the opportunity to open a business, go do it.
0:42:39 There are so many resources, whether it be listening to people on side hustle nation that have already,
0:42:44 you know, entered the same niche or Facebook groups where people are running the same type
0:42:46 of business or YouTube videos.
0:42:52 There’s a YouTube video to describe how to do every step of opening a business.
0:42:55 I have no formal background of business.
0:43:01 You know, I’ve sold on eBay and Amazon a little bit, but, and I was able to learn everything that
0:43:04 I needed to know, obviously with some trial and error along the way.
0:43:07 But if you see an opportunity, definitely take it.
0:43:12 Well, I think it’s a really cool case study on the marketing side, going back to your 700
0:43:13 postcards, right?
0:43:18 We talk about, you know, the dream 100 strategy was like, well, and some people kind of struggle.
0:43:18 Well, I don’t know.
0:43:20 I don’t know who my dream 100 customers would be.
0:43:26 You were able to come up with 700 potential customers within a, whatever, 35 mile radius.
0:43:29 It’s like, they’re out there and they don’t know you exist yet.
0:43:32 So you got to go get on their radar and be front and center about it.
0:43:34 And I thought that was really cool.
0:43:40 And then the other takeaway that I wrote down was kind of intentionally be the business owner
0:43:40 here.
0:43:45 And you’re going to have to go in and pick up the slack if something falls through, but like
0:43:51 trying to, from early on, hire other people to go deliver the product to be on the fulfillment
0:43:52 side.
0:43:57 So you can be the marketing arm, the administrative arm that you need to be to kind of position
0:44:02 the brand and move it forward and go out and, you know, land bigger and bigger events and
0:44:03 continue to grow that way.
0:44:04 So I think it’s really cool.
0:44:06 Again, phonepartyallstars.com.
0:44:07 You can find Tim over there.
0:44:11 Your free listener bonus this week is my local marketing checklist.
0:44:15 We talked about a few local marketing ideas inside this checklist.
0:44:20 You’ll find 10 proven ideas to get more lead flow to your local business.
0:44:24 You can download it there for free at the show notes for this episode, sidehustlenation.com
0:44:30 slash Tim, which is shocking after 650 episodes that Tim was available.
0:44:30 I don’t know.
0:44:31 I’m sure we’ve had another Tim, but who knows?
0:44:36 Sidehustlenation.com slash Tim, or just follow the show notes link in the episode description.
0:44:37 It’ll get you right over there.
0:44:40 Big thanks to Tim for sharing his insight.
0:44:44 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:44:49 Sidehustlenation.com slash deals is where you’ll find all the latest offers from our sponsors
0:44:50 in one place.
0:44:51 That is it for me.
0:44:53 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:44:57 If you’re finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:45:02 Fire off that text message to that friend of yours who might appreciate a little money-making
0:45:03 phone party in their day.
0:45:07 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen, and I’ll catch you in the
0:45:09 next edition of the Side Hustle Show.
How do you go from gym whistles and dodgeballs to foam cannons and $150,000 in side hustle income?
This elementary PE teacher discovered a unique business opportunity that lets him earn six figures during his summer break — and have a lot of fun along the way.
Tim Carstensen from FoamPartyAllStars.com runs a full-service mobile foam party that brings an interactive experience to the Chicagoland area. The best part is he started with zero business experience and figured it out as he went.
Tune in to Episode 676 of the Side Hustle Show to learn:
- The smart marketing strategy that got his first customers
- How he scaled from 1 foam cannon to 9 setups across multiple locations
- Why this business model works better than bounce house rentals
Full Show Notes: This PE Teacher Started a $150k Side Hustle
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