Page 53 - The $100 Startup_ Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love

airline their miles are coming from, and any restrictions they have on their travel
dates. Then Gary gets to work, combing databases to check on availability,
phoning the airlines, and taking advantage of every loophole.

It may sound strange to pay $250 for something you could do on your own for
free, but the value Gary provides through the service is immense: Many of the
trips he arranges would otherwise cost $5,000 or more. He specializes in first-
and business-class itineraries, and some of them feature as many as six airlines
on a single award ticket. You want a free stopover in Paris en route to
Johannesburg? No problem. You want to allow plenty of time to visit the
Lufthansa first-class terminal in Frankfurt before continuing on to Singapore?
Done. If he’s not successful in booking your trip, you don’t pay—the business
succeeds only when it provides real value to clients.

In addition to executives, Gary’s clients are often retirees headed for cruises
and couples planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip: basically anyone who has a bunch
of miles but doesn’t want to go through the hassle of figuring out how to use
them. Business picked up after he was featured in Condé Nast Traveler, but
aside from calling the airlines to book the tickets, Gary manages
communications entirely by email. The part-time job brought in $75,000 last
year and is on track to top six figures annually. Since he has the full-time CFO
gig and other business ventures, Gary invests the money instead of spending it.
“I honestly do this because it’s fun,” he says. Meanwhile, he cashes in miles
from his own bulging mileage accounts to travel the world with his wife,
squeezing in luxury trips to the Philippines and Thailand between financial
planning meetings back home.

Gary’s business, like many others we’ll look at, can be described as a follow-
your-passion business. Gary was passionate about travel and had found a number
of creative ways to enjoy first-class trips around the world at economy prices. He
started helping people do the same thing, first as a volunteer community member
for several travel forums, then on a blog, and then on an individual basis for
people he knew. Word got around—“Hey, Gary, I’d like to take my wife to
Europe and I have all these miles … What do I do?”—and before he knew it, he
had more requests for help than he could handle.

The next logical step was to start charging. He built a very basic website and
set up shop in a short period of time, not entirely sure what would happen next.
Would anyone purchase this unusual service? Well, yes, they would—and even
though Gary is content in his day job and has no plans to leave, he no longer
depends on it. If something changed at work, he’d have no problem living off the
funds from his side business or ramping it up to something bigger.