This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Paul Whitten, 37, the founder of Nashville Adventures. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
I run history and walking tours here in good ol’ Music City. I left a great job at Amazon in early 2024 to start my walking tour company in Nashville, where my wife and I moved in 2021. My wife thought I was crazy for doing this, but it’s grown every year by triple digits.
I created the LLC in September 2023 and started running it nights and weekends while still working at Amazon. I did a soft launch on weekends in November 2023 at the end of the off-season, but this was just me doing tours for free.
When I started, I partnered with another company called Tours by Foot — I looked up who was number-one in walking tours of Nashville at the time, and they were, so I just called them up, and I gave free tours there on the weekends just for tips. I made $40 on my first tour and was so ecstatic. We’re still part of the Tours by Foot network, but we do paid tours there now.
I quit my full-time job at Amazon in February 2024, which is when I fully launched my business and it became my full-time job.
In 2025, my business’s gross profit was just under six figures with total revenue of just over six figures. Now in the first eight months of 2026, our gross profit is already over six figures with revenue in the mid-six figures. I hired my first employee — an additional tour guide to work with me — about a year in as well.
I thought about what type of work felt fun, and what I was good at
I chose walking tours because they combine three of my favorite things: talking about history, public speaking, and making money.
I was in the US Army from 2007 to 2014 and when I was in Afghanistan, I got injured and was sent to a warrior transition unit in the US. After my surgeries in the morning, I volunteered to give tours at the Patton Museum in the afternoon for three weeks.
I loved it; when I looked back at what I had the most fun working at in my life, it was giving tours for free.
Before getting a corporate job, I literally went from the Army to the Peace Corps in three years. I joined Amazon in 2019 as an area operations manager.
At the time, Amazon was growing its fulfillment needs, so while I ended up in tech, I started in fulfillment. My ability to work well with the contractors and other stakeholders got recognized, and I moved laterally into the tech field. I became an automation program manager at Amazon in 2021.
What I realized working there is that I do have a unique skill set. I can talk to anybody, and I can help people from wildly different arenas get on the same wavelength.
I made six figures in Big Tech, but I make more now. These three strategies are the ones that helped my small business income and profit grow quickly:
1. I took no salary for eight months
I started my company with $3,600, most of which went to getting the URL.
When I started this business, I didn’t take a salary for eight months so that I wouldn’t need outside funding.
I wasn’t scared not to have a salary — I didn’t have a daughter yet and my wife was still working, so we still had health insurance. I also learned from my three years in the Peace Corps — when I lived off $140 a month in the Republic of Armenia — that I can survive without a big cash flow and can be happy with next to nothing. My wife was in the same environment.
We don’t need much, and we still spend pretty much the same as I did in the Peace Corps. Living below your means is a great way to survive and thrive in difficult environments. It lets you control your own destiny better when you know you can thrive on less than what others think is a lot.
My advice if you want to go this route is to reduce as much risk as you can by cutting back on every expense you have before you jump. This will help you make sure that you have an ability to survive as you try to make your business sustainable on its own.
2. I picked a unique niche business that wasn’t sexy
I’ve always had a passion for history. I’ve never taken a business class in my life, but by pure luck, I noticed there was a gap in the market of tourism in Nashville. Everyone caters to a very specific audience in Nashville — the bachelorette party market — and I found another niche here that works: people interested in the authentic, true history of Nashville.
I picked unsexy walking tours on purpose because I could actually rank for them on Google — so I taught myself SEO by literally reading library books and became the search result for Nashville history tours. That’s worked to rank well on GEO for AI search too, since it’s pretty much the same foundations of SEO.
The great thing about a walking tour is that it has an extremely low barrier of entry. I could afford a pair of tennis shoes to give a tour, but I couldn’t afford a $250,000 sightseeing bus. So walking tours were the manner of me getting to play in this arena with the budget I had at the time.
Having a really unique set of history knowledge and an interesting set of nerd knowledge that I was able to spit out in a fun way — that launched us.
3. I went off-road with the guest experience
I treated every single guest like they’d go tell 10 people, because in this business sphere, they do. That word of mouth plus free search traffic is our whole engine — no investors, no loans, just being findable and good.
I can’t stand scripted tours so we don’t do scripts — those are one step away from AI giving a tour. We find out where people are from, and then we adapt that tour to them based on what their interests are, after getting to know them in the first 30 minutes of the tour.
Like if I mention George Jones and someone says, “I love him,” then we’ll go into a honky tonk just for that customer. Half these honky-tonks have historical things on the wall that are practically museum pieces.
Nudie’s Honky Tonk has Elvis Presley’s jacket in it; Tootsie’s has Loretta Lynn’s shirt in a dirty frame on a dirty wall. So we’ll be like, “Hey, let me show you this real quick.”
We get that connection quickly with guests when we provide that little bit of a special feeling. Then all of a sudden, it’s not just a tour — it’s a backstage pass.
I love being an entrepreneur
Every job I’ve had before this makes me appreciate what I’m doing as an entrepreneur even more. I’ve done so many crazy things in my 20s, and one thing I got out of it is a firmer understanding of how to appreciate things now.
I want to have fun. I’ve had real jobs — they suck. I like this one. It took me 36 years to find a job I liked, and I had to make it myself.
You read all these books about the role of passion, and I always thought that was all b.s. until I lived it. Passion kept me going when I was making $40 on a Saturday and I was ecstatic about it — it was the sheer happiness of doing something I loved.
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