How to start a brown-bag lunch walking tour with weekly free concerts group

April 15, 9:42 AMSacramento Nutrition ExaminerAnne Hart

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Are you ready to wolf down food tailored to your body's requirements--after a brisk walk?  If you love to eat a nutritious lunch and you love to walk, how about starting a lunch-and-walk business where you take a group of people on their lunch hour for a half-hour walk followed by a half-hour lunch break that emphasizes more nutritious foods. Seeking more information? Glimpse my mini-book, How to Open a Neighborhood Walking Tour Business of Any City, Write and Publish Guides, or Video Record Walking the World. A concert at noon with a brown-bag lunch is one way to start because the Westminster Presbyterian church at 13th and N streets offers free music concerts at noon every Wednesdays, except on holidays and invites you to bring your brown-bag lunch.

Listen to classical music or jazz and eat. Then do your walking later in Capital Park across the street if you don't have to be back at work after the noon to 1:00 p.m. concert.

You could take them to a planned weekly picnic location after the walk, visit restaurants that serve the variety of foods you want, emphasize ethnic foods, or have a brown-bag plan where people bring certain types of foods for lunch and talk about the nutritious qualities of the food or exchange recipes. Here's how to start your lunch-n-walk business about town.

If you love to walk, contact various offices of any type where the people usually sit all day. Offer to take groups on lunch hour walks in a particular area of the city in which you live. Take the office employees--whether you work there or not--on long walks during the flexible lunch hour. 

Or you may want to take retirees and their dogs on a walk followed by a lunch, brunch, or dinner, or an afternoon picnic in a scenic area. The idea is to walk first and then brunch, lunch, or dine nutritiously. A healthy walk followed by food, a talk, and maybe music also may be done with a church group after services are over on a weekly basis, or on a daily basis with the lunch bunch office crowd that really could use a half-hour walk on a lunch break.

Start a home-based weekend-only neighborhood walking tour business on a shoestring budget. Give your walking tour business a name such as “Inside Details” or “Images and History.” Pick an original name for your business that explains in two words what you offer on your walking tour.

Start with sedentary office workers and offer lunchtime walks with a stop. The group then can sit somewhere and eat or buy lunch, sit down, and eat for 15 minutes before walking back to the office as a group.

During vacation periods from your usual weekday job, take tourists on walking tours all over the most fascinating cities of different countries. Pick a country that’s relatively safe for walking. Eventually, your walking tour business can offer international walking tours of foreign cities as well as local, neighborhood, and wilderness sites.

You start local at first, obtain knowledge of where to walk in which countries or cities, and finally, turn your small business, into an international walking business with a new name that explains where you walk. Finally, turn your international walking business into a nonprofit group dedicated to promoting neighborhood walking in urban, suburban, and rural environments throughout the world.

As you expand, you’ll have to hire people to run the walking tours seven days a week. You also can work with volunteers as well as paid employees. You decide how far you want to go as a nonprofit group with a commitment to promoting safe walking around the world, in your neighborhood, or cater to the downtown workers. Or you can picnic in parks and along the rivers or lakes. If you expand to daytrips, you could run a walking and lunch hour-long tour in almost any city overseas.

You can charge a small fee, such as $3 for the walk accompanied by a lecture or neighborhood tour of houses or healthier places to eat, or better yet for the lunchers, let everyone walk free, brown bag their lunches, have a picnic, listen to music, or operate as a nonprofit business to promote safe walking for health and stress reduction. You can cater to older adults or office workers or all age groups, or specialize in walking for people with special needs.

If you operate as a nonprofit agency, you can offer free walking tours and run on donations to your nonprofit agency. You’ll be able to maintain a rented office with a volunteer staff if enough donations come in for your nonprofit safe walking tour group. Most people would not like to spend a fee for walking.

You’ll probably find your people dropping because the walks cover the same area repeatedly. So it’s best to operate as a nonprofit agency and run on donations with a volunteer staff rather than a paid staff.

To bring in more money, publish a newsletter listing walking times for an annual $10 or $12 subscription. When running your non-profit walking tour service, make a list of categories to which people can contribute money. Out-of-town trips will generate more income.

Volunteer walking leaders can arrange their own trips and go through your nonprofit safe walking tour service to take walkers on tours of foreign cities or national locations if they can find enough walkers willing to walk through the cities selected at an agreed-upon price. They have to work up a budget.

For the working crowds, keep offering midweek lunch break walks. Some of these office workers will be happy to take your walking tours to other countries when they get vacation time. Your clients would be sedentary office workers. Specialize in working with office workers, senior citizens, students, weight watchers, mothers with babies and toddlers. Or create those walk, lunch, and prayer groups. Whatever your focus, there may be groups interested in walking tours followed by a varied and nutritious lunch.