How Jeanette Built a Local Tour Business … Only For Locals

Tour operators are told locals won't buy tickets to see their own city. They're usually right. Jeanette Pierce built a twenty-year business by selling the tour to someone else instead: the employer, the university, the city government that already has that local on a list. The product isn't sightseeing. It's attraction and retention.

Jeanette Pierce is the founder of Detroit's The City Institute, formerly Inside Detroit, which she launched in January 2006 after leaving a job at United Way, frustrated that outsiders were the only ones talking publicly about her city. Detroit was still years away from bankruptcy when she started and deep in it a few years later, and City Institute grew through that entire arc, not around a single moment of good press. Mitch and Jeanette break down how she built the business almost entirely on private, custom "learning journeys" sold to corporations, universities, and local governments, rather than tickets sold to the public.

Jeanette explains her "peanut" method for customizing a single tour into dozens of different themes for different institutional clients, why she deliberately kept her team small after burning out at eight full-time staff and forty part-time, and how she chooses which community partners to feature and pays them for their time. She also lays out why locals discover tours through Eventbrite and HR departments instead of TripAdvisor, and how City Institute turns university orientation and corporate onboarding into recurring annual revenue. This is a full playbook for selling to a market everyone else assumes doesn't exist.

Resources:

• thecityinstitute.com