I turned a fun candle-making side hustle into a full-time business after my layoff. Sometimes I wonder how the heck I did it.

• Taylor Kelly started running candle-making workshops in 2023 to get out of the house and meet people.
• He turned his side hustle into a full-time small business after he was laid off from his corporate job.
• His company offers classes like flower arranging, pasta making, and tea tasting and blending.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Taylor Kelly, the 34-year-old founder of Eventful ATL, who lives in Atlanta. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

It went from $2,000 in revenue in 2023, when it was an evening and weekend side gig, to $16,000 in 2024, when I created a legal business entity: Eventful ATL.

It gave me more flexibility to really dive in, and we ended the year a little under $75,000 in revenue. I pushed into 2026 with a stable small business, and we’re on track to end 2026 with around $100,000 in revenue.

We currently offer over 12 class topics, including candle making, flower arranging, pasta making, tea tasting and blending, charcuterie making, wine tasting, and cocktail making. We also recently added pottery-making and seasonal classes like wreath-making and gift-wrapping.

Sometimes I wonder, how the heck did I end up here?

I started hosting candle-making workshops after moving to Atlanta

I lived in New York for several years and worked for Ritani, a New York-based jewelry company, in a few different marketing roles from 2019 to 2025. I took two years off from Ritani between 2020 and 2022 to do a full-time MBA program at the University of Miami, and I rejoined the company in May 2022.

My side gig began in the winter of 2023. I’d moved to Atlanta, and in order to get out of the house and meet people, I started hosting candle-making workshops on evenings and weekends. Candle making had been my hobby during COVID and grad school.

It started to grow beyond candle making, into other types of classes. I teamed up with a venue partner who has a wonderful event space and added flower-arranging and caviar-tasting workshops.

Initially, I asked people whom I knew had specific hobbies, passions, or experience if they’d offer a class in it. Soon, I started getting emails and calls from small business owners and creatives who really wanted to teach but didn’t want to deal with the logistics of coordinating classes or experiences.

It wasn’t hard to balance it with my full-time job because I was working remotely and wasn’t doing anything else after work hours. I’d spend my nights and weekends working on Eventful and focused on SEO for organic growth.

As the months went by, it became clear that there was an opportunity to keep growing Eventful, and I thought about the possibility of making it my full-time job. However, I liked having a stable paycheck.

I was laid off from my full-time job in May 2025

It wasn’t a big surprise that it happened. I remember being stressed, like, Oh, crap, I don’t have any income now. If I hadn’t had this little business on the side, I would’ve spiraled. I’m so grateful that I had my side hustle to fall back on.

I started my job search in June while still working my side gig, but I wasn’t getting much traction with interviews. I sent out hundreds of applications and got only a handful of interviews. I’d be so annoyed about spending a whole day applying when I could’ve spent that energy diving into my business.

There were so many jobs listed, and a recruiter would say, “We’d love to chat,” and then the role would vanish. That was disheartening, and it made more sense to pursue something that I had going myself.

I also wasn’t finding roles that were exciting to me, the way I had years ago when I lived in New York. Part of that was because I was so excited about working on my business. I knew there was potential; it wasn’t huge at the time, but I knew we could continue to grow.

A couple of months later, I made the decision to pursue my business full-time

I’m not sure I would’ve pursued growing the company full-time anytime soon if it weren’t for being laid off.

Now, we host 15 to 20 events a month. We have at least two public classes each week, and we’re adding more throughout the holiday season, as well as multiple private group experiences throughout the week.

We have a lot of brands that leverage us to provide team-building experiences for clients and employees, including companies like Google, Salesforce, Chick-fil-A, and Home Depot.

We work with about eight to 10 contractors and instructors who teach classes. I like working on a team — I don’t like sitting here alone. I’ve also started teaching a lot of our pasta-making and flower-arranging classes.

When I’m not instructing, I like being present at as many classes as possible to facilitate setup and breakdown. However, there’ve been many times when our team has handled classes without me present, and the goal is to ensure we’re creating the right systems to make that the standard, in order to eventually scale and grow into new markets like Miami and New York.

Sometimes I’m the marketing person, and sometimes I’m the instructor for the day. Every day is a new day, and I wake up to an email of something cool that I didn’t expect coming across my desk.

I’m excited for us to continue to grow

It took until September of this year, when my brain was like, This is it. This business is really bringing in money, and if I’m being lazy or not doing as much as I can, it impacts my life. I have a dog who’s very expensive. I either make money and pay the bills right now, or it doesn’t happen.

It’s not just about the money, though. I also get to speak with so many passionate people every day. My business has been able to film on a Bravo show and has been featured in local news. We signed a lease for our first permanent space in downtown Atlanta early this year, in preparation for the World Cup this past summer.

Now that I’ve fully committed and we have people who are really invested in what we’re doing — the business owners who love teaching and sharing these opportunities — I always think about scalability.

That being said, who knows what I’d do if another opportunity came up? I don’t have to always be there personally with my business.

We have a lot of events happening at the end of 2026, which is giving me anxiety — but I asked for it. It’s either that, or we don’t grow.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Advertisement