I paid a mate £50 to create some PDFs for my teen side hustle – now it’s a multi-million-pound fitness empire
TODAY Grace Beverley has a net worth of over £8 million, but her business didn’t even exist a decade ago.
Now 27, the Tala and Shreddy founder started her side hustle as a teenager, by selling recipes online to her Instagram followers.
Grace, who’s from London, worked as an intern at IBM during her gap year between school and university.
She would wake up at 5am, go to the gym, work at IBM until the sun set, and post her recipes.
Then just 18, she spent her weekends batch-making meals for eight hours a day – to upload the following week.
The recipes were shared on Instagram for free but, after working full-time on an intern’s salary and having no time on the weekend to earn extra cash, Grace remembers thinking “I can’t continue to do this”.
Speaking on Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place podcast, Grace recalled she was “completely burning myself out” – so decided to start monetising her hard work.
Grace typed up all the recipe’s she’d ever made into two books – one for savoury meals and one for sweet foods.
She paid a friend of hers, who was a graphic design student, £50 to make the recipes into a PDF.
Then she created a Shopify account, and flogged the PDFs for a fiver.
Grace, who had around 10,000 followers at the time, said she “didn’t think of it as a business at all” – just a way to make a few quid.
Grace went onto launch Shreddy, a fitness app, while studying at the University of Oxford.
She also founded a sustainable activewear brand called Tala, which received a £4.5 million investment in 2022.
She more recently launched The Productivity Method, which sells planners, and was featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 Europe list in 2020.
She also has a book and podcast – both called Working Hard, Hardly Working.
She previously attended a £9,000-a-year nursery and St Paul’s Girls School in west London, getting A*, A, B in her A-levels.
Grace told Fearne she has “categorically never been good [at]” any of the things that she has made money from – like building recipes and making clothes – but she knows she can “out-work” other people.
“I will put in the sheer effort and hours 10 times over, whatever direction that may be in,” she added.
Her main tip for anyone wanting to start a side hustle is to ask themselves “how can [I] get more out of what [I’m] already doing?”
Some side hustles to try
- Tutoring
- Completing online surveys
- Becoming a transcriber or translator
- Testing apps and websites
- Dog walking
- Re-selling clothes online with apps such as Vinted or Depop
- Babysitting
- Joining a focus group
- Drop-shipping
Despite growing her business on social media, Grace didn’t want her businesses to “become synonymous with myself” so deleted all her YouTube videos after graduating from uni.
“I don’t believe that social media is a good place for people pleasers,” she added.
She still receives some negative comments online for her personal life.
In October of last year, Grace was criticised for the expensive price of her digital planner: £42.
Her followers wondered how she could justify the price, thinking they were funding her extravagant lifestyle – she recently visited a luxury five star hotel in the South of France which costs up to £1,224 per night, Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc.
Grace comes from a wealthy family too.
Her grandfather was the multimillionaire Sir Nigel Broackes, who founded Trafalgar House, one of the UK’s largest contracting businesses.
Her dad Peter runs a business consultancy and her mum Victoria works as a senior curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.