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 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:
- cityinstitute.com
Key Takeaways
- A tour business built for locals needs a different model than one built for tourists. (05:09) Jeanette Pierce has spent twenty years proving residents will pay for tours of their own city, just not in the format built for visitors. Most of City Institute’s revenue comes from private, custom tours sold to corporations, universities, and local organizations rather than tickets sold to the public. Operators chasing a local audience need to build around institutions, not individual buyers.
- “Learning journeys” are a different product than traditional sightseeing tours, and the distinction matters commercially. (05:57) City Institute still runs one public walking tour and a bus tour for general audiences, but the majority of the business is learning journeys built around speakers at each stop. That format lets Jeanette charge more and sell to corporate and institutional buyers who want content, not just a route. Naming and structuring the two products differently opens different sales channels.
- The business started from personal frustration, not a business plan. (07:37) Jeanette was broke and working at United Way when she got tired of hearing outsiders speak for Detroit in the press. She built City Institute as a nonprofit specifically so people would see it as impact-driven rather than a money grab. The company launched in January 2006, and Detroit hosted the Super Bowl that same year, which she used as an early proof point that people would show up.
- Detroit’s bankruptcy years after the Super Bowl show that a single high-profile event does not fix a market. (09:45) The Super Bowl gave Detroit its first wave of positive attention in years, but the city was still on a path toward bankruptcy just five to six years later. Jeanette built her business through that entire arc, not around a single spike in visibility. Operators in struggling or recovering destinations should plan for the multi-year grind, not a single turnaround moment.
- The single most important word on any tour is “I.”. (10:02) Jeanette leads with her own lived experience: she lives there, walks there, knows the person behind the counter, and shops there. That first-person credibility mattered even more in a city with a negative national reputation, because it directly countered secondhand headlines. Operators selling a place with a complicated story should lean into personal authority rather than general facts.
- When no directory existed, Jeanette built one herself, and it became her competitive moat. (12:10) Before smartphones made local search easy, Jeanette and her team physically walked the neighborhood to compile the first list of 100 bars and restaurants in Detroit’s downtown square mile. She learned a business had opened because she saw the door propped open, and learned one had closed because she showed up and found a sign. That firsthand knowledge, not marketing spend, made her the go-to source for what was actually happening on the ground.
- A single tour attendee can represent thousands of dollars in indirect economic impact. (14:46) Jeanette recalls a conference attendee who left her tour visibly upset, explaining he had turned down his dream job in Detroit two years earlier because he assumed the city wasn’t a place he wanted to live. One tour changed his read on the entire decision. That kind of attraction-and-retention outcome is the actual product City Institute sells to corporations and universities, not the tour itself.
- A physical storefront can be cheap and still change the trajectory of a business. (15:49) In 2008, Jeanette opened a 3,500-square-foot pop-up Welcome Center on Woodward Avenue for $500 a month plus utilities, a rate she still calls a lot of money for her at the time. The space, which is now a Nike store, gave her a public-facing base during some of Detroit’s hardest years. Operators waiting for a “real” retail budget should note she scaled the space to what she could afford at the time.
- Locals discover things through Eventbrite and community organizations, not TripAdvisor. (22:26) Jeanette points to a New York architecture tour operator whose top referral source is Eventbrite rather than any traditional OTA, because that is where locals look for things to do. Marketing a product to locals requires a completely different distribution channel than marketing to tourists. Operators trying to reach both audiences need two separate marketing plans, not one adjusted slightly.
- Locals often need an outside validator before they will value what is already in their own city. (23:19) Jeanette tells locals that a New York Times art critic called the Diego Rivera fresco at the Detroit Institute of Arts the closest thing America has to the Sistine Chapel. She also points out that architect Minoru Yamasaki designed his first skyscraper in Detroit before designing the World Trade Center. Borrowing outside authority and surprising facts is often more effective than simply telling locals to be proud of what they already have.
- Recurring institutional clients make locals more valuable customers than one-time tourists. (29:00) City Institute runs an annual eight-hour Leadership Detroit program for 75 of the region’s top leaders and a separate half-day experience for 300 college interns every year. One person deciding to bring 50 people is a much easier sale than convincing 50 individuals to each buy a ticket. Institutional, recurring bookings create predictable annual revenue that public tours rarely match.
- Staffing up does not automatically buy back your time, and lived experience cannot be trained at scale. (32:11) At its peak, City Institute had eight full-time staff with benefits and forty part-time employees, and Jeanette says she hated her life and was completely burnt out. She intentionally shrank the team afterward because more headcount did not translate into more time for the deeper city projects she wanted to do. Guides can be trained in facts and delivery, but passion and twenty years of lived relationships cannot be replicated by hiring alone.
- One base tour framework can flex to dozens of different themes for different clients. (34:16) Jeanette describes her “peanut” method: a base layer of information everyone needs, a middle layer tailored to the audience type, and an outer layer that matches whatever specific theme a client requests, whether that’s sustainability, arts, or community engagement. This let her design content for all 13 mobile workshops at a single conference without building 13 tours from scratch. Operators serving varied institutional clients can build one adaptable core product instead of a new tour for every request.
- Featuring a community partner should be a deliberate choice, not a default to whoever already has visibility. (49:07) Jeanette chose to build a relationship with the Black-owned Oakland Avenue Urban Farm over a nearby, higher-profile farm run by an outsider who was getting outsized attention. Her team volunteered there for years before ever bringing a tour group. She also pays stipends to nonprofits and speakers whenever she uses their time and expertise, which she treats as a cost of doing business responsibly, not a courtesy.
- The easiest local customers to reach are the institutions that already gather them. (53:34) Jeanette points operators toward parks and recreation departments, senior centers, churches, HR departments planning team-building days, university offices doing freshman orientation, and companies onboarding new hires. Instead of trying to convince individual locals to buy tickets, she builds relationships with the organizations that already have those people on a list. Any operator can start by mapping which local institutions already gather groups of the kind of customer they want.