Author: The Side Hustle Show

0:00:05 500 bucks a day from work you love. What’s up? What’s up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to
0:00:09 The Side Hustle Show, where it’s all about ideas, action, and results toward building
0:00:13 extra income streams. Fun one for you today, where my guest took her passion for cooking,
0:00:20 turned it into a six-figure business. From chefjessica.com, Jessica Leibovitch. Welcome
0:00:21 to The Side Hustle Show.
0:00:23 Hello. Thank you for having me.
0:00:27 Excited for this one. Stick around in this one. Even if you don’t know a saucepan from
0:00:31 a spatula, we’re covering how to get clear on what kind of service niche you could offer,
0:00:37 creative ways to get clients, and the different revenue streams that one skill can turn into.
0:00:42 So, Jessica, my understanding is you’re working in catering, you have some culinary background,
0:00:47 and then there’s this switch that flips. Maybe I could take this skill freelance. Maybe I can go
0:00:52 solo. Maybe I could get a personal chef type of client. Can you talk me through your first time
0:00:55 getting paid for this type of work as a personal chef?
0:01:02 Yeah. My background was in catering. I was very young, working very hard, burnt out in my early
0:01:08 20s. And someone told me, oh, have you heard about being a personal chef? You might be really good at
0:01:14 this. And I looked into it and I thought, I would be really good at that. I was still working. I just
0:01:21 decided to take a client on the side and I made in one day what I was used to making pretty much for
0:01:21 the whole week. Wow.
0:01:28 So, yeah. So being young and naive, I quit my job with no exit plan. I would not recommend that to
0:01:36 anyone, but that’s what I did at 22. So, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I’ve been a personal chef
0:01:38 now for 25 years.
0:01:40 Okay. How’d you find that first client?
0:01:45 It was through word of mouth, through some recommendation in the community. Most of my
0:01:50 clients in the beginning were word of mouth. But when I initially started my business, I created a
0:01:58 press release for a local community newspaper in a sort of an upper class neighborhood. And they loved
0:02:04 it. They ran with it because I wrote the story for them. And that really got the momentum going in my
0:02:10 business. Because as a personal chef, you really only need a few clients. And once you have a few
0:02:13 clients, word of mouth starts to spread.
0:02:18 Oh, I love this example. How big of a newspaper are we talking here? Like, you know, neighborhood
0:02:20 specific, city specific?
0:02:25 Yeah. No, a small one. You know how when you go into a coffee shop and they have the free papers there?
0:02:25 Yeah.
0:02:30 Those are the papers that I would send my press release to because those are the community papers. They
0:02:37 usually feature people in the community. And people love to read them and they want feel good stories. So
0:02:43 someone suggested it. And it’s really such a great way to get clients as a personal chef because it builds
0:02:45 trust and it’s free.
0:02:50 You write your own marketing material. This is good. Do you remember what it said? Like, Chef Jessica,
0:02:52 you know, now open for business or something?
0:02:58 Well, what I always tell people is you have to tell a story and market yourself without marketing
0:03:04 yourself. So basically, you show the problems that you’re solving. At the time, I was showing a family
0:03:10 in the community where I was really helping them. One of the family members had an allergy and the other
0:03:17 family members were having a hard time kind of eating around those specifications. And this was all new
0:03:23 for them. So I helped them. So now you do have to make your angle a little bit different. You can’t
0:03:28 just be like, oh, I’m a new personal chef in the area. You want to show how are you really helping
0:03:35 your community and what challenges are you solving for your clients? Like a unique spin on it. And a lot
0:03:40 of times they will pick it up because if you think about it, these journalists have to constantly come up
0:03:46 with news and articles. And if you give them something that’s nicely done, why wouldn’t they
0:03:46 use it?
0:03:53 Sure. So like there seems to be just recently a lot of press around food dyes and the danger. So it’s
0:03:58 like you could be like how to have a dye free, you know, kitchen or something like that.
0:04:03 Yeah. I mean, clean food is such a big thing now and just take, you know, seed oils, eliminating things
0:04:10 out of your diet. Adding red meat back in is really popular as well. So helping people do
0:04:16 those changes. There’s a lot of different things. It really depends on the chef and where their
0:04:17 strengths lie.
0:04:23 Yeah. This was one of the pages out of the 1-800-GOT-JUNK playbook where we’re talking with
0:04:27 Brian Scudamore, the CEO. And early on, he just bought a thousand dollar pickup truck and started picking
0:04:32 up. John started taking on very few clients, but initially…
0:04:33 Solved a big problem.
0:04:37 Solved a big problem and then pitched it to the local paper because it was like,
0:04:41 hey, high school student or college student, you know, creates his own summer job. And,
0:04:46 you know, it was a unique feel good type of story. Hey, young entrepreneur does good. But by virtue of
0:04:50 that, and of course, the picture that he submits is like him with the side of his truck with the phone
0:04:55 number like emblazoned on the side. It’s like starts getting all of these calls after the fact. It’s
0:04:59 like trying to figure out, like to your point about the seed oils or the allergy specific,
0:05:04 like what’s the broader trend that’s going on? Like how can you, in Brian’s case, like in a slow
0:05:08 job market, you know, local teen creates his own income stream. So like what’s the…
0:05:13 Yeah. What’s the angle? What’s the, you know, what’s the hook? I actually, in my, in my academy,
0:05:19 my business in a box for chefs, I give them a sample press release and a press release guide because
0:05:24 I feel like it’s so important as a personal chef to be able to get yourself out there in the press
0:05:30 because, you know, everybody wants to pay for marketing or do ads, but we have such a short
0:05:37 attention span and people also have such a strong distrust of ads that when you see someone in a
0:05:43 newspaper, it really, you’re able to trust them and you have an attention span that’s a little bit
0:05:46 longer than an ad. So it’s just much more effective.
0:05:50 Yeah. Especially targeting, you know, there’s, there’s some level of assumption that the journalist
0:05:55 has done some level of vetting. So there’s like, you, you’ve kind of skipped the line in a lot of
0:05:55 cases.
0:06:01 And they do. Most of the times they do. They’re not just going to publish it without speaking to you.
0:06:06 And again, sometimes you need to follow up with them. I mean, I’ve sent my press releases out where
0:06:11 they have not responded. And then I followed up and they’re like, oh yeah, we do want to do that
0:06:16 article on you. We just got busy. And then they end up publishing it. So, you know, sometimes you
0:06:18 have to be a little bit forward.
0:06:24 The one advantage that I see of this type of business is it seems ripe for recurring revenue,
0:06:29 potentially long-term recurring revenue, where if a family gets used to having a personal chef,
0:06:34 like probably a luxury expense in a lot of cases of targeting a more affluent audience.
0:06:38 Sure. But like, once I get used to it, it’s like, I can’t imagine going back to cooking for myself
0:06:41 again, right? It’s like, they could keep you on the, on the payroll here for, for months and months
0:06:42 or maybe years.
0:06:46 Exactly. I’m glad you mentioned this. This is a huge pillar of what I teach. There’s
0:06:53 sort of three pillars and it’s consistent income, work-life balance, and a high level of service.
0:07:00 And you’re only able to have consistent income if you give that high level of service and it,
0:07:06 you do, you become indispensable to your clients. And I think one of the nicest things one of my
0:07:11 clients ever said to me was that I was like part of the furniture, which I took as a compliment.
0:07:14 Not that we’re going to like walk over you like a rug, but yeah.
0:07:19 Yeah, exactly. You know, when I went to renew my contract with them and raise my price, they were
0:07:24 just like, yeah, you’re not, you’re not going anywhere. But you have to be in there and solve the
0:07:29 problem and understand them and be able to give that high level of service and really care about
0:07:35 them and their goals because their success is your success. And it’s the people who have that heart
0:07:41 who are successful at being a personal chef. It’s not necessarily the people who are amazing chefs.
0:07:47 I’ve been a chef for a long time. I was trained in France and I have a culinary arts degree, so I have
0:07:53 the whole background. And the funny thing is my clients almost never asked me about it. Most of
0:07:58 them have no idea where I went to school. Yeah. And a lot of times I don’t even use these skills because
0:08:02 the food they want is so simple. Yeah. When you were starting out, did you have
0:08:10 a niche in mind of like, I’m going to focus on organic or vegan or allergy free or like trying
0:08:16 to serve like, hey, I’m the go-to person for these specific dietary needs?
0:08:22 Well, I started so long ago that special diets were not as common back then. And because my background
0:08:28 was in fine dining, that was really where I went to. And my clients were aligned with that in the
0:08:34 beginning. They wanted really yummy food. I was making things like lasagna or, you know,
0:08:41 I would make roasts and gravies and things like that. And I still occasionally will have a client like
0:08:47 that, although it’s very rare. But what happened was, I think it was my first time I got a client.
0:08:55 She was a single mom with cancer. And, you know, I just was so invested in her eating well. I think
0:09:01 I was probably more invested in it than she was. And so once you have somebody like that and you’re
0:09:06 helping somebody like that, if you really are passionate about what you do, it sort of just
0:09:13 gravitates where I just started helping more people like that with health challenges. And because I could
0:09:21 put that focus and time and attention into each client, I was able to really develop a relationship
0:09:26 with them. And that’s where you will get that indispensability is when you have that long-term
0:09:34 relationship with a client. So I did sort of go in the direction of health challenges because I just
0:09:37 felt like there was such a need and those people really needed a chef.
0:09:44 I imagine it’s becomes somewhat more competitive. But even in Googling near like your personal chef near
0:09:49 me, your personal chef, Sammamish, I see some like catering companies that pop up.
0:09:55 People are very confused. The problem is, is what I’m doing a lot of there used to be a lot of us.
0:10:02 But what’s happened now is everybody wants to be a meal prep or a caterer because they don’t
0:10:07 understand how to make a career and income out of being a personal chef, because it is very specific.
0:10:12 You do have to be able to give the high level of service to be able to give that time and attention
0:10:19 and, you know, really understand what your clients need. And so a lot of people don’t want to do that.
0:10:25 And so they will do the meal prep. But what happens is a lot of times they will burn out because
0:10:33 it’s a lot of work. It’s exhaustion. You’re working weekends. You’re working evenings. You’re working
0:10:40 holidays. Personal chef is a Monday through Friday schedule. You’re typically working 9 to 5. And if you
0:10:48 have five weekly clients, you’re maxed out. And if you have 10 biweekly clients, you’re maxed out. So it really
0:10:54 depends on how you schedule it. So that’s why it’s not as competitive, because it’s very specific niche that
0:11:00 not a lot of people do. And a lot of people decided, oh, I want to do meal prep or I want to I’m a personal
0:11:07 chef, but I actually have chefs working under me. So if somebody is a personal chef, but they have
0:11:11 chefs working under them, that’s really not a personal chef, because how can they give that
0:11:17 one on one high level of service that the client needs with somebody working under them doesn’t
0:11:23 quite work the same. So it is a one on one solopreneur type business.
0:11:27 Yeah, it’s like a personal chef agency, semi personal chef.
0:11:33 A lot of people are doing that. I’ve tried it kind of like hiring people. But I feel that the
0:11:39 quality was lost. And what happens is instead of giving that time and attention to your clients who
0:11:42 are paying you for it, you end up giving it to your team.
0:11:48 Yeah, there’s pros and cons to it. Obviously, the advantage being you’ll free up your time in theory
0:11:54 from doing the direct, you know, one to one type of client work, how to expand beyond kind of the
0:11:59 natural capacity. Like you said, if I can do this only five days a week, and especially if I’m doing
0:12:04 it as a side hustle, maybe I only want to do it one day a week. And now here’s a chance to free some of
0:12:05 that up.
0:12:09 And there are ways you can do that. I mean, my team personally is like my bookkeeper,
0:12:17 my CPA, I have somebody who supports me with VA stuff. But as far as my relationship with my clients,
0:12:18 that’s all me.
0:12:24 Yeah, what’s typical in terms of pricing here? In terms of how, how much can you charge? Or how much
0:12:25 how much are people paying for personal chefs?
0:12:33 So for me, personally, it’s about 650 plus groceries per day. And I’ve, I’ve worked my way
0:12:40 up to that. But that’s very, that’s not on the extremely high range. That’s about average for a
0:12:40 lot of chefs.
0:12:44 And that’s not one day’s worth of food. That’s like a week or two weeks.
0:12:47 Oh, no, that so that would give them about a week’s worth of meals.
0:12:52 Okay. That’s like, hold on. That’s like a really, really nice restaurant. Yeah.
0:12:58 Yeah, no, not per meal. So so that’s my revenue for the day. And and to be honest,
0:13:02 it’s more than one day, because a lot of times I’m planning the night before I’m shopping that
0:13:09 morning, I’m cooking. So so if I have a weekly client, I typically will bring in at least $2,500
0:13:17 from that client a month. So if I have four weekly clients, that gets me to 10,000. Now, the way that
0:13:25 if somebody is just starting out, I typically suggest they start at the $500 rate and because
0:13:30 they’re a lot of times they’re more comfortable with that. It’s easier for them to sell until they
0:13:37 get really comfortable with pitching their value. But at $500 plus groceries, if they have five clients
0:13:40 a day, that’s 10,000 a month or five clients a week. Excuse me.
0:13:47 Okay, you have five clients a week. Got it. And so yeah, they come in do the weekly, weekly prep
0:13:52 on a Monday or, you know, on a Saturday, if you’re doing it as a side hustle.
0:13:57 Yeah. So they basically prep like a week’s worth of meals. It’s all customized. They leave them
0:14:01 packaged for them. And then, you know, they come back the following week and and do it again. And
0:14:06 they get feedback from the clients. Usually people are doing once a week or once every two weeks.
0:14:12 Okay. And if they do once every two weeks, it’s actually very affordable for, so it’s not just
0:14:19 for, you know, the upper class or the wealthy. You’re able to really market to just professionals
0:14:20 who really need support.
0:14:26 Yeah. I’m trying to think of, you know, putting yourself in the client’s position, which was going
0:14:30 to help your marketing is, you know, what are you, what are you really buying? It’s like on the surface,
0:14:34 you’re selling food, but you’re really, okay, what am I buying as the customer? I’m buying back my time.
0:14:40 I’m buying back my mental load of having to do me, just think about what’s for dinner this week.
0:14:44 Honestly, I like to say they’re buying a transformation because some of the chefs don’t
0:14:48 understand this because they think I mean a transformation in their health, but I don’t like,
0:14:56 and you probably know this because when you up level in life and you’re able to offload or outsource
0:15:01 some of your challenges, you transform things. You transform the way you react to things.
0:15:05 You transform your relationships because you’re able to breathe and focus your attention on other
0:15:11 things. And so that’s really what you’re selling is you’re selling that whole package of a support
0:15:17 system. It’s not just I’m cooking for you. And that’s why when my client told me that I’m part of
0:15:22 the furniture, I took it as a compliment because it is like a support system. It’s like I’m always there
0:15:28 for them. They know that I’m always going to be there to help them and they need me. So that’s kind of
0:15:33 how you have to look at it more than I’m just saving you time and cooking for you, because
0:15:35 if that’s all they wanted, then they could just get DoorDash.
0:15:42 Sure, sure. More with Jessica in just a moment, including the most effective free and low cost
0:15:45 marketing tactics coming up right after this.
0:15:52 Yeah. Okay. So this is helpful on the marketing side. What are clients really buying? Hey, you’re buying
0:15:56 a transformation. You’re buying a support system. You’re buying just the mental, you know,
0:15:59 offloading. Yeah. And like you said, leveling up. Hey, what are the things I don’t have to
0:16:04 think about? I don’t have to worry about anymore. I’ve got a team in place for this. Just like having
0:16:08 a virtual assistant. Right. Like, Nick, think about it this way. Like, if you have a housekeeper,
0:16:15 I’m not just paying for a clean house. It’s that whole support, the feeling of knowing it’s going to
0:16:20 be taken care of. It’s off my shoulders. I get to come home and it feels amazing to come home to a
0:16:26 clean house. I know she’s helping. It’s all of those things. It’s not just about the act. And I
0:16:30 think that helps in your marketing because when you’re able to communicate your value and also
0:16:35 really understand where your clients are struggling and how you can help, that’s going to help you
0:16:39 kind of get that ball rolling and have them sign on.
0:16:45 Do you find yourself making the same stuff week after week? Like if the client, if that family has a few
0:16:50 favorites where they’re like, well, make sure to include that in this week’s menu or is it, does it
0:16:53 have to, do you feel the pressure to like be constantly rotating?
0:17:00 No. In fact, most people want a rotation. So most people want to eat the same things most of the time
0:17:06 with a few new things sprinkled in. And think about it. Like, do you want to eat new things every single
0:17:11 week? Probably not. You probably have your favorites that you enjoy. And so a lot of times what I’ll do is
0:17:17 I’ll do three or four of the same things that I know they love and maybe try one or two new things.
0:17:22 And then if they love the new thing, that goes on the rotation. So the longer you cook for someone,
0:17:27 the more they find things that they love. But initially I do an assessment, try to play it
0:17:32 really safe, just go with things I know they’re really going to enjoy. I don’t want to scare them
0:17:38 too much. I want them to love the service from the beginning. And then once I get to know them better,
0:17:42 then we sort of branch out and try new things. And you have it set up, it sounds like as a recurring
0:17:49 monthly service, right? It’s $2,500 a month per customer. I come in every week and I do my thing.
0:17:56 Any tools or tech that you use either on the recipe, the shopping side, the client, you know,
0:17:58 recurring billing side, anything that we should know about there?
0:18:03 Yeah, I use a lot of tech in my business. Well, first of all, there’s a there’s a lot of different
0:18:09 recipe database programs that you can use. I have one that I call it’s called MasterCook that I love
0:18:16 because it creates a shopping list for you. And it stores your recipes and you can add to your
0:18:22 shopping list based on your recipe. This is very helpful for not forgetting things. Being a personal
0:18:29 chef is a very low stress job. But the one thing that will stress you out is if you forget an
0:18:35 ingredient and you’re ready to cook. So a program like that is really helpful to make sure that
0:18:36 doesn’t happen. Okay.
0:18:41 Some of the things that I do for my clients, I go above and beyond. So I will calculate macros
0:18:47 for a client if they want. For example, if they say, Jessica, I need to make sure that this meal has 40
0:18:53 grams of protein and 20 grams of fat. I will do that for them. And so I use programs for that. I
0:19:01 have a program called macro stacks. It’s an app that I use. Okay. And I also just use spreadsheets and I
0:19:08 will put their meals in the spreadsheet and calculate their meals for the day, depending on how I’ve had
0:19:13 clients who were with me a few days a week where they’re on a very high retainer. I will do their
0:19:19 macros for the whole week to make sure they’re on board. And so I need a really good tech for that.
0:19:24 Just to clarify macros, we’re talking about grams of protein, fat, carbs.
0:19:31 Right. So I’ll input all their food for them to make sure their meals are not going over and to
0:19:36 make sure that my meals are staying within the proper macros. But yes, it’s protein, fat, and carbs.
0:19:36 Got it.
0:19:43 Is it typical to go shopping, bring all the stuff to the client’s house? Are you doing it at your
0:19:48 place and then delivering it? Are you renting out a commercial kitchen space?
0:19:53 Well, you could do all of that. So I always say don’t ever rent out a commercial kitchen space. That’s
0:19:59 a waste of money. Typically, you’re going to either cook in your client’s home or you can cook in your
0:20:04 own home and deliver. Now, if you cook in your own home and deliver, you just need to make sure that
0:20:08 your client is aware of it and they’re okay with it. So you both are in an agreement.
0:20:12 Do you need to have like a cottage kitchen license or food handlers or anything?
0:20:16 No, you don’t because you’re not selling food to the public. It’s a service-based industry. So it’s
0:20:22 not a permit-based industry. You’re not being overseen by the health department. That’s why I
0:20:27 said you have to make sure that your client is in agreement. Now, if you’re telling your client,
0:20:31 oh, I’m at a commercial kitchen and you’re really cooking at your home, that’s not okay. You have to have
0:20:36 an agreement. Now, for me personally, I don’t really like cooking at my own home because it’s
0:20:40 more work. You have to bring the groceries to your home, prepare, package up. I get distracted at my
0:20:46 house. My clients have much nicer kitchens than I do. So I prefer to cook in their home. But a lot of
0:20:51 times, like for example, my clients, if they’re sick or if they have a lot of kids at home or if they
0:20:57 just had a baby or, you know, whatever it may be, I may cook at home. Or if it’s a one-time thing,
0:21:03 like a gift certificate, you can do that. Another reason people do it is I have chefs who are in the
0:21:09 corporate world and they are making their exit plan to be a personal chef. And so they’re doing the
0:21:15 remote work at home and they picked up a client and they’re able to cook while they’re doing their
0:21:20 breaks on their remote work and over the weekend and then deliver in the morning before their job
0:21:26 starts. So this is how they’re they’re able to kind of segue out. Got it. Yeah. And you can imagine
0:21:30 you can stack it up, you know, one client, two client, three clients, like it just lowers the
0:21:34 height of the of the cliff that you need to jump off of to quit your job. That’s what I always suggest.
0:21:40 Don’t do what I did. But yeah, if that way, if you have a couple of clients, you start to save money,
0:21:45 you know, and once you gain the momentum as a personal chef, it doesn’t take as long.
0:21:51 Once you start to get your marketing strategies dialed in and you build your list. I love Google
0:21:57 ads, another way to get clients. So if you have a Google ad going, they’re going to deliver leads
0:22:03 to you on a regular basis if you have a pretty good website. If people are searching personal chef near
0:22:08 me or personal chef, you know, city name, then you want to make sure your ad shows up? Yes, because
0:22:15 there’s no competition. There’s not, you know, there’s not 100 personal chefs. So typically if you have a
0:22:19 Google ad for personal chef and someone is searching, they’re going to see your website.
0:22:24 So it just increases your visibility. Like I said, I’m not a huge person who loves to pay for ads,
0:22:28 but that’s just one that is really effective for personal chef.
0:22:31 Yeah, I like that. That seems like a low, low budget. I mean, I can’t imagine there’s a huge
0:22:34 search volume, but like you said, it doesn’t take a lot of clients. Like I only need one,
0:22:39 you know, one taker to add potentially 2000 bucks to my bottom line.
0:22:43 Yeah, $5 a day too is all the ad spend you really need.
0:22:49 Okay. What else have you got on the marketing side? I think this is, it’s not going to take
0:22:54 a ton. You probably not have to do all of these different marketing tactics to fill up your
0:22:55 schedule, but what else?
0:22:59 Strategic partnerships are really effective that are aligned with your strengths. You know,
0:23:05 a lot of times people will think, oh, I’m going to go with a personal trainer. That’s not what I would
0:23:10 consider a strategic partnership. What I would consider a strategic partnership is again,
0:23:16 someone who you’re helping solve that challenge. So like a doctor or nutritionist is a good strategic
0:23:22 partner because they will give their clients or patients a plan and just send them on their way and
0:23:30 have no idea of how they’re going to do that. So a personal chef is that bridge between the plan
0:23:36 and execution that really helps that customer have success. So they’ve been really great strategic
0:23:43 partnerships. So a lot of times when I work with chefs, my homework will just be to find 20 strategic
0:23:49 partners and reach out to them with an introductory offer. And a lot of times that is enough to just get
0:23:51 your ball, the ball rolling as a personal chef.
0:23:54 Can I pause on introductory offer? What do you, what’s an example of that?
0:23:58 So an introductory offer of obviously like people aren’t going to want to jump in and pay
0:24:04 $2,500 to somebody if they’ve never tried their service. So an introductory offer is a way, it’s a
0:24:11 taste. It’s a way for people to get to try your food, your services, get to know you, start to build
0:24:15 that trust and see if they want to take it further. It’s, you know, it’s just like any other relationship,
0:24:21 you know, people aren’t going to ask to be exclusive on the first date. So you want to just kind of
0:24:26 get to know and see, is this an alignment? Is this going to be good for both of us? And so an
0:24:34 introductory offer is that, that ability. And by doing that, you have a crowd-pleasing menu that
0:24:41 showcases your food in a way that is a little bit less work for you and maybe a little bit lower of a
0:24:41 price point.
0:24:46 Okay. And are you offering that to the doctors and nutritionists or you’re offering it as
0:24:50 something that they can then in turn pass along to their, their clients?
0:24:58 Yeah. And it could actually be offered to anyone or you could tailor them to the specific doctor or
0:25:03 nutritionist, depending like if you have a doctor or nutritionist who focuses on, you know, let’s say
0:25:08 they have a heart patient. So you want to gear it towards them, or you could have a general introductory
0:25:13 offer. That’s going to be really up to each individual chef, how kind of dialed in they want
0:25:18 to get. Okay. Yeah. So the nutritionist is going to say, Hey, you’re, we got your, we got your test
0:25:24 results back. You need to improve your omega-3, omega-6 ratio. You need to add more lean protein to
0:25:28 your, to your diet. And then they just send you on your way. So like, here’s a value add for them.
0:25:33 And by the way, if you’d like a discounted sample from a trusted personal chef contact of mine,
0:25:35 you know, give Chef Jessica a call.
0:25:42 Exactly. Or she, she has a special introductory offer just for people in our office. And here it is,
0:25:48 something like that. I mean, I love ChatGPT for helping me kind of fine tune my offers. A lot of
0:25:55 times they’re very general, but if I can’t decide how I want to position it, it might help me. Okay.
0:26:00 I have a nutritionist who specializes in this, and I really want to help her patients do this.
0:26:05 Can you help me? And then it will help me kind of pinpoint that offer. And then I can fine tune it
0:26:11 more towards my food and my messaging. But that’s just one way. Strategic partnerships are a really
0:26:18 great way. I mentioned press releases. Just being visible in your community. So instead of posting on
0:26:23 social media all the time where people have such a short attention span, getting out there and talking
0:26:29 to people, going, like, I love going to senior centers. I will go, I’ll bring a healthy baked good,
0:26:37 I’ll bring a healthy lunch salad, and I’ll talk to them for an hour or two. And it’s so fun. And it’s
0:26:41 so rewarding. A lot of times I get paid a couple hundred dollars. I mean, it’s not a ton of money,
0:26:47 but it’s enjoyable. It’s paid marketing. And you get them to sign up on your list. You always make
0:26:53 an offer at the end. That’s one thing that chefs need to always do is make an offer at the end of when
0:26:58 you’re talking or your demo. And if they don’t sign up, collect their emails, and then you can pitch
0:26:59 your offers in the future.
0:27:05 Okay. So the senior center is paying you to come in as the expert guest of the week?
0:27:11 Yeah. Actually, a lot of places do. Like, wellness, places with wellness businesses that have wellness
0:27:16 programs for their employees. Like, I used to go to the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal
0:27:21 Park. They had a wellness program for their employees. And they would pay me to come in,
0:27:24 and their employees would get points to come and watch me.
0:27:29 Oh, okay. And you’re giving a presentation on how to make healthy food at home or something like that?
0:27:33 Yeah. I think for them, it was healthy eating for the work week. And again,
0:27:37 pitch my offer. I still have those, a lot of, this was probably like 15 years ago I went there
0:27:42 for the first time. And I still have those people on my list that read my newsletter.
0:27:48 Okay. Yeah. This is one of our favorite marketing tactics. First, the strategic partnerships that
0:27:52 you mentioned on that, or like doing any sort of commission or ref share, like, oh, I’ll give you
0:27:54 10% of the first month’s service or anything like that.
0:28:00 I never have, honestly. I’m helping them really, their patients have success. So I don’t really feel
0:28:06 like there needs to be a revenue share. Because again, then it’s also like making money, more money
0:28:10 off of their patients when really we’re just trying to help them. And I think if you come from this
0:28:13 business with a service mindset, you’re going to be a lot more successful.
0:28:17 Yeah. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it both ways. So just wanted to clarify, you don’t have to have
0:28:23 like a paid affiliate relationship or partnership that way. And the other thing that you mentioned
0:28:29 here was these kind of like low-key speaking gigs at the, you know, the corporate wellness event,
0:28:34 you’re getting on their calendar, the senior center where you’re showcasing your expertise,
0:28:39 you’re getting in front of a larger group of potential customers all at once. Of course,
0:28:42 not everybody’s going to sign up. You don’t need everybody to sign up, but if they are going to
0:28:46 hire the service, all of a sudden you jump the line, right? They’re not going to go to Google
0:28:50 anymore. They’re just going to go straight to you. This is a really, really powerful, we’ve seen people
0:28:56 do this, you know, in person, like lunch and learn, Hey, come learn about copywriting from, you know,
0:29:02 the seven deadly SIDS you’re making with your website to, to doing it online partnerships,
0:29:06 whereas, you know, invite your email list to this free webinar workshop, and we’ll teach you this
0:29:12 skill and this really, really effective way to, to kind of jump the line and, and showcase some
0:29:18 expertise. Yeah. I mean, it builds trust, I think. And as a personal chef, you really, they have to
0:29:22 trust you because they’re bringing you into their home and they’re sharing a lot of personal information
0:29:28 with you. And so by doing those things, for example, having the San Diego zoo and wild animal park,
0:29:35 bringing me into their employees, it built trust. Their employees trust me and it, it sort of softens
0:29:39 that relationship. But not only that, again, I talked about earlier how, you know, we have such
0:29:45 a short attention span and to be able to really capture people’s attention span is where you’re
0:29:50 going to get them. I mean, you know that you have a podcast where people are tuning in. It’s totally
0:29:54 different than when people are scrolling, you know, and you have them for two seconds. So that’s why
0:30:00 really being visible and getting out there in your community and showcasing your offers, showcasing your
0:30:05 skills is always going to be more effective than posting on social media.
0:30:08 Yeah. Fair. I like it. Anything else on the marketing side?
0:30:14 Get comfortable with talking about what you do and telling people what you do, because a lot of people
0:30:18 I work with, they just don’t talk about it or they don’t tell people and people don’t know. Having a
0:30:24 elevator pitch or a tagline where you can describe your services very quickly is very helpful. But just
0:30:30 getting more comfortable and confident is really what’s going to get you over the edge and be good
0:30:33 marketing because nobody’s going to hire a chef that’s not confident.
0:30:39 More with Jessica in just a moment, including the additional income streams she’s been able to build
0:30:44 from this one skill beyond just cooking for clients one-on-one. That’s coming up right after this.
0:30:51 Let’s talk about a potential way to scale because it’s like, okay, I can make great money doing
0:30:56 something that I like. I could start doing it as a side hustle. It doesn’t take a lot of clients to
0:31:01 really build up a meaningful income stream. But if I ever want to take time off, all of a sudden I’m not
0:31:08 getting paid. If I want to try something else, I’m kind of potentially stuck in this trading time for
0:31:16 money business. And is there, you know, what are some ways that you’ve seen where someone with a
0:31:20 skill could branch out to some other creative revenue streams?
0:31:25 Okay. Some of the things that I have done and I’ve seen chefs do is, you know, you look at the
0:31:32 problems you’re solving for your clients right now and how can you help people who can’t afford your
0:31:39 services on the same level. So one of the things that I will do is I would create a customized menu
0:31:47 plan for people that has recipes, shopping lists. So it basically shows them how to be their own
0:31:54 personal chef. You can start to release recipes. I have personally done a lot of consulting work.
0:32:01 So I will do recipe development for companies such as like I’m making a developing a protein bar
0:32:10 developing a healthy shaved ice. I have created a cookbook for a supplement company there. You can
0:32:17 also do cooking classes, cooking classes online or in person. So there’s a lot of different ways that
0:32:22 you can creatively create different income avenues as a personal chef.
0:32:28 Okay. So these, these companies are coming to you to say, Hey, we saw you on social or we saw like,
0:32:32 can you, can you help us put this together? Yeah. And believe it or not, they either find me through
0:32:37 my website, which is primarily through looking for a personal chef. They’re not looking for a research
0:32:43 and product development chef. I can tell you that because I know my keywords and also through my
0:32:49 personal chef clients. So a business partners of my personal chef clients will say, Hey, Jessica,
0:32:54 I’m really interested in making this. Do you think you could help me? So that’s just things that have
0:32:59 come to me because I’m open to them. And I talk to people about these types of business situations,
0:33:07 but I think that people being open to helping people with eating healthy in new ways. So it’s not just
0:33:13 about, Oh, can I cook you a healthy dinner? There’s think about it’s problem solving. I mean, I can’t answer
0:33:21 how, you know, chef Dan in Idaho should, should align his business to the highest level, but I know there’s
0:33:28 a way for him to do it. Right. I like this, um, this kind of reframe or this, this, um, exercise of,
0:33:33 you know, what can I create for the people who can’t necessarily afford my one-on-one services and then
0:33:38 parsing out using those same skills. Oh, it could be the recipe development. It could be the meal planning.
0:33:45 It could be, you know, the group, uh, cooking classes or the hosted dinner party. Like there’s,
0:33:48 um, eat with, or was, you know, I came across one of these sites where I was like, you know,
0:33:54 host this dinner party. It was like a cool experience type of thing, kind of a sample almost of your work,
0:34:00 but, you know, allows you to serve lots of people all at once versus just the one, uh, one-on-one
0:34:04 client. Yeah. Ideas are popping into my head as we’re talking. Like I’m thinking, Oh, you could,
0:34:10 you could create a dinner party master plan where you teach somebody how to create a four course
0:34:14 dinner party in their home. I mean, there’s so many different things that you could do. You have to
0:34:21 take what your skill is and what do you like to do, but especially now with AI, it’s much easier to do
0:34:26 these digital things as a chef, because a lot of times in the past, they didn’t necessarily have
0:34:32 those skills, but it’s easier now. And it’s something that I’ve done for at least 10 years now,
0:34:39 been doing the digital side for my chef clients where I sell menu plans and recipes and cookbooks
0:34:45 and things like that. And it’s great because it allows me to connect with people all over the
0:34:49 country and the world that I would not normally have as clients. Yeah. What do you charge for the
0:34:54 menu, menu planning or something like that? If it’s 500 bucks a day or 600 bucks a day to have you come to
0:34:59 my house? It’s not cheap. It’s usually starts at like 150, but it’s quite a bit. It’s, it’s very
0:35:04 extensive and it’s customized and it’s something they have forever. And it always comes with my
0:35:08 support. I always want to support people with anything they purchase of mine. So I always tell
0:35:14 the chefs as well, you know, provide that support and people will keep coming back. Another thing I did,
0:35:18 which is interesting. So one of the things that I teach people is offer and visibility, create the
0:35:23 offer and be visible. That’s how you get the clients. So I created an offer during a slow time
0:35:29 called the soup trio. And basically this was for my local clients and I did, it was three
0:35:36 plant-based soups and it was sort of like a detox. But what I did was I sent it out to my whole list
0:35:41 as an option of either you could purchase the soup or you could purchase it as a digital download.
0:35:47 So you could get all the recipes for the soups that had the shopping list. So if they wanted this
0:35:52 detox or this cleanse at home, they’re able to do that. And I think I sold that for like
0:36:00 $30 or something very low. But that was a way to showcase what I did. But it was no more work for
0:36:04 me because I was already doing it for my regular clients. I already had to create all of that stuff
0:36:05 anyway.
0:36:11 Yeah. Do you do any of the group classes? I’m thinking is when we travel, I think we did one of
0:36:16 these in Thailand where I don’t know if it showed up on TripAdvisor or like some other friends had
0:36:21 gone and said, oh, you got to do this while you’re there. I mean, anything like that through Airbnb?
0:36:27 Yeah. So I didn’t mention this in the marketing. Airbnb has connections. So they reached out to me
0:36:34 and I’m sure any chef could do this. They have an elevate part of their services where you can post
0:36:39 something that you want to provide, a service that you want to provide. If you want to do a
0:36:46 fancy picnic or a cooking class, you post that in the Airbnb elevate area and then people searching
0:36:52 for services like that will see it. As a personal chef, there are a lot of apps and companies that
0:36:59 want to market with you. There is Cozy Meal, which does cooking classes. So people will sign up on their
0:37:05 app and book a cooking class through you. Airbnb, a lot of places. So you can kind of hand off the
0:37:09 marketing in some aspects if you like to do events like that.
0:37:15 Yeah, I think this is really interesting. When we were trying to shop for a place to do our annual
0:37:21 Friendsgiving and we’re looking for AirBbs or houses to rent in Mexico. And it seems like a lot of the
0:37:26 hosts, the owners of these places had relationships with local chefs. We’re like, and if you don’t want
0:37:32 to bring, you don’t want to deal with going out or you don’t, we could bring in our partner chef to
0:37:36 prep three meals a day for you. It would be an extra hundred bucks a day or something. It was like
0:37:41 different currency, cost of living, everything else. But it was a unique value add where if you have
0:37:46 some strategic partnerships, if you’re in a tourist area, you don’t necessarily want to do the full
0:37:52 weekly thing, but you’d be open to doing it every now and again when the requests come in. I could see
0:37:57 that being a thing too. Yeah. I mean, nobody wants to go out every single night when they’re going out
0:38:03 to eat. So it’s actually a really great service. I don’t do this as much anymore, but I used to spend
0:38:09 a lot of time or a lot of events doing vacations because I live in an area where a lot of people
0:38:13 come in for vacation in the summer. And so a lot of my clients would travel during the summer. So it
0:38:18 allowed me to kind of pick up extra business. Yeah. We came across, there was, I want to say it was
0:38:23 Southern California too. Maybe it was in LA, but they were doing these luxury picnic setups and there
0:38:28 was some overhead involved because like, you know, fancy little table and table linens, you know, for
0:38:34 this, they’d set up the whole charcuterie platform, but it was like. So pretty. I’ve seen them. I forget
0:38:39 the price, but it was much higher than I expected somebody to pay for a picnic setup. Yeah. It’s
0:38:45 definitely a premium service. There are so many cool ways to market yourself as a personal chef. It’s kind
0:38:51 of like, and it’s just like anything. Like I always feel like everything takes effort and work,
0:38:56 no matter what we’re going to do. Everything takes hard work, but I don’t feel like this is a hustle,
0:39:04 like hustle hard. It’s more of a hard work and alignment type of side hustle where, you know,
0:39:10 you find people who you’re really connected with and you can help instead of having to work so hard to
0:39:16 find clients because you only need five to 10 clients. Right. Yeah. And it’s a helpful exercise
0:39:19 where you’re not, you’re not trying to serve thousands of people, right? You don’t, you don’t
0:39:22 need to. And you, and you, you, you physically couldn’t. Yeah. There’s not a lot of businesses
0:39:29 that you could get to six figures with just five clients and still work Monday through Friday,
0:39:34 nine to five. I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of businesses like that. So in that way,
0:39:39 it’s very unique, but again, it’s, it is a service-based industries. Right. And have some
0:39:45 level of security in that. Well, if you, it’s a good job, if you got one client and you get fired,
0:39:49 then you lose a hundred percent of your income. Like, well, if I lost one, one client and I lost
0:39:53 10 to 20% of my income instead, then I go replace them. That’s true. Actually.
0:39:59 So you’ve been doing this a couple of decades, like any big surprises or any big mistakes that you see
0:40:05 new personal chefs making? I would say the biggest mistake is getting locked in with either the wrong
0:40:11 client or too low of a price or agreeing to something that they know they shouldn’t do.
0:40:17 Because as a personal chef, once you’re locked in with the client, it’s really hard to, you can’t go
0:40:21 back and say, you know, I think I want to raise my price or I think I don’t want to cook this much food.
0:40:27 So that would be my biggest mistake. I see people make is agreeing to stuff because they’re so,
0:40:31 they want a client. So they just go, you know, they, they drop all their boundaries.
0:40:36 Okay. Yeah. You price too low at the beginning or it’s just like, it’s not a great fit. And now,
0:40:37 and now you’re kind of stuck.
0:40:44 Or promise the world, you know, the people are asking too many things and, and the chefs don’t
0:40:50 know how to set parameters on their business. Because I think a lot of people, they come from this,
0:40:53 they come to this business because they love to cook and they want to help and they,
0:40:59 they liked doing it, but the business side, they’re a little bit clueless on and they don’t
0:41:01 know how to really communicate that part.
0:41:06 Yeah. I think a lot of people fall into that boat of, well, I have this, I have this skill
0:41:11 and I just flip, flip a switch and say, well, now I’m in business. Like, well, there’s a few
0:41:16 freelancer skills or entrepreneur skills. It’s got to learn along, uh, along the way that we,
0:41:20 we talked about the mindset and the marketing and positioning and everything else.
0:41:24 Yeah. And, and also like as a personal chef, the interesting thing is you’re dealing with people
0:41:32 who are very business savvy, right? Your, your clients and you may not be. So if you’re, if
0:41:37 you’re coming in and you, you’re going to get steamrolled, they’re going to push your boundaries,
0:41:42 you know, because they can’t, I’m not saying they want to, they just don’t know. They’re not mind
0:41:46 readers. They don’t know where your boundaries are. And that’s why it’s really important for business
0:41:51 owners, especially personal chefs to be able to communicate that. And that’s one of the things I,
0:41:58 I see them really struggle with is because, and that’s confidence mindset. That’s all of it. That’s
0:42:03 why I always say confidence mindset is the first step to pricing, to your pricing strategy.
0:42:08 Yeah. I like this call to put up some boundaries, put up some guardrails from, from, from the early
0:42:12 days of, you know, what are you willing to do? What are you not willing to do? And kind of stick to
0:42:16 your, your North star guidance on that. So I appreciate, appreciate you sharing that. You’ve
0:42:22 alluded to it a couple of times. The Prosperous Personal Chef is a program that Jessica has created.
0:42:28 You can find it at chefjessica.com. Tell us a little bit about it. Who’s it for? What do you, what’s
0:42:36 inside? It’s basically start to finish walking you through the business of starting, growing, sustaining
0:42:42 a personal chef business. That being said, there is a ton of stuff in there that’s done for
0:42:49 you. The assessment, the sample menus, all of that is in there. And then anybody who goes
0:42:54 through the academy also gets my full support because I want to make sure that they’re successful.
0:43:01 So I include three full calls to make sure they are on page with their going through the right
0:43:08 direction because even I find that as a self-study course, it’s not as successful as if you have my
0:43:14 support because people still kind of get off the rails with their marketing and their boundaries and
0:43:21 all of that. Yeah. Well, I think it’s a fun example of kind of packaging up years of knowledge and
0:43:26 expertise and sometimes like the actual resources and templates and stuff that you use. And I imagine
0:43:31 people were asking like, Hey, can I, can I pick your brain on how to get started on my own? How did
0:43:35 you get customers? You’re like, well, you know, you get, you get sick of answering the same questions
0:43:39 over and over again. You’re like, well, let me put, if there’s some demand for this. Yeah. It was also
0:43:45 like, ah, like watching, you know, watching a train wreck or like you, you, it’s like you seeing
0:43:50 almost like your child wants to go to Disneyland, but won’t put their shoes on. That’s kind of what it was
0:43:56 like watching with chefs and seeing them doing the wrong thing over and over again as personal chefs and
0:44:02 people constantly posting questions that are like, how much should I charge for this? Or things like
0:44:09 that. Just when I felt like I got to get this information out there because somebody needs to
0:44:14 document the right way to do this. There’s too much misinformation and too many people doing it the
0:44:20 wrong way. Oh, very good. We’ll link that up. Chef Jessica.com. You can find your free guide to
0:44:25 getting high paying VIP clients over there. We’ll link that up in the show notes. This has been fun.
0:44:31 Hopefully some lessons and takeaways, um, regardless of what kind of local service business that you’re
0:44:36 running. You talked about, you’d may not be, uh, cooking may not come, uh, naturally to you, but lots of,
0:44:41 uh, tools and tactics I think that you’d be able to apply and different mindset shifts that you might be
0:44:46 able to apply to different business models as well. Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip
0:44:52 for side hustle nation. Connection. I think that if you want to grow a successful business, it’s all
0:44:59 about connection and building that connection with your clients is truly the secret to success in my
0:45:07 opinion. That’s so true. It’s all about your network and building that level of trust and who knows you,
0:45:12 how they know you talked about the strategic partnership angles, talked about the, uh,
0:45:17 introductory offer angles, like the, like the free samples at Costco. The example I come back to
0:45:22 a lot of times, I go, Oh, I don’t know if I want to commit to having you here every week. Let me,
0:45:25 let me see about this first. I call it dipping your toe in the water.
0:45:32 Yes. I love that angle. I love the angle of doing kind of low, low risk, low key speaking events
0:45:38 or presentations to showcase your expertise and, uh, build, build trust. Lots of cool marketing tactics
0:45:45 here. Again, chef Jessica.com is, uh, where you can find her. You also find the full text summary of
0:45:52 this episode, links to all the resources mentioned at side hustle nation.com slash chef. While you’re
0:45:57 there, go ahead and download your free listener bonus for this episode. That’s 101 service business ideas.
0:46:03 she might be able to apply some of Jessica’s same strategy to once again, side hustle nation.com
0:46:08 slash chef, or just follow the, uh, the link in the episode description. It’ll get you right over
0:46:13 there. Big thanks to Jessica for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this
0:46:18 content free for everyone. You can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest
0:46:24 offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in until next
0:46:29 time let’s come out there and make something happen. And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side
0:46:30 hustle show. Hustle on.

0:00:07 If your traffic has been eroded by AI snippets and Reddit in the search results, this episode
0:00:10 is going to show you how to fight back and tap into the power of Reddit.
0:00:15 Now it feels a little bit like if you can’t beat them, join them kind of strategy, but
0:00:19 there’s no ignoring that Reddit, the self-proclaimed front page of the internet, has found itself
0:00:22 on the front page of just about every Google search.
0:00:26 Stick around in this one, we’re breaking down how to get some of that traffic flowing back
0:00:31 to you, the Reddit research and content best practices to be aware of, and some common
0:00:33 mistakes to avoid.
0:00:37 Now to help out, I’ve enlisted a professional content marketer who’s been helping businesses
0:00:44 and brands take advantage of this brave new Reddit-dominated search world from redvisible.com,
0:00:46 red with two Ds, Amy Aitman.
0:00:47 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:49 Hi, I’m so excited.
0:00:52 I love this show and I’m really excited to get into this.
0:00:53 So much fun.
0:00:57 And me as well, I’ve got some big Reddit news to share coming up, but maybe you can
0:01:03 kick us off with an example of what is possible from a publishing standpoint of, well, maybe
0:01:08 my own site is having a hard time ranking anymore, but I could publish the same or similar content
0:01:11 on Reddit and have it jump to the first page almost immediately.
0:01:14 So case study, really fun.
0:01:19 I was looking at one of our clients today and in SaaS, I guess a SaaS tool.
0:01:20 Okay.
0:01:21 Software product.
0:01:27 And we have a website that we publish, reviews, comparisons, been around for a long time.
0:01:35 We still do publish on our third party publishers, but we will publish a full scale article, blog,
0:01:42 and then we’ll share something in Reddit and either a subreddit that we own and that we built out and we’ll share.
0:01:47 Often Reddit content is quite different than a full blog.
0:01:53 It’ll often be sort of a share and, you know, it has to fit the Reddit world and the Reddit narrative and the Reddit site.
0:01:58 But if you go the next day, you’ll see the ranking for our content.
0:02:06 And what’s really fun now is we’re seeing that because all roads lead to Reddit, it’s informing AI overviews.
0:02:09 We’re seeing results in chat GPT search.
0:02:11 We’re seeing results in Bing.
0:02:13 Reddit has their own AI search tool.
0:02:15 So you can show up there.
0:02:20 You can show up in people also asking, show up in what people are saying.
0:02:25 Everything can show up all over the place because all roads do sort of lead to Reddit.
0:02:25 Yeah.
0:02:37 From kind of late 2023 helpful content update to late 2024, like 12 months later, where so many publishers got hit by a series of algorithm updates, starting with helpful content.
0:02:43 Reddit was like 10x, like 10 times the traffic that it used to get.
0:02:46 It’s like, oh, there’s this giant sucking sound.
0:02:49 And how do we, you know, get in front of that audience?
0:02:51 You mentioned there’s going to be some nuance to it.
0:02:53 So I want to get into the best practices here.
0:02:57 It’s not just copying and pasting the content that I used to publish on my website.
0:03:03 They’re like, maybe I still want to publish there because there’s hopefully down the road, like an opportunity to double, maybe triple dip.
0:03:04 Maybe I create the video.
0:03:10 Like I could take up potentially a lot of real estate on that first page of Google if I do it right.
0:03:19 But you mentioned, okay, I’ve got my own subreddit that I own and moderate and manage, but then like tapping into potentially others that could be relevant.
0:03:29 Maybe it would be helpful to have an example of like a product review type of article or like a roundup, like best, you know, 10 best toaster ovens or like that kind of traditional affiliate content.
0:03:30 Maybe we’ll start there.
0:03:30 Yeah, that’s great.
0:03:35 Well, 10 best toaster ovens, let’s say that we’re working on getting that ranking.
0:03:37 Obviously, we still have our publication.
0:03:42 And I feel like that’s, to me, it’s like one spoke in this internet realm right now.
0:03:46 And it’s an important spoke, but it used to be like the hub.
0:03:50 And that’s where like all roads led to our publications.
0:03:55 And now I look at it as one part in this entire landscape.
0:03:59 Publication meaning like a website, like your domain that you have full control over.
0:04:00 Yeah, okay.
0:04:01 That you own, yeah.
0:04:05 And that you do want to lead people to eventually, which is nice.
0:04:09 But it’s only one spoke and that’s the reality of it.
0:04:15 And posting a best toaster roundup in Reddit is not just copying and pasting your blog.
0:04:22 For example, like Redditors really, I think they’re really suspicious generally of brands and of affiliates.
0:04:25 And they know that kind of game things.
0:04:26 Like people squeeze in there.
0:04:27 We see it all the time.
0:04:33 There’s a lot of Reddit rules and best practices that you have to engage in.
0:04:36 But I would say generally be helpful.
0:04:41 And a lot of times when we’re sharing those types of best of in ours, it’s, you know,
0:04:44 we could take an angle of like, we’re looking into this, like we genuinely care.
0:04:47 We come at it through the side of like, we’re the users.
0:04:52 We are the curious people that are actually in their kitchen looking at toasters and,
0:04:55 and comparing them and, you know, like UGC.
0:04:59 But that’s how I would probably approach that in a Reddit list.
0:05:04 Like I’m looking at these and can you add some recommendations or have you tried these?
0:05:08 So that’s the kind of content I think that does really well in Reddit.
0:05:13 And if you want to publish in your own subreddit, that’s great.
0:05:15 I think it’s a great distribution play.
0:05:20 And I think all publishers, at the very least, if you are intimidated with Reddit,
0:05:23 create your own subreddit and start distributing your content.
0:05:25 That’s where we really started.
0:05:30 We would just distribute our content in Reddit and start to see some natural engagement.
0:05:36 I mean, you can use the sidebar, you can link back to your site, you can add, you can add links back to your site.
0:05:41 You can give them little teasers, like the full review is on my site, which is really great.
0:05:42 That’s a great technique to Reddit.
0:05:44 Like, you know, I’ve been looking into this.
0:05:46 These are three things I learned.
0:05:53 Not just straight copy and paste syndication, but a little teaser summary and, hey, the full review is back on my domain.
0:05:57 Yeah, there are subreddits that let you distribute your content.
0:06:06 And I see a lot of news driven content or if you have that type of a site where it’s like, you know, breaking news or breaking like entertainment.
0:06:11 So there are some subreddits that will do just that and you can engage in that as well.
0:06:12 That can be a strategy.
0:06:18 But for a lot of my, like for our type of publishing or for review sites or affiliate sites,
0:06:26 I think kind of crafting something that is valuable and answers a question or shares and then you can bring them back to your site.
0:06:30 So that’s a really good baseline strategy for publishers out there.
0:06:39 OK, and this is this is very timely because we like just as of literally yesterday got control of the Side Hustle Nation subreddit.
0:06:40 Somebody had been squatting.
0:06:43 I was wondering that I was looking at us.
0:06:46 It’s like, wondered if you had control of that.
0:06:53 Squatting is probably an aggressive term, but somebody was using that trademark term as their own subreddit in promoting who knows what.
0:06:54 But it had kind of been abandoned.
0:06:55 Yeah.
0:07:00 And so we submitted a trademark request, submitted like a moderator takeover request.
0:07:00 I don’t know what it was.
0:07:04 And was able to get on board with that.
0:07:12 And so now it’s like the question mark of why, you know, obviously we can invite the audience to come be members and contribute to the conversation and the content there.
0:07:24 But from a publishing standpoint, like do we start with like the archive, like the dozens and dozens of posts in the archive that like start to drip those out as threads in this community or in this subreddit?
0:07:30 Oh, I mean, that is definitely one strategy that you can do and, you know, figure out what kind of works.
0:07:36 The great thing about Reddit, I would say, one, it’s great that you got your subreddit back.
0:07:47 So for all the publishers out there, if you do anything right now, it’s like, you know, get your Reddit subreddit name because anybody can create any subreddit for any brand.
0:07:48 There’s no, there’s no rules.
0:07:52 It’s the wild, wild west of the world, Reddit.
0:07:55 So it’s nice when you can recover that and you can take it over.
0:07:59 So, yes, I would generally say have that distribution strategy.
0:08:04 But think if you if your goal is a traffic arbitrage, there’s things that you might want to do.
0:08:13 If your goal is to build a community there, there’s definitely a lot of community building things that you can do, you know, questions and engagement.
0:08:14 Like you said, bring your audience back there.
0:08:17 And what could that really look like?
0:08:26 I would spend a few minutes actually strategizing what you want your group to look like and what it’s going to lead back to and what you want people to do.
0:08:36 OK, but there’s a lot of opportunity there for for you to repurpose your tips, build some excitement, get some more views, ideas.
0:08:46 Yeah. I mean, one thing that’s that’s top of mind is looking at some of the highest performing articles, historically highest performing articles that have lost traffic and then saying, well, why?
0:08:50 You know, they’re still they’re still on the first page, but they’re just lower down.
0:09:03 Right. And so it’s like, how could we create, you know, the Reddit thread or the red, you know, some sort of post around that in an attempt to sure, hopefully this still exists on the site and maybe we update it, make it more relevant and timely.
0:09:08 Sure. But also, like, could we leapfrog that with some sort of Reddit in the search results?
0:09:17 Like, do you see people going after that or trying to create, you know, some other little compelling little tentacle out into the Internet world to like draw people back in?
0:09:22 Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s great. I love the feedback loop that can come from that, too.
0:09:36 So if you have an old listicle article that has done well and you can share some of that and ask people to, you know, weigh in on are these great choices or do you agree with this advice or any other advice, you can update the article and you can actually share and write it.
0:09:39 We’ve updated the article. We’ve updated the guide.
0:09:43 There’s so many things you can do with your subreddit as a community as well.
0:09:51 And for brands, I think, and for publishers, having that branded publisher subreddit is really great.
0:09:59 But you can expand your footprint as well and have like affinity subreddits, which are more like topical.
0:10:06 So you can, you know, just like just like a topical content map, you can have a subreddit for almost anything.
0:10:12 And I feel like it’s almost like the old days of SEO and there’s like exact match.
0:10:20 The more topical and the more niche the subreddit is, I feel like the easier it is to rank for certain things as well.
0:10:29 So sometimes having those brand new subreddits that are really, really topical, like wedding flower arrangements, let’s say.
0:10:32 And that’s all you talk about in that subreddit.
0:10:38 And it becomes a place where people can ask questions, but also where you can share really topical things.
0:10:41 And I feel like that also helps you rank.
0:10:43 It all will depend on the landscape.
0:10:49 Just looking at if you, you know, do a deep dive and look at what’s in the SERPs for anything.
0:10:54 There’s certain subreddits that are just dominant, like moving is a dominant subreddit.
0:10:59 A lot of business groups, you know, like project management, business, there’s a lot of that.
0:11:02 So like the broad terms have kind of been taken over.
0:11:03 Okay.
0:11:13 So going a little bit nichier and having those little mini affinity groups, you don’t need to have a ton of content.
0:11:19 You don’t need to have a hundred pieces, a hundred posts in your subreddit to start ranking and start seeing results.
0:11:25 The thing that people don’t really talk about Reddit a lot is that Reddit will serve your content right away.
0:11:36 The very first post, you create a new subreddit, you create a post, a welcome post or a new post, and it gets served to other editors right away.
0:11:44 Yeah, it’s getting indexed and everything, spending a lot of computing power, indexing all this content, user-generated content here.
0:11:51 We’ve built a lot of websites from scratch, and we know that it takes months to see those early results.
0:11:55 And you’re in Ahrefs and you’re like, okay, are we getting every indexed?
0:11:55 Are we getting some rankings?
0:11:56 Are we doing that?
0:12:03 It takes months to see if your original strategy is working, and Reddit, it takes days.
0:12:05 Yeah, yeah, you get the quick feedback loop.
0:12:08 Let’s go back to this, you know, best toasters example.
0:12:12 So maybe I put the list on my site and it’s, you know, bestkitchengadgets.com or something.
0:12:18 And I also have the best kitchen gadgets subreddit, sure, and I can post, you know, the teaser of it there.
0:12:23 And then I’m going to r slash kitchens, r slash cooking.
0:12:27 Am I, like, treading carefully not to, you know, get in trouble for self-promotion?
0:12:35 Or does it make sense to make, like, the best toaster, like, to create a completely separate subreddit, like, only for that day?
0:12:38 Or to piggyback on the brands themselves?
0:12:41 Like, oh, you know, KitchenAid was, you know, one of the…
0:12:48 So, I mean, that probably already exists, but, like, you know, if it’s an up-and-coming brand, like, if it doesn’t exist, like, you could be the first, you could be the creator of this thing.
0:12:51 And this is the exciting thing about Reddit right now.
0:13:01 And when we even start to work with partners and work with clients or even do a Reddit strategy for one of our sites, it’s, like, that’s part of the strategy is figuring out…
0:13:06 It’s, like, kind of, like, choosing your own adventure in Reddit and where you want to go.
0:13:13 And it is really just, like, evaluating the landscape and saying, okay, the brands, that’s, like, that’s already out there.
0:13:14 There’s already…
0:13:17 There might even be, like, a best toaster subreddit.
0:13:19 So maybe we take a different approach.
0:13:20 And, like, where can we kind of see?
0:13:28 And also kind of evaluate the titles and the kind of thing that is ranking but also is getting engagement from Redditors.
0:13:36 Because I think that’s another factor in getting your Reddit post up is comments and engagement as well.
0:13:39 And we really like to have great content.
0:13:41 I’m a content purist, a content nerd.
0:13:43 I don’t want to have a bunch of…
0:13:44 Oh, no bots.
0:13:47 But I don’t have a bunch of people just upvoting things to upvote.
0:13:51 I want great content that gets natural engagement.
0:13:57 And knowing that Reddit serves your content, if it’s good, people will like it and comment and engage in it, too.
0:14:01 So that’s another factor as well to keep in mind when you’re creating these strategies.
0:14:08 But there is a lot of initial put things out there, put a few Reddit posts together, see what’s working.
0:14:11 And then you can adjust the strategy.
0:14:13 Yeah, isn’t it?
0:14:14 In a way, it’s just nuts.
0:14:20 Like, I miss the EAT, whatever, you know, expertise and authority and trust.
0:14:25 It’s like, no, any old Joe Schmo can now create this thing and it ranks instantly.
0:14:28 It’s like, well, what happened to building domain authority?
0:14:34 I’ve been part of editorial and I’ve been a big EAT champion for many years.
0:14:38 And the goalpost for content quality, it kept moving and moving and moving.
0:14:44 And that was something like my editorial got tougher and tougher and we kept hiring more and more experts.
0:14:45 And we still do that.
0:14:49 I still hire the real deal experts, the real deal nerds.
0:14:49 Yeah.
0:14:54 But the Reddit thing coming up, it was like, that was my first kind of like gut.
0:14:57 It was like, oh, these people are may or may not be experts.
0:15:03 And I kind of had to like take a step back and embrace it.
0:15:11 Because if you think about with AI overviews and AI content creation and all the things that are happening, content is a bit of a commodity.
0:15:15 But at least with Reddit, as for the most part, it’s real.
0:15:16 It is real people.
0:15:20 I’m not saying they’re all experts, but they are real people.
0:15:28 And the more that I spend time in Reddit, the more I kind of get it and kind of respect the ecosystem that is there.
0:15:31 And I can’t believe the things that people are willing to share.
0:15:32 Yeah.
0:15:35 It’s a lot of anonymous usernames.
0:15:37 It’s like, well, who’s to say?
0:15:41 I mean, I guess you’re speaking from personal experience in a lot of cases as a commenter.
0:15:43 But, you know, who’s behind it?
0:15:43 I don’t know.
0:15:45 I can see the pros and cons to that.
0:15:49 But I think the anonymity really does help people express themselves.
0:15:51 Let’s just like say that.
0:15:54 Express, share things that they might not share.
0:15:57 Even like horror stories with work or insights.
0:16:04 Things that, you know, like even when you’re doing a podcast, there’s always going to be this thing where you’re holding back.
0:16:06 But on Reddit, someone might not hold back.
0:16:08 They might tell everything.
0:16:09 And they often do.
0:16:18 So I think that anonymity, it’s almost a tradeoff, but it could almost bring out more expertise and more insights than without it, to be fair.
0:16:19 Okay.
0:16:29 More with Amy in just a moment, including encouraging that engagement, building your community, and how you might do keyword research to figure out what kind of content to post in the first place.
0:16:30 Coming up right after this.
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0:18:52 There’s still a lot to unpack here.
0:18:57 You mentioned that comments and engagement seem to be a positive signal, right?
0:19:05 Like if this is getting a lot of upvotes and comments, like that may be more likely to get more eyeballs to both on the Reddit platform and potentially through Google later.
0:19:10 Do anything specific to encourage that feedback, to encourage commenting?
0:19:16 I would say create good content and learn what works when you get it served.
0:19:18 Like I said, you create a post in Reddit.
0:19:21 It gets served to other people in Reddit.
0:19:23 You’ll see what’s kind of ranking.
0:19:26 And once people are there, are they actually clicking through?
0:19:27 Are they actually engaging?
0:19:28 Are they actually upvoting?
0:19:34 Those signals are really great and you can work on the editorial from there.
0:19:35 You can kind of make adjustments.
0:19:41 And do you have an example or two of a post or a thread that did get that level of engagement you were looking for?
0:19:55 One of the things that we did in the beginning was we started just a subreddit for one of our websites and it naturally got a lot of engagement and people joining in and saying, OK, can you look into this tool?
0:19:59 Can you look into this review or I don’t agree with you on this?
0:20:04 So like sometimes even having like really strong opinions will get engagement, which is great.
0:20:10 And I was looking at a post today and someone said, I don’t agree with your list for CFOs.
0:20:14 I think these are not really great recommendations and it’s a talking point.
0:20:15 It’s great.
0:20:18 And they’re making my post have more engagement.
0:20:21 I can always edit the post if I agree with them.
0:20:23 I can always disagree with them.
0:20:27 And I think that back and forth is actually a really good starting point for Reddit.
0:20:33 So, I mean, just like sometimes you can, if you have a strong opinion, people are going to agree or disagree with you.
0:20:38 It’s not about giving everything away like in a full blog.
0:20:43 It’s about sharing a strong opinion, showing your expertise, having a side.
0:20:45 I think that works really well to get engagement.
0:20:52 I mean, is this any different than blog comments, you know, back in the day or is this just, you know, nobody’s nobody’s reading the blog anymore.
0:20:53 So you got to go where the people are.
0:20:54 Yeah.
0:20:55 And that’s a really good point.
0:21:00 I feel like everything I’ve done for the past decade or more has led me to this.
0:21:09 It’s the way we’ve done editorial, like even just like how to get engagement, how to like improve a title, what to look for and what works.
0:21:11 It’s just we’re on a different platform, right?
0:21:15 It’s just a different place to put content and, you know, slightly different way.
0:21:24 Is there anything proactive that you’re doing to build your own subreddit community on the platform?
0:21:28 It’s like, I’m like such a newbie user.
0:21:29 It’s like, does it just happen organically?
0:21:32 People search side hustles and they find it?
0:21:32 Like, how does it work?
0:21:37 It can happen organically, but also like we do old fashioned community building.
0:21:46 So we do reach out if somebody comments on one of our posts, I will reach out through the mod mail and say, thank you so much for your comment.
0:21:47 Can you join our community?
0:21:52 Can invite other mods and other people to contribute to your community?
0:21:54 That’s that’s another thing that you can do.
0:21:57 You can do cross posting on Reddit.
0:22:02 I think Reddit is more friendly to cross post and sharing those kind of things.
0:22:07 Self promotion is you have to kind of play it a little bit safe.
0:22:12 But I think if you bring something valuable and it makes sense and it’s not all that you do.
0:22:19 Remember, every single Reddit profile that we that you have, you can see in the entire history of what someone’s done.
0:22:23 So every single thing you’ve done is a cross post promotion.
0:22:31 You’ve mentioned the same brand or same publication everywhere you go or that’s all you talk about is the AI tool that you love.
0:22:37 It’s very obvious to other writers that you’re not there to contribute to this Reddit community.
0:22:38 OK, yeah, no shortcuts there.
0:22:41 You got to be a part, be a good steward of the community.
0:22:42 Can you explain cross posting really quick?
0:22:47 This is like taking something from your subreddit into another subreddit.
0:22:52 And sharing and it’s like there is a way that you can actually cross post and share.
0:22:53 Yes.
0:22:57 And that’s also you can also cross post a question into more than one.
0:23:03 If you ask a question in another subreddit, you can cross post the question if you feel like you need more answers.
0:23:05 So there is that, too.
0:23:09 But yes, you can cross post your content into other subreddits.
0:23:14 And again, every subreddit has their own rules, their own ecosystem, their own guidelines.
0:23:22 So I just caution before you do any promotion, make sure you read the full subreddit rules.
0:23:25 And when you control your subreddit, you get to control that, too.
0:23:27 You can you can literally say no cross posting.
0:23:28 You can say anything.
0:23:30 You can say no cross posting, no brand promotions.
0:23:35 You have to start every post with a Yahoo to get approved.
0:23:36 Like it’s wild, wild.
0:23:41 Let’s say I’m coming to you as a new client or new prospective client.
0:23:52 Like talk to me about the like keyword research strategy, if that’s even the right term here, like to figure out where to go, what to post, what kind of keywords to target.
0:24:03 It’s a similar type of conversations working with, you know, creating a content plan or working with just like an SEO type of content strategy, depending on the client goals, like figuring out what they want to do first.
0:24:07 Do they want, is it going to be sort of a traffic arbitrage?
0:24:09 Is it going to be an awareness play?
0:24:12 Is it going to be a brand reputation management play?
0:24:18 Is it going to be there’s a lot of different things that you can do with Reddit?
0:24:23 But we start like literally looking at the search landscape, like where is Reddit coming up?
0:24:26 Where are their brand terms coming up?
0:24:29 What their brand terms are important to them?
0:24:34 Obviously, like review comparisons, all those commercial intent terms are really important.
0:24:44 We also look at AI overviews because Reddit’s being informed, like using Reddit’s in AI overviews now, which has only been for a few months, to be fair.
0:24:57 So that’s really interesting to see like what kind of what are they pulling and then determine the content strategy and keyword strategy and what type of content where we put it from there.
0:25:02 Any tools or tech that you like on this?
0:25:14 I’m just trying to think of, well, in Ahrefs, I could pull up like a competitor report or like a content gap type of report and say, oh, you know, these 10 similar sites are ranking for these keywords.
0:25:19 If you haven’t covered that, you might consider it because clearly there’s interest in that.
0:25:22 Well, in Ahrefs, you can look up everything in Reddit.
0:25:32 I feel like it’s a little bit behind still, like because there’s so much Reddit results that Ahrefs can be a little behind and displaying all the terms and the keywords that are actually ranking in Reddit.
0:25:33 But that’s a good place to start.
0:25:43 Like just look up Reddit, you know, look up your brand, look up your keywords, see it and also see like look up the keywords with your brand and then append Reddit.
0:25:46 So like, you know, Nike review Reddit.
0:25:47 So look to see that.
0:26:01 So kind of like look at that landscape, like digging into those Reddit results and and seeing if it’s major subreddits that are coming up, if it’s if it’s a geo play, because a lot of times it could be something where it’s a lot of geographical locations.
0:26:09 Like, you know, ask in Toronto or in Canada or in North Carolina or in L.A. and those kind of things, too.
0:26:15 And seeing some of the terms that come up, a lot of times for brands, we see things like is Brand X legit?
0:26:19 That’s a very something that comes up in Reddit a lot, as you can imagine.
0:26:19 Yes.
0:26:25 If you have a review of that brand, would you title that the three, you know, is Brand X legit here?
0:26:26 I tested this out.
0:26:28 I found these results.
0:26:28 Yes or no?
0:26:30 Like, here’s here’s the link to my full review.
0:26:31 Yeah.
0:26:38 I mean, for our blog, we might our third party, we might do a full review and that might be a subheading for a Reddit post.
0:26:40 That might be the title of a Reddit post is blah, blah, blah legit.
0:26:44 If we’re seeing that, if we’re seeing that people are asking that or is it worth it?
0:26:45 Is it legit?
0:26:46 Those kind of things.
0:26:56 And you can see the type of questions that people are asking in Reddit results already and deciding what to do with the information is like the next step in the strategy for sure.
0:26:57 But yeah, legit’s a good one.
0:26:58 Worth it’s a good one.
0:27:01 Would you create a new thread in that case?
0:27:03 Like kind of with that same title?
0:27:04 Or would you just comment on it?
0:27:06 Like, yes, it’s legit.
0:27:06 No, it’s not.
0:27:08 Like whatever your results finding was.
0:27:17 So a lot of times I evaluate sentiment of for the reviews that are coming up currently when we first start working with a client.
0:27:30 And if it’s negative sentiment, if something’s definitely negative sentiment, one thing you don’t want to kind of do is like add to the fire because comments and upvotes make that post better.
0:27:32 Give it more, give it more juice.
0:27:43 So we kind of have an approach of like love bombing around the negative sentiments, at least having more of an editorial approach or creating things around that.
0:27:48 I wouldn’t go and engage with a fully negative review and hoping to like turn the brain.
0:27:50 And that’s what brands have done.
0:27:51 They’re like, oh, I have a negative.
0:28:01 Someone said something and it’s and it could be for something 10 years ago that happened and somebody was upset and it’s actually we could be a post from 10 years ago and write it like this is what we’re dealing with now.
0:28:08 And so they’ll go and they’ll comment on that right at their head and just give it more juice and that it can stay in the ranking.
0:28:14 But we like to kind of love bomb, let’s say, around those and to shift the sentiment.
0:28:16 Sorry, I’m not sure if I’m clear on that.
0:28:22 Are you saying like don’t jump on that overwhelmingly negative thread with a positive spin?
0:28:23 You’re just like you’re just adding more fuel.
0:28:27 And the consensus is still like we want to bury this thing.
0:28:29 Like we don’t want this to have any more visibility than it already does.
0:28:32 Starting something else that, you know, has a clean slate.
0:28:33 It could be more positive.
0:28:43 Yes, I would say the exception would be if it’s something that’s in your own branded subreddit and it’s a customer service type of question that’s genuine.
0:28:46 I think then brands need to address it and need to comment.
0:28:49 And I think that’s, you know, that’s a different strategy.
0:28:52 That’s more of like a customer service strategy.
0:29:01 But as far as like if you’re for the ranking, remember, like the more you engage in a post and read it, the more it’s going to surface to the top.
0:29:01 Okay.
0:29:02 Yeah.
0:29:07 So maybe not adding more visibility to something that you don’t want people to read or you don’t want people to see.
0:29:13 Or even if you’re just an affiliate partner, it’s like we don’t necessarily want that to be front and center.
0:29:17 But I think evaluating that sentiment as content creators is really important.
0:29:22 And I think that’s part of the research and part of what I tell our writers as well.
0:29:34 Because if we’re talking about brands or products or things that we like and every single thing in Reddit is negative and we come across as this overly positive, which we would never do.
0:29:41 Because we have a real editorial UGC approach to this, but it’s also doesn’t fly and it stands out.
0:29:52 So like I think digging into what’s there and seeing what other people think is really important to create honest and genuine editorial and making recommendations as well.
0:29:52 Yeah.
0:29:54 Be upfront.
0:29:56 Like, hey, here’s what we liked about it.
0:29:56 Here’s what’s good.
0:29:58 Here were some of the downsides.
0:30:03 Or here’s, you know, here’s what some of the detractors say, you know, just to be aware of both sides.
0:30:14 Yeah, it’s like we posted a post the other day and that said, I see a lot, just as many Reddit posts love this mattress versus just as many Reddit people don’t love this mattress.
0:30:15 And here’s why.
0:30:16 And that’s how we kind of approached it.
0:30:23 But to completely ignore that there’s like people that are like, I, this is a way too soft of a mattress and I don’t like it.
0:30:26 I think doesn’t play well on Reddit either.
0:30:26 Yeah.
0:30:28 I mean, I don’t think it’s a great editorial either.
0:30:31 I think I like the balanced kind of approach.
0:30:32 Okay.
0:30:38 So that would be maybe how to approach some of the review content looking like, is this brand legit?
0:30:39 Is this brand worth it?
0:30:40 Is this product worth it?
0:30:48 Imagine you could do similar for like this product versus this product, kind of like bottom of the funnel, you know, high buyer intent type of keywords.
0:31:01 And then even going, you know, the 10 best toasters, like something a little bit higher in a buyer’s decision and kind of teasing that, hey, we’ve just undergone this, you know, month long intensive testing process.
0:31:07 And I can’t wait to share all the results, you know, here, here on our site, but I’ll tease, you might be surprised who won or something.
0:31:15 And I think if you want to embrace the Reddit values of things, you’ll be opinionated, you’ll share something.
0:31:22 And overall, I think what’s gotten me really excited about doing editorial already is that it does feel fresh.
0:31:24 It does feel a little different.
0:31:31 And it does feel more human for a long time in SEO, in content websites, in affiliate websites.
0:31:34 I feel like we were creating very similar types of content.
0:31:40 And there was a lot of people in the industry saying the top 10 results all look the same.
0:31:43 The top 20 results all look the same.
0:31:45 And then we were just competing on content quality.
0:31:47 We’re competing on a lot of different things.
0:31:50 But to be fair, that was the landscape for a while.
0:31:58 Yeah, authority, domain age, everybody plugs it into a phrase or something and says, well, this is what, you know, is already on the first page.
0:32:00 Make sure you include that in your article.
0:32:01 Make sure you include that.
0:32:09 And even when we had these, like, you know, really underground reviews for, like, indie games on our sites that would get to it.
0:32:17 Once something started getting searchable, once something started having enough search volume, one of the bigger publications would pick it up and destroy us.
0:32:23 Because they would do, you know, a content pack of, you know, 200 articles or 50 articles to our three, right?
0:32:24 Yeah.
0:32:37 And now I think Reddit is giving other people a way to, you know, have those discussions, share those insights in the SERPs that the publishers, you know, competing with the publishers, yes.
0:32:39 But it can be really refreshing and exciting, too.
0:32:47 More with Amy in just a moment, including mistakes to avoid and how to get more mileage out of the content you’re already creating right after this.
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0:34:04 One strategy I didn’t fully embrace or maybe wasn’t fully aware of when I was starting out was this idea of the piggyback principle.
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0:35:17 Is it primarily text written content versus, you know, people sharing videos or trying to get more juice to their YouTube channel or to their short form content?
0:35:20 Yeah, I think there’s all sorts of things.
0:35:24 Video content right now is really another exciting avenue.
0:35:26 I see video in tons of SERPs.
0:35:28 A lot more short videos.
0:35:32 I see, like, obviously YouTube, TikTok, all of those channels being promoted.
0:35:35 But yeah, you can use video in Reddit as well.
0:35:36 And you can do all that.
0:35:40 I don’t think we do a lot of video in Reddit, but we have.
0:35:52 Okay, so what I’m hearing, own your community, own your subreddit as a place where hopefully nobody can, like, ban you for, like, dropping links or, like, you know, being self-promotional.
0:35:53 Like, hey, of course I want to promote my stuff.
0:35:54 This is my subreddit.
0:35:58 But treading really, really carefully in others.
0:36:03 Like, if there is, you know, r slash cooking and you come in, well, here’s my best, 10 best toasters.
0:36:08 It’s like, ah, it’s a recipe to get the post deleted at best or get yourself banned at worst.
0:36:15 Well, I would say even with your own subreddit, there’s no guarantee that you cannot be, that you won’t be suspended or banned.
0:36:17 Reddit is a risky platform in that way.
0:36:22 So I would say, like, give, and I call it paying the Reddit tax.
0:36:25 Go in, give, share valuable information.
0:36:29 I would never, ever start a new subreddit and start adding affiliate links.
0:36:33 In fact, I, like, kind of don’t want to share any affiliate links.
0:36:34 I think it’s a red flag.
0:36:35 I think Redditors hate it.
0:36:38 I think it’s sad because that’s how people, obviously, we’re…
0:36:39 Yeah, Amy, we’re trying to make money.
0:36:40 Come on.
0:36:42 We are trying to make money.
0:36:47 So you have to take a few extra steps and you have to, you know, you know, give till it hurts.
0:36:48 Follow the rules.
0:36:49 Share.
0:36:53 You can share links to your own site and have affiliate links there.
0:36:55 Yes, it’s another step that people have to take.
0:36:58 But I think it’s worth it.
0:37:10 I think it’s not worth the risk and, you know, just losing people, like, losing the Redditors’ kind of trust by, you know, just having a bunch of spammy, kind of linky kind of things.
0:37:10 So.
0:37:11 All right.
0:37:15 So that’s helpful to be, like, I don’t know, to hear you say, like, I wouldn’t put any affiliate links.
0:37:18 Like, okay, just tread, tread super carefully.
0:37:21 Any other risks or mistakes that we should know about?
0:37:25 I mean, it does feel, this is my beef with all these platforms.
0:37:28 It’s like, yeah, you got to go where the eyeballs are, but you’re still playing in somebody else’s sandbox.
0:37:31 They could take their ball and go home at any time.
0:37:34 And you’re like, I feel like I’m building on borrowed land here.
0:37:35 It’s really tough.
0:37:36 I feel like that, too.
0:37:41 I mean, the advice that I would have given five years ago is not what we’re doing now.
0:37:46 In fact, like, being publishing and we publish a lot on YouTube.
0:37:47 We publish on our own site.
0:37:48 We publish in Reddit.
0:37:52 We publish in Medium and TikTok and Quora and other forms.
0:37:55 I would have said before, don’t do that.
0:37:56 Don’t spread yourself thin.
0:37:58 The editorial is different.
0:38:01 It takes a lot more effort to get into all these things.
0:38:05 And you’re, you know, going on rent to land and Reddit does have its risks.
0:38:08 But it’s such a huge platform.
0:38:10 There’s so much visibility.
0:38:12 You almost have no choice.
0:38:16 If you’re not on Reddit, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities to be in the SERPs.
0:38:21 And so we had to, our motto was like, we’re going to figure it out.
0:38:23 No matter what, we’re going to figure it out.
0:38:25 And so that was like, challenge accepted.
0:38:26 We’ll do it.
0:38:26 Yeah.
0:38:30 Tell me about the Medium and Quora strategies.
0:38:31 It’s like the same type of content.
0:38:35 You know, we started a thread or somebody asked this question or a very similar question.
0:38:37 So we could answer it over there as well.
0:38:38 Yeah, I would say similar.
0:38:41 They’re a little bit more edit friendly.
0:38:46 You can edit a Quora question after it’s been asked a little bit easier.
0:38:48 You can edit your Reddit questions too.
0:38:54 But I think the etiquette is to say edited because I added this and it has to be valuable.
0:38:55 Okay.
0:38:55 Okay.
0:39:01 I think Quora and Medium are obviously a little less risky as far as like you can publish what you want.
0:39:05 And depending on the SERP, sometimes Quora outranks Reddit.
0:39:13 So I think just evaluating that landscape again and seeing and also asking questions that people will answer is really important.
0:39:15 Knowing how to ask the question.
0:39:17 Quora has their own kind of etiquette as well.
0:39:21 Like they ask you, don’t ask questions that have already been asked.
0:39:23 So that kind of thing.
0:39:28 So all these different things, they all have their own little quirks, let’s say, that you have to figure out.
0:39:35 I mean, do you give any weight to like, you know, back in the day, it would be like, oh, that would be considered duplicate content to publish the same stuff on your site.
0:39:40 And to paste it on Medium or paste it in, you know, syndicate to MSN.
0:39:43 It’s like, or publish it on Substack.
0:39:51 Like there’s lots of different channels where like, okay, on the plus side, it’s like, well, I have the potential to take up half of the first page if all of these somehow get ranking.
0:39:56 But, you know, maybe only one of them is going to get indexed if it’s the same.
0:39:56 Well, that’s the thing.
0:40:02 We might have the same topic, but the approach to every single different platform is going to be different.
0:40:06 And it’s different content for every single platform that we create.
0:40:07 It might be remixed.
0:40:08 Sounds like a lot of work.
0:40:09 It is a lot of work.
0:40:12 And I feel like maybe that’s why there’s bad sentiment.
0:40:17 Like scaling up these teams, these editorial teams.
0:40:28 But I have a great team of writers, creators that do video, will create a blog post, will create a Reddit share, will create a Quora, will create a Medium.
0:40:32 And it is very, it is different for every single approach.
0:40:34 And they will do fresh content for every single thing.
0:40:36 So it is a lot of work.
0:40:43 But it’s worth it because we have a client that I was doing a report for, and we were ranking in seven spots on the first page of Google.
0:40:44 Yeah.
0:40:46 For seven different things.
0:40:47 Yeah, that’s what’s possible.
0:40:51 They just completely dominate the front page real estate if done right.
0:40:51 Yeah.
0:40:57 Are there any rules of thumb in terms of, you know, publishing cadence where it’s like, well, every Monday I got to have a new thread?
0:41:02 Is there any rules like that or just kind of like as you see fit or as you see necessary?
0:41:06 With Reddit, I think starting off, don’t publish a 50 or a 100.
0:41:09 I wouldn’t publish, mass publish anything.
0:41:11 I wouldn’t, I would have a human approach to it.
0:41:14 So I would start with publishing one thing, publishing two.
0:41:21 And like I said before, you don’t need to have a ton of content to start seeing some results and start seeing what works.
0:41:25 I’ve seen friends of mine, I think that’s their mistake because they put a lot,
0:41:31 they invest a lot of their team’s energy and effort into their subreddit and they start to like, you know,
0:41:36 I’m going to publish a hundred things, 150 things and put a ton of effort into it.
0:41:41 One, the risk is if something happens and you lose that subreddit, which can happen.
0:41:43 I hope it doesn’t.
0:41:44 You’ve lost 150.
0:41:53 But two, you can get enough data and validation and review from a few posts and then see what kind of works.
0:41:55 But I also think just like be human.
0:41:58 Like I think too much cadence, kind of maybe like a tripwire.
0:42:00 So I would space it out a little bit.
0:42:01 Okay.
0:42:01 Yeah.
0:42:10 So if, so if other publishers are in the same boat as me, they’ve, you know, been running their sites for five or 10 years, they’ve got like this huge library of content.
0:42:13 The strategy is not to go and try to dump that all at once, even every single day.
0:42:16 It’s just like, take a, take a metered approach.
0:42:28 And if you want to publish more, I would say create those affinity subreddits as well that you can publish more and to different things like expand it that way instead of just expanding.
0:42:35 But once your subreddit is established and you have members and you have engagement and all the good things that come from that, it’s a little bit more solid.
0:42:40 And you can do, you can do a lot more and you can publish on more of a regular cadence.
0:42:50 And of course, ideally people are publishing on your subreddit, they’re publishing questions and you have moderators and it can, you know, become this humongous thing eventually.
0:42:51 Yeah, it can be its own.
0:42:57 So it’s another touch point for the brand is kind of how I’ve traditionally viewed the Sino Salvation Facebook group.
0:43:02 It’s like, hey, you know, wherever you are, if you’re in the car, hey, listen to the podcast.
0:43:06 If you’re scrolling through your feed, make sure you see our stuff in the Facebook group.
0:43:14 So there’s, I guess I could see another touch point here with people being engaged with the brand and fueling future content through their questions.
0:43:26 Like, yeah, hey, anybody ever tried this particular side business or this particular money making app or whatever and try and gather feedback on that or like, sure, I never heard of that.
0:43:27 I won’t test it out.
0:43:28 Yeah.
0:43:31 And then you can create a podcast or find somebody by an expert.
0:43:39 And a lot of great things can happen with that kind of community and that feedback loop that I think is really fun for something like this, for sure.
0:43:46 And remember, like, Reddit is not like a Facebook or like another social because it’s just so prevalent in the SERPs as well.
0:43:53 So people that may even tell us that they’re not Reddit users, like my husband says he isn’t on Reddit, but he’s on Reddit.
0:43:53 Sure.
0:43:57 Because when he does any kind of Google search, Reddit will show up.
0:43:58 He’ll be on it.
0:44:00 You know, he might not realize it.
0:44:01 Okay.
0:44:02 Personal question.
0:44:08 Like, you’ve talked a lot about, like, the affiliate type of content, which, you know, okay, there’s an extra step.
0:44:09 Hopefully I draw people back to the site.
0:44:11 Maybe they eventually click the affiliate link.
0:44:18 If I want to promote an episode of the show and say, hey, we just had this really interesting guest on.
0:44:24 She was getting paid to create short form videos for brands, you know, two, three hundred bucks a video, sometimes more.
0:44:28 I genuinely think it’s like a super creative business, like a really cool story.
0:44:31 Hey, I made a hundred grand on the side from my day job.
0:44:37 You know, just trying to get the word out there, but not be like, hey, come listen to my stuff.
0:44:45 Like, what’s, how do you, I don’t know, how do you tread lightly or, you know, figure out the best way to promote something like that or like that story based type of content?
0:44:47 Oh, yeah, that’s really interesting.
0:44:53 Because I think that there is a case for having more of a cadence then because you have real things that you want to share.
0:45:02 And maybe there is like, maybe you share it in your brand and subreddit, maybe you have your own like, like subreddit for the podcast only.
0:45:08 And this is where you get updates and it can be kind of a feed, but you can engage in other subreddits as well.
0:45:13 And if you are genuinely excited, and I see a lot of people promoting themselves like that.
0:45:16 But again, it’s like where it’s kind of like the approach.
0:45:22 So, you know, it’s like this is such a really interesting story and I think you’re going to really get good tips.
0:45:24 I think that can, that can work.
0:45:31 I just think it’s when, I think it’s just when brands are almost lazy and too self-promotionals when they get into trouble.
0:45:31 All right.
0:45:31 All right.
0:45:39 But I think if you’re a genuine content creator and you generally do what you do on Reddit, it does translate.
0:45:39 It can.
0:45:41 Not perfect, but it can.
0:45:50 To what extent are you using AI to spin up, you know, different intros or different ways to say the same type of thing and like to make it unique and different?
0:45:55 Well, we have like a no AI policy in our content.
0:46:09 And to be fair, I don’t really know if our writers have used AI in their brainstorming process and their, but I don’t want it to look like AI, feel like AI, sound like AI.
0:46:12 Even if they haven’t used AI to create it, if that makes sense.
0:46:13 You can kind of sense it.
0:46:16 I want them to, I want it to be a little imperfect.
0:46:18 I want it to be, you know, opinionated.
0:46:24 I want it to be, for Reddit especially, I think anything that feels computer generated.
0:46:29 But yeah, for testing, I think that’s something that you could do.
0:46:29 I don’t know.
0:46:31 We don’t, we don’t really do that right now.
0:46:32 All right.
0:46:33 Fair enough.
0:46:45 The people that are creating our editorial or creating our post are real experts, real nerds, full of like, you know, humor, edginess, opinions that I want to pull that out of them.
0:46:49 I don’t want to figure out a formula for, you know, testing.
0:46:50 Mass, mass producing.
0:46:51 Okay.
0:46:52 Fair.
0:46:53 What’s next?
0:46:55 Where do you see Red Visible going?
0:46:58 Where, I mean, what’s got you excited this year?
0:47:12 Well, the first thing is, I feel like it’s really exciting to survive in this new landscape when AI reviews are, you know, at the forefront, taking up half the listing on Google right now.
0:47:16 When our publications, when the traffic changed, there was a huge shift.
0:47:26 All of the things that have happened in publishing and digital, to be still here and to be excited and to be in content is a really big win for me and still gets me really motivated.
0:47:36 And to be able to work with people that I love and creatives and, you know, and do the thing I love, that is really what’s kept me going for the past year, year and a half, two years.
0:47:37 It’s been a roller coaster.
0:47:50 Looking forward, I feel like because we’ve figured out how to distribute content, create content on different platforms, I feel like it’s a moat around our business, around what we do.
0:47:54 Because no matter how the SERPs change, I feel like we have a stake somewhere.
0:48:01 Whether it’s if Reddit completely disappeared from the SERPs, we still have our third party, but we still have our publishers.
0:48:04 We still have, there’s still Quora Medium.
0:48:06 There’s still video, which is really exciting.
0:48:21 So, moving into that and just embracing search for what it is right now and for how people are discovering us and for where people are living online has been really what’s kept me motivated and what I look forward to doing.
0:48:23 And every day is a new day.
0:48:29 And in one year, I may be talking about something else, but for right now, that’s what keeps me going.
0:48:32 Yeah, the change is the only constant.
0:48:40 You never know what’s coming, but for the time being, a lot of that traffic and attention is certainly flowing towards Reddit.
0:48:44 So, you might as well figure out how to take advantage of that, whatever that means for your brand.
0:48:47 Redvisible.com is where you can find Amy.
0:48:51 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.
0:48:53 Embrace your side hustle.
0:49:01 Like, I feel like everybody needs to have a side hustle, no matter how busy you are, and I feel like it’s a great way to test new things.
0:49:03 I still have my little side hustles out there.
0:49:11 You don’t necessarily have to make a lot of money right away, but the things that you learn, you never know where it’s going to come into play.
0:49:20 So, I would say one of my side hustles is I love to play around with AI and play around with AI tools and things like that and create things.
0:49:22 But have I put anything out into the orbit yet?
0:49:23 No.
0:49:24 But I’m learning a lot.
0:49:29 Yeah, but you learn from that, like, just messing around time, like the tinkering time.
0:49:30 But, I mean, I love it.
0:49:37 I listened to the interview you did on UGC and how amazing that is and how much freedom someone gets.
0:49:43 And I love hiring UGC creators and I love finding people and it can fit into your life.
0:49:51 And these kind of things that people are discovering now and doing now, there’s going to be different opportunities in two years and three years.
0:50:01 So, if you have a passion to do that and I have a 14-year-old and he’s done some videos with us and I was really hoping he would really get into it and be a creator.
0:50:02 But it’s funny.
0:50:07 Like, some of those episodes that you’re like, I know the perfect person for this.
0:50:09 And you send it to them and they’re like, eh.
0:50:11 I was like, man, I really thought that was going to hit.
0:50:14 But when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
0:50:15 So, maybe they’ll come back to it.
0:50:21 I think listening and hearing other people’s stories and getting inspired, you never know what’s going to be.
0:50:22 And just, like, tinker around.
0:50:23 It’s fun.
0:50:25 Like, I think that’s my advice.
0:50:29 I am in the very early stages of my Reddit tinkering.
0:50:30 I hope you’ll come by and join.
0:50:33 If you’re listening to this, it’s r slash side hustle nation.
0:50:34 Come and come by.
0:50:38 Help us out and build a helpful community for side hustlers on the internet.
0:50:41 A couple of takeaways from me before we wrap.
0:50:42 Like Amy said, no shortcuts.
0:50:44 You got to be a member of the community.
0:50:45 It’s real work.
0:50:46 It’s real effort.
0:50:51 And, you know, you can’t come in guns blazing and just spamming up a place with your affiliate links.
0:50:52 You got to be there for the long haul.
0:50:57 And the second thing is to build that subreddit that you are the moderator of, that you have some ownership over.
0:51:00 It could be a distribution channel for your content.
0:51:05 It could be a place to gather community feedback and questions that fuels future content.
0:51:12 It could be just another touchpoint for your brand if people are going about their day-to-day lives and they see you pop up in their feed there.
0:51:20 So those are kind of the highlights for me and I’ll probably update as we go forward with our newfound reddit journey here.
0:51:24 But big news, the Side Hustle Show just had its 12th birthday.
0:51:31 So whether this is your first time listening or you’ve been around since the beginning, I appreciate you spending some time with us in your earbuds today.
0:51:39 If you are new or newer to the show and you want to dig a little bit deeper, you can actually get a personalized playlist at hustle.show.
0:51:48 You just answer a few short, multiple-choice questions and it’ll recommend 8 to 10 of our greatest hits to start out with based on your answers.
0:51:48 Totally free.
0:51:51 Hustle.show for your personalized playlist.
0:51:53 Big thanks to Amy for sharing her insight.
0:51:57 Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:52:02 SideHustleNation.com slash deals is where you can find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
0:52:05 Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.
0:52:07 It really does make a difference.
0:52:08 That is it for me.
0:52:10 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:52:14 If you’re finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:52:15 So fire off that text message.
0:52:19 Maybe somebody that you know who had their traffic hit in the last year or two.
0:52:22 Say, hey, maybe here’s a path forward like we talked about at the beginning.
0:52:24 If you can’t beat them, join them.
0:52:27 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:52:30 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show.

0:00:06 Everybody wants passive income. That’s the dream. But how you go about getting it is the
0:00:10 hard part and which path you choose depends on your starting point, your interests, your
0:00:15 long term goals, all that stuff. Now we’ve covered a ton of quote unquote passive income
0:00:20 ideas on the show, or maybe more accurately, time leveraged income ideas, ways to make
0:00:24 money without directly trading your time. But today I’m grouping those into four different
0:00:28 categories, four different types of passive income that you can start making. So you can
0:00:33 see which might make the most sense for you. The first is to buy cash flowing
0:00:39 assets. This is the make money with money option. And under this category of cash
0:00:43 flowing assets, you’ll find options like dividend, investing, business lending, real
0:00:48 estate, and stuff like that, which is great if you already have money to invest.
0:00:53 Rental real estate is probably the classic example of this and might be
0:00:57 statistically one of the most common side hustles in the world. Buy a house, rent it
0:01:02 out, pocket the cash flow. Here’s how Dustin Heiner explained it in episode 387.
0:01:08 The way to start is to number one, find which state you’re going to invest in and
0:01:12 then zoom into which city you’re going to invest in. And the way you do that is I
0:01:17 usually use Zillow. Zillow is a great site to get big, broad picture. Actually, it’s a
0:01:22 start. As we look through that, it’s a tool for us to do more due diligence. And that’s
0:01:25 basically just making sure we’re making the right investment. But you’re looking at the
0:01:30 entire state. Look for population areas that have a lot more properties than not. And you
0:01:34 zoom into that city and you get even closer and closer. And you’re going to look at all
0:01:40 the different properties in that specific city to see if they meet your criteria, how much
0:01:44 money you have to invest, the type of properties that you want and how much rent it’s going to
0:01:48 make. So you’re making, and here’s, here’s a principle for everybody listening. You want
0:01:55 to buy for $250 or more in passive income after every single expense that goes into your pocket?
0:02:00 Because that’s how I provide for my family. I have 30 plus properties now. And so we literally live off
0:02:05 of a real estate. The next thing we do is build the business, finding the right people to actually run
0:02:11 the business for us without us doing any work. Because with all my properties, I literally only work
0:02:17 30 minutes a month, 30 minutes a month for every single one of my properties and other people do the
0:02:21 work because I built the business. Now, let me give an example of what building a business looks like. If
0:02:25 you’re going to start a convenience store, you’re not going to just get a location, open door, put a box of
0:02:30 chocolate candy bars in the center, and hope to run a business. That’s essentially what you’re doing if you
0:02:34 just buy a property anywhere without building the business. No, you’re not going to do
0:02:37 that. You’re going to get the gondolas, which are the shelving units. You’re going to get the
0:02:42 countertops. You’re going to get the fountain machines, the cold storage, the cash registers, bank
0:02:48 accounts, employees. You’re going to build the entire infrastructure before you put one piece of
0:02:55 inventory into that business. And when you’re doing that, you now have a solid business. Every piece of
0:03:02 property with my 30 plus properties now, I literally view them as inventory. It’s not a home for me to live
0:03:07 in. It’s a piece of inventory, just like a candy bar. So once I have the business built, every new
0:03:13 property is like another box of candy bars inside my business. And I could just keep adding and adding
0:03:19 and adding into that business. Does that make sense? Sure. So this is, you’re talking about like the team being
0:03:25 the property management, the realtor, perhaps the handy person to come out and fix stuff when it breaks. Like, is
0:03:31 that what you mean? Your number one person is your quarterback, and that is your property manager. So you, what I
0:03:36 suggest is I literally have all my students interview six different property managers, because you’re going to make
0:03:40 that this is the number one person you’re going to work with. There’s so much to talk about, which we
0:03:46 can’t go into that right now. But your other people you’re going to get are many wide receivers or
0:03:50 running backs, if you know a football analogy. So these are the people that are going to be making
0:03:55 plays for you. And these are realtors. These are wholesalers. Wholesalers are basically like
0:04:00 realtors, but they’re not licensed. They find sellers and they find buyers and put them together. You’re going to
0:04:06 find other investors that are willing to sell. You’re going to find other ways to find properties, seller
0:04:09 financing and all that sort of stuff. You’re going to get somebody on your team that’s going to be doing
0:04:12 your insurance. You’re going to get somebody that’s on your team that’s going to be doing your finances.
0:04:17 You’re not just finances, but funding. Make sure you get mortgages and things like that right. And even
0:04:24 handymen, contractors, roofers, plumbers, you’re going to get all this stuff developed and know that you will
0:04:30 absolutely have a business built before you buy that property. Because I’ll give you an example of a big
0:04:36 reason why I never fly anymore is I flew to Illinois. I went to Springfield, Illinois, a great town,
0:04:41 great place, but I literally could not find a good property manager. And I thought, man, I flew all the
0:04:45 way out here and I can’t find a property manager. I can’t buy a property because nobody’s going to manage
0:04:50 it. Or at least I could not find somebody. All this time and everything was wasted. So now I literally do
0:04:55 everything remotely through the phone, through internet and all that sort of stuff. And I found there’s no need
0:05:00 to actually fly to another city ever again to even start a brand new place. And especially all my
0:05:06 students have literally done that as well. So yes, building the business is getting your team, getting
0:05:11 the infrastructure of your business so that it runs for you automatically and makes you money every
0:05:17 single month. Now having that team in place is what it allows real estate to be a passive income stream
0:05:23 for Dustin, because there are many a burnt out landlord who will tell you that it’s anything but if you
0:05:28 don’t have that infrastructure in place. Now, the most powerful thing that Dustin said in that interview
0:05:33 actually came at the very end of the call. And it was him describing getting laid off from his
0:05:40 government job, the job he thought was super secure. And in that moment, the identity shift of becoming
0:05:46 an investor first, a real estate investor first, and an employee second, because he did, you know,
0:05:50 he went and found another job. And he might have only had one or two properties at that point,
0:05:56 but he saw the way out. And he said, look, it took another 10 years to build the portfolio to build
0:06:02 up that cash flow. But it started from that really low point of getting laid off and shifting the
0:06:08 mindset. My day job is now my side hustle was kind of how he phrased it. So that is episode 387
0:06:14 in your archives. If you want to go back and check that out. Another popular side hustle I would put in
0:06:19 this category of buying cash flowing assets, it would be vending machines. So you’re going to pay
0:06:25 upfront for the machine for the inventory, but then they can make sales 24 seven without having you
0:06:31 around. If you find a good location, they could easily generate $500 plus per month in profit. And
0:06:36 it’s a matter of stacking those up, stacking locations, adding more machines and and building
0:06:42 that route to get to your income goal. The other cool thing about the vending businesses is pretty
0:06:47 low risk. If one location isn’t working, it’s portable, you pack up that machine and try someplace
0:06:53 else. Here’s part of my chat with Mike Hoffman from episode 599 on how he got started as a vending
0:06:59 preneur. So you get your first yes from this apartment building, this athlete or student apartment
0:07:02 building. And then you start looking around, well, how am I going to get a machine? Walk me through
0:07:07 what happens after that. I literally Google vending machines. You kind of got two routes here. You got
0:07:14 the, you go down the use path, look on places like marketplace and Craigslist and even local refurbish
0:07:20 type places like appliance type places. And then you got these new places. And the best analogy I would
0:07:25 use is a new vending machine manufacturer is very similar to a car dealership. So I called them up.
0:07:30 They’re like, all right, Mike, the machine you want, it’s going to be about $5,500. Do you want to pay
0:07:34 for it upfront or do you want to finance it with zero money down? And I was like, okay, tell me
0:07:39 about your financing options. Like, oh, we can do it over 60 months. You can use profits to pay them
0:07:46 off early. And every single one now I’ve financed with zero money down and I typically have them paid
0:07:52 off in the first year just with profits. Okay. And that’s like the real estate mindset of leveraging
0:07:58 other people’s capital versus coming up with a hundred percent down payment. Yeah. And this is back to
0:08:02 the, like when I bought that a hundred grand house, I had to put 20% down and that just wasn’t
0:08:08 sustainable every single rental. So this is where with vending, I just bought 18 grand worth of vending
0:08:12 machines, I think in October, and I didn’t put a dollar down. And the benefit there is that you got
0:08:16 something brand new. Cause I’m, I’m on a Facebook marketplace, of course, like, well, shoot, what’s
0:08:23 available to me from the 500 to a thousand dollar range. It looks like for some drink machines. Okay.
0:08:27 A little bit more than that for like the combo machines or the snack machines. I don’t know how
0:08:32 old they are. I don’t know if they have card readers, but there’s options if you want to minimize the
0:08:37 upfront sticker price of these things too. There’s definitely options. I got my first machine used and
0:08:42 then it broke after six months and I was like, I never want to do that again. I don’t want to be a
0:08:47 machine mechanic. None of that stuff. I just want this thing to run it. Are they like relatively reliable?
0:08:53 To what extent do you have to know the fixing game or do you have a go-to vending machine fixer
0:08:56 person that you can call? Like if something does break?
0:09:01 Yeah, that’s why. So ever since that first, when I got off Craigslist broke, I’ve only bought new
0:09:05 ever since. And so they’re under warranty. So if anything were to ever, I mean, you got to keep
0:09:09 in mind, these things have been around for decades, so they’re built to last. I mean, we’re talking
0:09:17 20 years plus. So they constantly are built to be robust and to be used. So if I ever have an
0:09:21 issue because mine are under warranty, I just FaceTime them when I’m at the machine, they do
0:09:26 their little troubleshooting thing. If there’s any issues, they just overnight me apart. And like I
0:09:30 said, I don’t want to be the mechanic. Yeah, that becomes a little bit less passive at that point.
0:09:36 Exactly. So walk me through the math here. So new machine, 5,500, you’re financing that over a period
0:09:42 of several years. What’s typical payment? Typical payment is right now with interest rates are around
0:09:49 170 bucks a month. Your first payment isn’t due until 90 days after it’s installed on site. So
0:09:56 you’re going to do 90 days of revenue before your first $170 payments due. And then it’s $170 a month
0:10:01 typically. And that’s just based on today’s rates of let’s just say eight to 9%. I don’t know.
0:10:07 I have one. Sure, sure. Yeah. Four years ago that my payments are $112. So they’re definitely a little
0:10:13 variable there. And then, yeah, you can just use profits to pay those off of those machines. I just
0:10:19 used as an example that are 170 bucks a month. I mean, we had one in January that just did over $1,500.
0:10:26 Okay. $1,500 of revenue minus your cost of product. You aim for a, what, like a 3X markup,
0:10:30 like stuff and vending machines. It’s not cheap. Exactly. You pay for the convenience. Yep. Yep. So
0:10:37 typically we’ll be around 35, 40%. So let’s just shoot high on expenses. Let’s say 40% of $1,500.
0:10:45 So what’s that? $650, $700 in cost of goods. Okay. So we’ll call it 800 in profit on that
0:10:52 $1,500 a month. Yep. Okay. Yeah. Minus your 170 in payment and you’re still in the black pretty
0:10:55 healthily and you pay it off faster if you don’t like paying interest and you can parlay that into
0:11:01 the next machine, next location. Okay. So you’re starting to try to see how this can work out and
0:11:06 you have so far minimized your overhead. Definitely recommend checking out that full episode if you missed
0:11:13 it number 599 in your feed. Mike breaks down his criteria on what makes a good location for him
0:11:19 in terms of residential building population, number of units or office building occupancy. Yes,
0:11:24 you got to restock the machines, but that just means you’re making sales. Also under this category of
0:11:30 buying cash flowing assets would be stuff like short-term real estate backed loans, like on ground
0:11:35 floor. It could be dividend investing. Like for years, I was focused on building up my truly passive
0:11:42 dividend and interest cashflow, setting new monthly milestone targets. Could I get it to $1,000 a month?
0:11:48 Could I get it to $1,500, $2,000? Very passive. Maybe not the most exciting ROI in the world. You can
0:11:54 sometimes generate better returns by looking for businesses for sale nearby. After all, that’s what
0:11:59 dividends are, right? It’s a portion of the company’s profits paid out to shareholders. I’ve got a fun
0:12:06 example of someone doing just that coming up right after this. Remember data from the Goonies,
0:12:12 the guy with all the gadgets, or data from Star Trek? I think that’s why I say data instead. And one thing I
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0:13:20 business owners instead of business doers. You’re always going to run into problems,
0:13:25 and problem solving is a really important skill, but I’m constantly trying to remind myself,
0:13:30 I don’t need to know how to solve everything. I just need to be able to find the people that do
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0:14:29 need. We’re back and we’re talking the four types of passive income and which flavor might make the most
0:14:35 sense for you in your financial journey. The first type is buying cash flowing assets, which is
0:14:41 historically the takes money to make money option. But with a little creativity and finding the right
0:14:47 opportunity, you might be able to buy some cash flow with little or no money down in the form of a local
0:14:51 small business. Here’s Hannah Ingram from episode 571.
0:14:57 I read this quote by Warren Buffett that said, if you don’t find a way to make money in your sleep, you will work
0:15:01 until you die. That really just like hit me like a ton of ricks right there. I was like, it hits you,
0:15:05 right? Yeah. I was like, what can I do that actually makes passive income?
0:15:09 Yeah. And for most people, that’s like the traditional retirement path. Like I’m going to build up this huge
0:15:15 nest egg and you’re eventually going to live off the dividends interest appreciation or it’s rental
0:15:20 properties that I can build off that cash flow or I could build a business that spins off cash flow,
0:15:25 but it absolutely hits you. You’re like, well, shoot, I’d rather not wait or I’d rather not work
0:15:31 until I die. I’d like to have some optionality here. Exactly. That was my whole thought press and I think
0:15:38 really long term. So I was like, man, I am not going to work until I die. Like I’m going to be retired by
0:15:43 the time I’m 30, you know? So I was like, okay, I sat down. I was like, what businesses are actually
0:15:47 making money. You know, if I’m at the gym, if I’m hanging out with friends, if I’m out selling real
0:15:53 estate, showing a house or whatever. And that’s when I was like, okay, car washes, laundromats,
0:15:59 storage unit facilities. So like those were like the three that I really went hard and put a focus on
0:16:04 trying to acquire. Where were you shopping? I was looking around like on loopnet.com,
0:16:09 correctc.com. I was doing driving for dollars, kind of like the whole wholesaling method,
0:16:14 but with businesses and just scouring the internet. Can I pause you? What do you mean by
0:16:19 driving for dollars? So driving for dollars, I was like driving around looking for kind of like
0:16:24 ran down businesses and I would slide a note under the door. Okay. You know, with my number on it,
0:16:28 asking if they’re interested. Yeah. If they’re like the building is still there, but they’re not,
0:16:32 it doesn’t appear that they’re operational. That or it looks really ran down because I’m trying to
0:16:37 find a motivated seller. So I’m trying to find one that’s ran down that doesn’t look like it’s been in
0:16:43 business for a while or whatever. Okay. And so you come across, so a loopnet is one that I’ve heard
0:16:48 of. Crexie is new to me. And so I was just, you know, looking around what, what might be available
0:16:53 found a car wash for me, but they’re asking $2.4 million in Seattle. They’re like, uh, and it still
0:16:59 looks kind of run down. It’s like, it’s marked as like a development project or something. So was it
0:17:03 through one of those searches or had you come across the property that you landed on?
0:17:10 So I’ve been searching for forever. And apparently this car wash had just hit the market. I didn’t
0:17:15 even know it was listed yet. And a friend of mine told me about it because I had mentioned it to her
0:17:22 and she told me, she was like, Hey, this one’s for sale. It was in my same town. So I just hadn’t seen
0:17:28 it yet, but it was like up for sale. I just had not actually laid eyes on it being listed yet.
0:17:30 Okay. That’s great. So what’s your next step?
0:17:36 Next step was contacted the sellers, took a tour of the property, got the financials,
0:17:39 made sure this thing was actually making money. Then we went from there.
0:17:41 So what was the sticker price? Or do you remember what the sticker price was?
0:17:48 It was 150K and I talked them down to 140. So I got it for 140K.
0:17:53 And that’s based on a multiple of their last 12 to 24 months of earnings.
0:17:58 I don’t really know how they came up with the number, but that was just kind of what they threw
0:18:03 out there. That’s what they wanted. It included the business and the land or was it leased on top of
0:18:09 the land? Nope. Land, building, business, equipment, everything. Wow. I got to move to Tennessee. That
0:18:14 sounds way better than 2.4 million. Hannah went on to explain that she didn’t actually need the
0:18:20 $140,000 to close on the business. She was able to negotiate seller financing, basically borrowing
0:18:25 the purchase price from the current owner and then paying off that loan with the proceeds from the
0:18:31 business. I think at the time we recorded, it was earning around $5,000 a month. Creative, low risk
0:18:36 way to do it. And definitely an inspiring episode about finding that unconventional path, inserting
0:18:43 yourself into income streams that are already flowing. That’s episode 571 in your archives.
0:18:47 Now, we’ve heard from a couple other entrepreneurs in this vein. Link Moser went out and bought some
0:18:53 cash flow in the form of local web hosting businesses. It was something that he was already
0:18:57 doing. And I’m going to grow through acquisition, find other little mom and pop operators that have
0:19:03 a book of business, sometimes as little as 20 or 30 clients. But after that recurring revenue,
0:19:09 hosting and maintenance piece of it, Jono Santa Maria bought a laundromat. So keep your eyes peeled
0:19:16 for something that you might be able to apply your skills to and see what types of businesses might be for
0:19:22 sale. Jono had a background in digital marketing. So he was able to improve the online presence of the
0:19:28 laundromat ended up and making a couple other tweaks, but ended up tripling the revenue of the business in 12
0:19:34 months. And so I was like, well, I paid this price, but I have a feeling I’m going to be able to increase
0:19:40 that value. And the cool thing about it is because it’s a business asset, well, now I’m pocketing that
0:19:45 extra cash flow every month. But I’ve also, in theory, tripled the equity in that business as well,
0:19:50 or tripled the exit value of that too. So a way to build near-term cash flow and potentially long-term
0:19:56 wealth as well. And like Hannah described some creative financing ways to go about it too.
0:20:02 The second type of passive income is to build cash flowing assets. So if number one was the
0:20:08 takes money to make money option, number two is the sweat equity option, building something of value,
0:20:15 say a digital product, a book, an app, a course, a website that earns advertising revenue. These things
0:20:21 obviously take some time and energy to create and to market, but can run relatively passively,
0:20:28 often for years, if you set it up right. One of my favorite examples of planting little mini digital
0:20:34 money seeds is the digital product or printable business. And a lot of the time, sellers are relying
0:20:40 on Etsy organic search traffic or teachers pay teachers organic search traffic. So you don’t
0:20:45 necessarily need to start with an audience of your own. I loved how Cody Berman explained it in
0:20:53 episode 665 on how even low search volume terms, they can stack into significant income streams.
0:20:58 Those are the numbers he’s talking about in this clip, estimated monthly searches on Etsy.
0:21:03 I usually don’t touch anything under 50. And some people think that’s crazy. Some people,
0:21:08 some other Etsy quote unquote gurus don’t touch things that are under like 200. But for me, I’m like,
0:21:13 there’s 50 people searching for this a month and there’s zero competition. And I can scoop up,
0:21:19 say even 20% of them, 10 people buy my $5 thing. I like to think of these each as like a little mini
0:21:23 passive income machine. Like that’s 50 extra dollars per month. And that 50 adds up. Like if you can
0:21:28 get an army of these $50 per month products, even if they don’t have a lot of search volume,
0:21:32 you get 20 of those going, that’s $1,000 per month and mostly passive income.
0:21:38 E-Rank was the tool that Cody mentioned to estimate the search volume. We’ll link that up
0:21:43 in the show notes. Another type of digital asset that you can make money from is YouTube videos and
0:21:48 you don’t even have to sell anything. Lately, the Side Hustle Nation YouTube channel, as a point of
0:21:54 reference, is earning $20 to $30 a day in what I might call relatively passive income. And I say
0:21:59 relatively because, yeah, it took some time to create the videos, but it tends to stay fairly consistent
0:22:05 whether or not I upload anything new. Now, of course, the goal is to keep stacking evergreen videos
0:22:10 that have that long shelf life where some of the top performing ones are stuff that I uploaded years
0:22:18 ago. If you can add 10 more $100 per month videos, that’s another $1,000 a month to the bank.
0:22:23 Insurious YouTubers are going to say, dude, you’re shooting way too low. That’s a really modest goal.
0:22:28 And they can make tens of thousands of dollars from a single popular upload. But the idea here,
0:22:34 create something once, get paid over and over again. That’s the hope anyways. In my case,
0:22:39 like five to 10 minute videos, mini digital assets, a lot like the printables that Cody was talking
0:22:46 about. Now, lately, I’ve been using a tool called Pictory to pull in a bunch of B-roll clips in just
0:22:51 a few minutes. That’s really sped up the process. I’ve got a demo slash review video with a promo code
0:22:57 I can link up in the show notes if you want to check out that tool. And sometimes the video asset that
0:23:01 you create doesn’t even have to be that long. Like we’re talking five to 10 minutes in the example of
0:23:06 YouTube. But with the Amazon influencer program, sometimes a one to two minute product review
0:23:12 video can take off and generate some serious income. I think most of what makes you successful
0:23:18 as a product reviewer has remained constant. You have to, it’s work. You have to put in the time.
0:23:23 You have to be fairly consistent. There were a lot of people who started around the same time I did,
0:23:31 who worked really hard for six months, made 500 videos, made 20,000, $30,000 off that, but then just
0:23:38 burnt out. And so I think the best advice I can give anyone now is set manageable goals, you know,
0:23:44 do five videos a week, but do that consistently over a period of several months. And then it starts
0:23:49 to compound. And if you’re only making pennies in the beginning, just know it’s, it’s a numbers game.
0:23:54 And you know, it might not be my, my best product review. I did a review in my first year. I was about
0:24:00 six months in and I was starting to figure out what things sold better and what was trending. And I found
0:24:06 something that popped off and it made me $17,000. And I have not had that kind of success since them.
0:24:13 However, that product still makes me a few hundred dollars every single month. And if I had only done
0:24:17 my first 400 videos, I never would have had that product. And so it’s just being consistent,
0:24:23 looking for different things and improving over time, as far as your product selection and as well
0:24:26 as the style of the videos, things like that. You just get better at it.
0:24:31 17 grand from one video. You never know what’s going to pop off. Yeah. There was some effort in
0:24:35 creating that stuff, but create it once and it sits out there and can earn you passive income
0:24:43 for sometimes years. That was Tyler Christensen from episode 656. Now the Amazon influencer program
0:24:48 is still, uh, by application only, but it might afford an opportunity to, uh, double or even triple
0:24:55 dip on income. For example, after you’re established as a product reviewer, as, uh, as an Amazon influencer
0:25:00 brands start to send you product for free. They might even pay you to create the video. You’re like,
0:25:02 Hey, I don’t want your free product anymore. You’re going to have to pay me to do this.
0:25:07 And a lot of times they’ll say yes. And then you can earn your Amazon commissions on top of that.
0:25:12 And you might even resell the item when you’re done with it. Triple dip on this, uh, on this stuff.
0:25:18 So that’s the Amazon influencer program. Episode 656 was our update on that. Now I’ve got just a
0:25:25 fraction of the videos that Tyler, uh, has uploaded. I’m maybe 60 at this point, but still made over
0:25:32 $700 in passive income from those last year, stacking up those mini digital assets. Another popular
0:25:38 passive income idea under this category of building cash flowing assets is to create an online course
0:25:44 around an area of expertise. Now, like we talked about in our recent, uh, side hustle trends episode
0:25:50 with Spencer Haas, I think it’s becoming harder to sell a straight up a pre-recorded video course.
0:25:57 The trend seems to be shifting toward higher touch, uh, cohort based groups, personalized coaching,
0:26:01 community participation. And the good news is that those can command a higher price point.
0:26:06 The bad news is they’re less passive from the creator standpoint, but still I go back to
0:26:12 Jack Hopkins, the online course guy who has dialed in his piano in 21 days course marketing and sales
0:26:17 funnel over the last 10 years. So that it pretty much runs on autopilot.
0:26:22 There’s one opt-in on the website. Every page will point you to that opt-in and it’s an ebook,
0:26:28 a workbook called learn 36 popular songs in five days. That book I haven’t updated in a few years.
0:26:33 It offers a lot of value to people that are in my target market. Beginners looking to get quick wins
0:26:38 on the piano without sheet music and a lot of the traditional like music nerd stuff, like a lot of
0:26:43 theory and whatnot. So they download that. And then there’s about a 12 day evergreen funnel where they
0:26:51 get a lot of value through emails, through video and a, a limited time window to get a discount on the
0:26:55 program. So you can go to my website and buy the course at full price. I have two tiers. One’s $500,
0:27:01 one’s a thousand dollars, but inside that limited time window of the funnel, you can get in for basically
0:27:08 20% off. And those two packages go to $400 and $800. And that funnel has been exactly the same for many
0:27:15 years. One of the videos in there is me and my baby sitting on my lap, just super casual video, like less
0:27:17 than a year old. She’s about six and a half now.
0:27:22 Yeah. That’s where you really notice the passage of time. It’s like when you see your kids at these old
0:27:26 videos or old photos, you’re like, dang, that’s weird. Cause I haven’t aged at all.
0:27:32 When we recorded it, Jacques had sold over $4 million worth of his piano course, including lately
0:27:38 between 10 and $30,000 a month. That’s the power of building an asset that you can sell to multiple
0:27:43 people following a repeatable and scalable system. It’s actually really similar to a software business
0:27:48 where you sell access to a tool you created. Even if you’re not a coder, AI can help you build these
0:27:54 things now, which I think is really interesting. We had Pete McPherson on the show earlier this year
0:28:00 about how he used AI to create several different web apps. Now, a couple idea generating strategies
0:28:06 he shared were to scratch your own itch, create a tool to solve a problem in your own life or business,
0:28:12 or unbundling one feature of a more expensive tool, and then selling that as a standalone product.
0:28:17 Another one of my passive income streams is my portfolio of Kindle books, paperbacks,
0:28:25 and if you ignore launch periods, those have been earning between $200 and $500 a month
0:28:31 for years. And I’m actually starting to kick around some new book ideas this year after taking a few
0:28:37 years off. Obviously, a lot of effort to create, but can be really passive once the book is out there.
0:28:43 In nonfiction, it’s probably better off to consider your book as an authority builder,
0:28:50 the book as a business card mentality, and consider any royalty income as really just a bonus. For me,
0:28:55 it’s a top of the funnel. It’s a discovery point. If people are searching for side hustle information
0:29:02 on Amazon, I hope they find the books and enter into the ecosystem that way. But it’s, you know,
0:29:06 obviously, I’ll take the royalties too. Other self-publishing strategies that can tap into the
0:29:13 power of Amazon would be low-content books like journals or diaries or coloring books, maybe even
0:29:20 created with the help of AI. We had Aaron Kerr on the show years ago. He said he made like $100,000
0:29:27 from public domain publishing. His bestseller was this Anne of Green Gables compilation, if memory serves.
0:29:33 So lots of different ways to go about it and tap into the power of the pre-existing Amazon marketplace
0:29:39 in the example of Kindle books, paperbacks, audiobooks. Now, also under this category of building
0:29:45 cash-flowing assets, I would include websites or blogs, but the marketing, the SEO landscape has been
0:29:51 challenging lately, to say the least. If you can drive traffic from social media, from Pinterest, from email,
0:29:57 or even paid ads to a site monetized with advertising or affiliate partnerships, it can still be a viable
0:30:02 business and one where every piece of content can pay you over and over again. I mean, some articles
0:30:08 that I drafted years ago are still bringing in revenue every day, just not as much as they once
0:30:13 did. So that’s the second type of passive income and one we cover quite a bit on the show because
0:30:18 usually the startup costs are pretty low. It’s the sweat equity side hustle. The third type of passive
0:30:25 income is renting or selling access to assets that you own or control. And I’ll share some fun examples
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0:32:52 The third type of passive income is to rent or sell access to assets that you control. This could include
0:32:59 extra space around your house. It could be your backyard pool with a site like Swimply or even the
0:33:05 data generated by your phone through services like Caden. And we’ve seen several examples from side hustle
0:33:10 show guests renting out things that they own, sometimes with a surprising level of demand.
0:33:16 I went right into panic mode of, oh my gosh, I just bought this RV for a lot of money and my wife
0:33:19 doesn’t want to be here and jumped down to Craigslist and threw it up for rent.
0:33:25 Okay. So you’ve got this big expensive asset slash liability at the moment, but hopefully it turns
0:33:29 into an asset sitting in the driveway and said, well, shoot, what am I going to do with this thing?
0:33:36 So you turn around, put it up for rent on Craigslist. What kind of reaction does that get? Any takers?
0:33:41 Yeah. You know, it blew my mind. I literally had inquiries coming in within a couple of hours.
0:33:46 So the light bulb like immediately went off. People are, hey, I need it for this weekend because that
0:33:51 was in July when I purchased it for her. So it’s like in the middle of summer and people are like,
0:33:53 oh, hey, we’re going camping this weekend or that weekend, you know?
0:33:54 Sure.
0:33:55 So it was, it was wild.
0:34:01 That’s Gar Russell from Fireside RV who ended up buying a few more RVs to rent out before
0:34:07 transitioning to a lower overhead model of helping other people rent out their RVs and acting kind of
0:34:13 like a property manager slash booking agent. Yes, there’s work involved, but your income is tied
0:34:18 to the asset, not necessarily the hours you’re putting in. A similar strategy would be rental
0:34:23 arbitrage, leasing long-term and renting short-term with the landlord’s consent. Of course,
0:34:28 we’ve heard from guests like Richie Matthews doing this with apartment units and it was an
0:34:33 Ikea explosion was the line I remember from that episode. So you’ve got a little more upfront costs
0:34:39 in signing a lease and furnishing the place, but still relatively low risk if you’re confident in
0:34:44 your market research demand. And of course, a lot less investment than just buying a property outright.
0:34:48 But in several cases, we’ve seen entrepreneurs buying smaller assets for the sole purpose of
0:34:53 renting them out like Lenny Tim did with his mobility scooter rental service.
0:34:55 A brand new one is about
0:35:01 1500 bucks right now, a little less, a little more, but I actually bought mine used and
0:35:08 I look for about 500 bucks. I go on Facebook marketplace or any other local marketplace and I’m looking to get it for
0:35:15 about 500 bucks. So as you can, you know, see, I pretty much got my money back within one, two, three rentals.
0:35:22 Yeah. I’m thinking, yeah, if it’s 250 a week plus 75 delivery, like a couple of weeks later, I’m, I’m in the black on this, on this unit.
0:35:24 How many do you have at this point?
0:35:25 Right now I only have seven.
0:35:29 You say only. I mean, that’s a pretty serious fleet.
0:35:39 Yeah, it’s not bad. I have seven right now and I, you know, I make it work. I could definitely have a lot more, but I just, I keep it completely a side business.
0:35:49 The other interesting thing that Lenny did, and this is from episode 564, is he didn’t even buy that first one until he had a critical mass of inbound inquiries wanting to rent from him.
0:36:17 When I came up with the idea, it was back in 2019. My first thing was to just build a website just to see if there’s a demand. I want to see if there’s a demand for these scooter rentals. I didn’t go out to buy any equipment. I didn’t do anything like that. So that’s pretty much how I started just to build out a really nice website, just to see if I’m getting customers, if people are going to call, if people are going to make any requests before I actually go out and buy anything or commit to the business.
0:36:33 Did you do anything specifically on the SEO front to build backlinks, to build the Google business profile, to do anything other than just having like the exact, you know, what somebody might be searching for in the URL and then in the content on the site itself?
0:36:56 Well, first of all, the name, LA Mobility Scooter Rentals. I tried to get a domain that’s going to, you know, match, I guess, search pretty good. I didn’t really do anything special. I don’t know much about SEO. I just built a website. I did as much back-end SEO as I could. Whatever they asked me to fill out, I filled it all in. You know, mobility scooter rentals, mobility scooters, all that kind of stuff.
0:37:07 Put some good pictures, put up as much info as I could. I’m pretty sure I, you know, opened up a Google My Business page right away. And I may have did the Yelp as well at the same time, but that’s pretty much it.
0:37:12 Did you have a metric in mind? Well, if I get five requests a month, then I’m doing it or something like that?
0:37:21 Probably more than that, yeah. I definitely had something in mind where I would want to make decent money and it would probably have to be several requests a day.
0:37:33 During this time, Lenny would reply to customers and say, hey, sorry, we’re booked up at that time or we don’t have the inventory available. And then only after hitting that critical mass of inquiries did he go out and buy his first scooter.
0:37:40 He even did that in a pretty lean startup way as well, like we talked about finding one used on Facebook Marketplace.
0:37:51 Now, I’m a fan of these lower cost, unconventional rental assets. Like we did an episode about moving boxes, you know, renting out portable plastic boxes for moves.
0:37:55 We’ve done photo booths. We’ve done portable hot tubs. We did an episode about renting out dresses.
0:38:03 And here is actually Summer Fisher from that episode explaining why dresses are a unique asset class people probably don’t think about.
0:38:12 When you’re buying a dress, you’re buying cash flow, basically. So the dress, just like a house, the dress is the asset and I’m buying the cash flow from the rentals.
0:38:24 And so I’ve got to kind of make a mathematical decision. Is, you know, the money best sitting in the dress or is it best moving it on and buying something that’s kind of yielding a better rental?
0:38:27 She even gave a couple ideas on how you could get started for free.
0:38:33 If you want to get started, the two ways you can get started without putting a lot of money into inventory
0:38:41 is you can work on a consignment model. So you can go to all your friends and family and say, who’s got dresses? They want me to rent.
0:38:42 Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it.
0:38:44 Yeah. You could get started that way.
0:38:56 The other way is, and this might be a bit controversial, but you can buy things on, say, if you’re in the US, you could buy things on somewhere like Revolve that have, you know, change of mind return policies.
0:39:16 And you could see it put it up for rent, see if it rents. If it doesn’t rent, you send it back. And before you have to pay your credit card. And then you can get a feel for what rents. And at least then if you have gotten that piece that rents, you’ve already recouped, you know, a third of your investment straight off the bat before you’ve actually had to pay any money out.
0:39:35 Again, that’s Summer Fisher from episode 652. Now, what if you don’t want to deal with physical assets, physical products at all? There’s another type of side hustle that I would lump into this rent or sell access to assets category. And that’s product licensing. Here’s Stephen Key from InventRight on why it makes such an interesting side hustle.
0:39:53 It doesn’t require any capital. You don’t have to set up a company. And there’s so many companies out there that need us creative people. So they’re looking for ideas. And every year, there’s just more and more opportunity for us to submit ideas to companies and let them pay us royalties for everyone they sell.
0:40:05 So that’s the basic business model is saying, hey, I am the idea guy who we just had on the show, and I’m going to turn around and essentially sell that intellectual property to some company who can turn that into a product and make money off it.
0:40:09 Absolutely. You’re basically renting your idea to a company.
0:40:09 Okay.
0:40:29 And they’re going to pay you on everyone they sell. So you don’t have to start a company. You don’t have to worry about manufacturing or raising money or do any of those things. And what’s really great about it, Nick, it’s really speed to market today, right? If you start a company, raise capital, all those type of things that you need to do to be successful, it takes a lot of time and effort.
0:40:39 When you license an idea, you find that perfect partner that has relationships, distribution, money, they can put your product on the shelf extremely, extremely quick.
0:40:56 Steven went on to explain that 5% of gross sales is a pretty typical product licensing agreement, which may not seem like a lot. But if you think about the distribution and economies of scale that some of these larger brands have, it can really add up, especially for something with super low startup costs.
0:41:01 I mean, you’re basically taking something for free from your brain and getting paid for it.
0:41:04 And Steven had some great tips on how to approach companies with your ideas.
0:41:09 But one thing that was surprising to me is a lot of companies already have a process for this.
0:41:16 They’re really open to crowdsourcing product ideas from people like you and me and paying us for them.
0:41:25 For example, if you look up Hasbro submit ideas, you’re going to find a structured program called Hasbro Spark that lays it out, how it all works, how to submit your proposal.
0:41:31 So be sure to check out that full episode with Steven for more on how product licensing works.
0:41:32 I’ll link that up in the show notes.
0:41:37 And I also want to add that product ideas aren’t the only thing that you can license.
0:41:38 We’ve seen examples.
0:41:40 You can license photography.
0:41:42 You can license voiceover work.
0:41:43 You could license music.
0:41:46 I think we’ve got examples of just about all of those in the archives.
0:41:52 So for that third category of passive income, think unconventional rentals.
0:42:03 Think creative assets that people might want to use occasionally, but maybe can’t justify buying themselves or they don’t have a place to store themselves or licensing your work or your ideas.
0:42:09 Again, trying to figure out ways to get paid multiple times from work you do once or something that you buy once.
0:42:10 And maybe you may not even have to buy it.
0:42:14 Like in Gar’s example of the RV, I’m renting out other people’s RVs.
0:42:20 Or maybe you could work out a consignment sort of deal with somebody else and act as a property manager for that asset.
0:42:25 Like Summer mentioned, you know, maybe I could consign other people’s dresses and do rentals for those.
0:42:30 The fourth type of passive income is what I call reverse passive income.
0:42:34 Reverse passive income comes from cutting your ongoing monthly expenses.
0:42:36 This is Ben Franklin.
0:42:37 A penny saved is a penny earned, right?
0:42:41 And it’s actually better than that because, well, your earned income is going to be taxed.
0:42:46 So simply spending less money might be the fastest path to improving your bottom line.
0:42:52 And the truth is, it’s a lot more fun when you view it, when you view saving money as a game instead of a necessity.
0:43:01 One way I try and do this is through what I call the substitution game, which aims to find better, faster, cheaper alternatives to what I’m already spending money on.
0:43:05 What that looks like in practice is taking stock of your monthly spending.
0:43:06 Easy way to do it.
0:43:12 Just bring up your bank statement or credit card statement and look at each transaction and ask, is there a better alternative here?
0:43:18 And you might find some room to completely eliminate or cancel certain expenses or subscriptions.
0:43:22 But I find the substitution game doesn’t even have to feel as drastic.
0:43:28 Classic example was switching from Verizon to Ting to Mint Mobile for cell phone service.
0:43:32 Over the years, that’s added thousands of dollars in reverse passive income to our bottom line.
0:43:37 It could be renegotiating your TV or internet service to get a better deal.
0:43:41 It could be shopping around for a better car insurance rate.
0:43:43 It could be dropping that annual fee credit card.
0:43:52 One huge one for us that a lot of people don’t consider was actually a big substitution Joshua Sheets mentioned on the show probably 10 years ago.
0:43:57 And that was moving to a lower cost of living area or a lower tax area.
0:44:07 Now, the Seattle area, definitely not a low cost of living area, but it had one big advantage over California, where we used to live, in that it’s a no income tax state.
0:44:09 Washington state, no income tax.
0:44:17 If you’ve got a portable skill, if you’re location independent, if you’re a remote worker, this is one of the biggest levers you can pull.
0:44:21 But it’s obviously pretty uprooting to pull off, so not for everyone.
0:44:27 On a smaller scale, one thing you might consider is a house hacking arrangement to offset some of your living expenses.
0:44:32 This is where you buy or rent more space than you need, and you rent out a portion of it.
0:44:37 On the business side, the substitution game is called Operation Tool Swap.
0:44:44 This is where you look at your tech stack or your monthly software expenses, and you see if there are alternatives that would accomplish the same thing.
0:44:52 Steve Chu and I talked about Zapier earlier this year, when they went out and doubled their pricing, we switched to Make.com.
0:44:55 Same functionality, fraction of the price.
0:44:57 AppSumo is a great resource for finding deals.
0:45:03 You might even pause services that you don’t use every month or have some duplicated functionality.
0:45:13 Like we were able to pause Otter, which was an AI transcription service that we used really consistently, because it turns out that same functionality is already built into Descript.
0:45:21 I created the RoboNIC AI voice clone in 11 labs, but I don’t use them every month, so we just toggle that subscription on and off as needed.
0:45:30 Even Ahrefs introduced a lower tier price plan that was still more credits than we needed, so we were able to drop down to that without any impact to the business and save some money every month.
0:45:39 Now for personal, what I might call luxury or non-essential expenses, I try to apply a 30-day waiting period, call it a cooling off period.
0:45:45 How it works is if there’s something you want to buy, just put a note in your calendar to ping yourself in 30 days.
0:45:48 And if you find you still want it, go for it.
0:45:57 But oftentimes, you’ll find you lived a perfectly happy existence in the meantime, as it just makes you reevaluate how important it really is and might save you some money along the way.
0:46:05 In our episode on creative ways to save money, Jen Smith gave us her four-question framework to use before any purchase.
0:46:07 Before I buy anything, I use these four questions.
0:46:09 How can I get it for free?
0:46:15 So like a buy nothing group or free on Facebook Marketplace or from a friend either trading or borrowing.
0:46:19 If I can’t get it for free, how can I get it for low cost?
0:46:21 And so that’s where secondhand comes in.
0:46:25 How can I get it on Poshmark, eBay, ThredUp?
0:46:29 Can I buy it from Facebook Marketplace, Thrift Store?
0:46:39 Or if I can’t get that, and I don’t spend a ton of time searching for these, I’m, you know, depending on how fast I need something, I’m not searching for years, right?
0:46:40 Right.
0:46:45 I’m just, I’m looking, I’m trying to get creative before I just first go out and buy it new.
0:46:50 If I can’t get it low cost, I ask, how can I get a deal on it?
0:46:53 Like, how soon is the next sales cycle coming up?
0:46:55 Because they always come back around.
0:47:02 And then if I really need it and I can’t wait for a sale, how can I buy full price and not feel guilty about it?
0:47:06 So is there a way I can buy locally or sustainably?
0:47:08 Something like that.
0:47:13 So those are the four questions that I ask before I buy something in order to save money.
0:47:17 Now, ahead of any big purchase, I try and do a few things.
0:47:19 Obviously, shop around, try and get the best price.
0:47:23 Maybe even try and negotiating if you feel like that’s a thing that is an option.
0:47:27 Maybe add it to your cart from a couple different stores and then let it sit a few days.
0:47:34 A lot of online stores have some kind of abandoned cart email offer where they may send you a special discount to complete your purchase.
0:47:41 You’ll also want to check a site like Cashback Monitor to see how you might maximize your cash back on the order.
0:47:48 Basically, there are a bunch of affiliate sites that split their commission with you when you buy through their links at no extra cost.
0:47:49 So it’s like getting free money.
0:47:55 Rakuten is the one that I’ve used most consistently and have saved hundreds of dollars at this point.
0:47:58 Another thing you can do is check for card linked offers.
0:48:10 For example, you can look in your Chase or Bank of America or Capital One portal and you’ll often find an extra 5% to 10%, 15% back on stuff you might be buying already.
0:48:15 You just have to check the box and sometimes you got to buy through their link or sometimes you got to add that offer to your card.
0:48:18 Typically, only check for bigger purchases.
0:48:24 And these are usually listed in Cashback Monitor as well as a way to check multiple different portals at once.
0:48:27 Another thing you can do is buy discount gift cards.
0:48:29 Costco can be a good source for these.
0:48:36 I actually used to buy big discount Costco gift cards at like 5% to 10% off through some discount gift card site.
0:48:40 Just a little bit, a little ways to save money on what you’re already spending.
0:48:47 And then once or twice a year, if I know we have some expenses coming up, I’ll look at new credit card sign-up offers, sign-up bonuses.
0:48:51 These usually range from $200 to $1,000 in value.
0:48:54 For spending money, we were going to be spending anyway.
0:49:00 So it’s a way to mentally offset the cost of the new thing, like an appliance purchase or plane tickets for the family.
0:49:04 We also did an episode recently on bank bonuses.
0:49:09 Not entirely passive because you got to set up a direct deposit and meet some other minimum requirements.
0:49:18 But my guest, Dylan, said it was easily a $200 to $300 an hour side hustle that he was able to do consistently with one new account a week.
0:49:26 And I’d seen those offers before, but always thought, oh, it’s too big of a hurdle to switch over my entire banking life for a few hundred dollar bonus.
0:49:28 He said, Nick, you’re looking at it all wrong.
0:49:30 You don’t have to switch over your primary account.
0:49:32 You just have to meet these few requirements.
0:49:37 Check the boxes, collect the bonus, lather, rinse, repeat on the next one.
0:49:39 And all of a sudden, it looks a lot more attainable.
0:49:43 So that is episode 663, if you want to check that one out.
0:49:45 But that’s reverse passive income.
0:49:47 Perhaps the easiest of the four to start with.
0:49:49 Get some quick wins under your belt.
0:49:51 Improve your bottom line by saving money.
0:49:52 Getting some easy cash back.
0:49:56 So to recap the four types of passive income in this episode.
0:49:59 Number one was to buy cash flowing assets.
0:50:00 We talked about real estate.
0:50:02 We talked about vending machines.
0:50:03 We talked about small businesses.
0:50:05 We talked about dividend investing.
0:50:07 Lots of different ways to go about that.
0:50:10 Number two was to build cash flowing assets.
0:50:13 Remember, this is the true side hustle, sweat equity option.
0:50:17 Digital products, printables, courses, e-books, websites.
0:50:19 Anything under that umbrella.
0:50:24 Number three was to rent or sell access to assets that you control.
0:50:31 RVs, cars through two-row space in your backyard shed through a neighbor.com.
0:50:32 Could be Airbnb.
0:50:37 Could be renting out mobility scooters, photo booths, dresses, portable hot tubs, moving boxes.
0:50:41 We’ve got lots of fun examples on this kind of rental business.
0:50:45 Like this semi-passive asset where you can get paid over and over again from something that
0:50:50 you bought once or maybe even you don’t own in the example of Gar’s RV rental service.
0:50:55 And the fourth type of passive income is that reverse passive income where you can cut recurring
0:50:55 expenses.
0:51:01 You can play the substitution game, maximize your cash back, strategically work out credit card
0:51:08 bonuses or bank bonuses into your year, and maybe even consider a 30-day no-spend challenge
0:51:11 or, you know, 30-day waiting period before any big purchase.
0:51:16 But my recommendation is to start with a small passive income goal.
0:51:22 Something that is small enough to be attainable, but big enough that it’s still interesting and
0:51:23 meaningful to you.
0:51:24 That’s a sweet spot.
0:51:27 For me, it was $1,000 a month.
0:51:30 And there was a specific project I was hoping would get me there.
0:51:35 That was my virtual assistant website back in 2011, 2012, 2013.
0:51:37 And eventually it did.
0:51:39 And so that was really rewarding.
0:51:41 That was like, I’m going to build up this passive income stream.
0:51:47 But hopefully this episode has sparked some ideas on the many, many different ways side hustlers
0:51:49 have started to build their passive income.
0:51:54 Building passive income streams that aren’t directly tied to your time is such a crucial step
0:51:59 in building financial independence, even if they start out super small.
0:52:05 I remember a line from Mike Newton 10 plus years ago on the show about, he said,
0:52:12 I’m more excited about earning $5 passively than $5,000 actively because that $5 didn’t
0:52:13 trade time for it, right?
0:52:15 It had the power to scale.
0:52:21 Really empowering and encourage you to carve out a portion of your week dedicated to pursuing
0:52:22 time leveraged income.
0:52:23 Nobody’s going to do it for you.
0:52:25 It’s not going to happen by accident.
0:52:26 You got to take control.
0:52:28 You got to be proactive about it and do that.
0:52:32 Big thanks to all our guests for sharing their passive income advice over the years.
0:52:35 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:52:40 Be sure to check out sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our
0:52:41 sponsors in one place.
0:52:43 That is it for me.
0:52:45 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:52:49 If you’re finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:52:53 So fire off that text message, let them know and say, hey, what kind of passive
0:52:56 income would you like to add to your life?
0:53:00 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen and I’ll catch you in the
0:53:02 next edition of the Side Hustle Show.

0:00:03 12 big ideas from 12 years of The Side Hustle Show.
0:00:08 Now, the first 10 ideas here aired in the milestone episode 500 back in 2022.
0:00:13 And I’ll be back at the end with a couple new ones to add for this 2025 edition.
0:00:20 Big idea number one is to set a vision for your life and determine why it’s important to you.
0:00:23 Where do you want to go and why do you want to get there?
0:00:25 And who do you want to take along for the ride?
0:00:30 Because without that driving motivation, it’s going to be too easy to quit.
0:00:33 It’s the same reason people give up on their New Year’s resolutions.
0:00:34 They didn’t want it bad enough.
0:00:36 It wasn’t that important to them.
0:00:39 Otherwise, by definition, they would have made it happen.
0:00:45 I was never much into vision boards or affirmations or anything like that.
0:00:51 But a couple people challenged me in 2018 to actually sit down and write out a three to five
0:00:54 year vision of what life was going to look like.
0:01:00 One of those people was Brian Scudamore, the founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
0:01:06 My number one tip would be anyone out there who wants to improve their life, improve their
0:01:10 business, grow a business, I’d say come up with your vision.
0:01:14 What is your painted picture, I call it, of where you’re going?
0:01:21 Now, I sat down on a dock in my parents’ summer cottage when I was at a million in revenue and
0:01:25 I wrote down on paper, one page double-sided, our painted picture, which said we’d be in
0:01:27 the top 30 metros in North America.
0:01:29 We’d be the FedEx at junk removal.
0:01:31 We’d be on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
0:01:37 All these things and more happened because we had a destination, a clear vision of what that
0:01:38 future would look like.
0:01:41 So for anyone in life, I think it’s what’s your painted picture?
0:01:44 What does your life look like in three to five years?
0:01:45 And write it down.
0:01:49 At that time when I recorded with Brian, his business was doing about a million dollars in
0:01:51 sales every day.
0:01:54 And maybe there’s some survivorship bias going on here.
0:01:59 But when an entrepreneur at that level gives that advice as his number one tip, you got to
0:01:59 take notice.
0:02:04 And since Bryn and I went through that painted picture exercise four years ago, we actually
0:02:07 made quite a few moves to get closer to it.
0:02:13 And maybe on the other side, it’s made it a lot easier to say no to projects and so-called
0:02:16 opportunities that don’t support that shared vision that we had.
0:02:20 Because if you don’t know where you’re going, how are you going to be able to reverse engineer
0:02:21 a path to get there?
0:02:27 At some point, there needs to be a force, either internal or external, to get over the inertia
0:02:32 of doing the same thing and hoping for or expecting different results.
0:02:35 Mitch Davis put it this way in episode 324.
0:02:38 Number one tip is you got to do something.
0:02:42 Otherwise, tomorrow, the next day and the next month and the next year is going to be the
0:02:42 same.
0:02:45 That’s a line I refer back to quite a bit.
0:02:48 You got to do something or tomorrow is going to be the same.
0:02:55 And when you find that reality unacceptable, like Shane Sams did, you have no choice but to
0:02:56 take action and do something about it.
0:03:00 Long story short, I found out my son was being mistreated in a daycare.
0:03:01 He was being abused.
0:03:04 They were locking him in a bathroom for hours at a time.
0:03:08 And the day that I needed to take off work to deal with this, my boss told me that I
0:03:10 needed to handle my personal problems after work.
0:03:16 And that’s what inspired me and moved me to go work for myself.
0:03:19 And I promised myself that I would never be in that situation again.
0:03:22 I would control every second, every minute of my life.
0:03:26 Someday, somehow, it starts as a side hustle, but it ended up being more.
0:03:32 As a parent, that’s just a terrifying thought, but it illustrates how motivating a bad situation
0:03:34 can be to get out of.
0:03:39 If things in your life are pretty good, relatively speaking, you got to find another powerful why
0:03:40 to get going.
0:03:42 So that’s big idea number one.
0:03:47 This driving motivation or optimistic vision of what life could be.
0:03:50 But visions and motivations don’t pay the bills.
0:03:51 So what do you do next?
0:03:57 The second big idea I’ve noticed from the last 500 episodes is what I call the piggyback principle.
0:04:01 Find a hot trend and piggyback on that hot trend.
0:04:05 That would be my best advice for anyone starting out is find something that’s really hot or popular.
0:04:11 And instead of just going for that item, sell an accessory or an add-on to the really popular item.
0:04:14 That was Tony Anderson way back on episode 194.
0:04:18 So when you’re trying to come up with a side hustle idea, we’ve seen some great success stories
0:04:21 of people catching a rising tide.
0:04:25 In a sense, this is the old business model of selling shovels into a gold rush.
0:04:28 For example, you know, more and more people are hiring cleaning services.
0:04:33 Maybe you could start one of your own in your own town, like Anthony and Junoka Hartsog, like Chris Schwab.
0:04:37 Or maybe you could build some booking software that makes their life easier, like Jobber.
0:04:41 Or maybe you could help them collect more reviews, like Chris Lillini.
0:04:43 And more people are starting podcasts, as another example.
0:04:48 Maybe you could help them with the editing or the show notes, like Podcast Fast Track,
0:04:50 or Awesome Pros, who’s been on the show.
0:04:52 Companies are getting involved in content marketing.
0:04:55 Maybe you could offer a freelance writing service, like Georgia Austin.
0:04:57 More and more parents are homeschooling.
0:05:01 So maybe you could offer a class on out-school, like Jade Weatherington or Devin Ricks.
0:05:05 More and more people are using XYZ-specific software.
0:05:09 So maybe you could create some video training materials and consulting services, like Paul Miners.
0:05:13 Example after example of this big idea number two.
0:05:18 Catch a rising tide, piggyback on those trends, and I think you’re going to have an easier
0:05:21 time than, you know, fighting against the current, trying to convince someone that this is something
0:05:22 that they need.
0:05:27 So be on the lookout for new trends in your industry, because there’s an advantage to being
0:05:28 early as well.
0:05:29 So now we’ve got the motivation.
0:05:32 We’re keeping an eye on interesting trends.
0:05:34 Just paying attention to what we see happening.
0:05:40 Or you can use a tool like Google Trends to measure the relative interest in a search term
0:05:41 over time.
0:05:45 Or you could subscribe to a newsletter like Trends, Trends.co, which is really well done.
0:05:48 And I think there’s still a free trial over there.
0:05:52 But after that, it comes time to solve a problem.
0:05:54 And that’s big idea number three.
0:06:00 The vast majority of guests that you hear on the Side Hustle Show built a business to solve
0:06:01 a specific problem.
0:06:03 That’s what customers pay money for.
0:06:06 That’s what I pay money for as a business owner, as a customer, as a consumer.
0:06:11 I don’t particularly care about your passions and motivations as long as you can make my pain
0:06:12 go away.
0:06:14 Here’s John Lee Dumas to explain.
0:06:17 Frankly, a lot of people are getting some so-so advice out there.
0:06:21 One of the pieces of advice people are getting are, follow your passion.
0:06:22 That’s enough.
0:06:23 Just do that.
0:06:29 And that’s terrible advice because, listen, if it’s just your passion and there’s no value
0:06:31 to go with it, it’s just a hobby.
0:06:34 Because, listen, people are going to be happy for you that you’re passionate about something.
0:06:41 But unless it’s providing real value to their world, unless it’s providing a real solution
0:06:45 to their problems, they’re not going to care that much.
0:06:46 I promise you.
0:06:48 And that’s just called being a human being.
0:06:50 So you need to say, OK, what am I passionate about?
0:06:51 What am I excited about?
0:06:52 Good.
0:06:52 Check.
0:06:53 I know all these things now.
0:06:56 OK, now step two, what am I good at?
0:06:58 What skills do I have?
0:07:00 What value can I add to this world?
0:07:01 OK, step two is done.
0:07:02 I know those things now.
0:07:08 Step three, how can I combine what I’m good at, value that I can add to the world, skills
0:07:12 that I have with something that I’m passionate about and excited about and fired up about?
0:07:13 What does that look like?
0:07:18 What is that zone of fire that I call that lies in the middle, that intersects those two?
0:07:26 That’s a combination and a co-mingling of your passions and your skills, of your enthusiasm and
0:07:27 your expertise.
0:07:29 That’s your zone of fire.
0:07:31 That’s where your big idea lies.
0:07:33 Because now you’re excited about it.
0:07:34 You’re going to get up every day and do it.
0:07:35 But also, guess what?
0:07:37 You are going to be adding value to the world.
0:07:39 You’re going to be solving real problems.
0:07:45 And other people are going to care then because they will care when you provide solutions to
0:07:46 their problems.
0:07:51 Now, the good news here is that humans, we’re natural born problem solvers.
0:07:54 So how do you go find problems you can solve?
0:07:55 Number one, through conversations.
0:08:00 You can ask people questions like, you know, what challenges are you facing right now?
0:08:02 What are the biggest threats to your business?
0:08:04 What’s the most annoying thing in your life right now?
0:08:07 Number two, maybe your own pain points.
0:08:09 Where do you spend your own money?
0:08:12 And especially the money that you’re kind of meh about spending.
0:08:13 Like you wish there was a better option out there.
0:08:16 Julia Tunstall explained recently on the show.
0:08:20 She couldn’t in good conscience recommend any of the barware that was being sold on Amazon.
0:08:25 So she and her husband, Chris, ended up having their own stuff manufactured and they were off
0:08:26 to the races with that.
0:08:31 And then maybe the third thing is what do other people complain to you about?
0:08:35 If other people are complaining to it, maybe on the other side of that, there’s a business
0:08:40 opportunity because problems are everywhere, but it’s the solution that may be the money
0:08:42 making opportunity, the side hustle opportunity.
0:08:48 The trick is to find a pain, find a problem that’s both real and perceived and hopefully worth
0:08:49 spending money to solve.
0:08:52 This is Greg Hickman from episode 270.
0:09:02 Pay really close attention that you are falling in love with the problem that you solve, not the
0:09:04 solution to the problem.
0:09:05 Why do you say that?
0:09:06 Just because the solution may change?
0:09:07 Yeah.
0:09:07 All right.
0:09:09 Fall in love with the problem.
0:09:12 So can I just give a little backstory on that real fast?
0:09:13 Yeah, let’s hear it.
0:09:17 So before Systemly, I had a business called Mobile Mix.
0:09:19 It was a blog, podcast, turned into a mobile marketing engine.
0:09:23 We were selling mobile services specifically to independent retail.
0:09:24 Guess what?
0:09:29 Independent retail, A, didn’t think they had a problem at all.
0:09:30 So I had to convince them they had a problem.
0:09:34 Then I needed to educate them on mobile because they didn’t even know anything about it.
0:09:37 Then I needed to connect mobile as a solution to their problem.
0:09:40 These guys weren’t even using email yet.
0:09:44 Like if you think they’re going to be investing in mobile, it was a pain.
0:09:50 I was basically slamming my head into a wall for a year or actually more than that, where
0:09:53 we were just stuck at $5,000 to $7,000 a month in revenue.
0:09:54 Yeah.
0:09:55 You were the mobile marketing guy for years.
0:09:56 Yeah.
0:09:57 Over a decade.
0:09:59 And so talk about pivot, right?
0:10:05 But when I really looked at it, I was so in love with mobile because that was my background.
0:10:06 I spent a decade there.
0:10:07 I was the mobile guy.
0:10:10 Like literally, people sometimes even say like, and it got to the point where I was like,
0:10:12 I just had to have a really tough conversation.
0:10:17 I was like, do I care more about being the mobile guy or do I care more about having a business
0:10:19 that can create leverage and have longevity?
0:10:23 And obviously that decision came down to, yeah, I don’t care about being the mobile
0:10:24 guy anymore.
0:10:27 I can reinvent myself, which is what I had to do.
0:10:29 Now we’re here talking about funnels, not mobile, right?
0:10:36 So just be careful that you might be good at something or love something so much that you
0:10:41 become blinded to the fact that the person you want to sell it to, despite you knowing it
0:10:46 will help, if they don’t feel like they have a problem, you’re never going to sell it.
0:10:49 So fall in love with solving that problem.
0:10:53 And the solution will come and you will find a way.
0:10:57 But as long as you can be in love with that problem, you will always have a business because
0:11:00 you can always solve that problem no matter what the solution is.
0:11:05 Like fall in love with solving the problem, not the way that you solve the problem.
0:11:10 And in your conversations, and this is straight from Dane Maxwell, start from zero.
0:11:14 You can even ask people, well, what would your ideal solution look like?
0:11:15 How much would that be worth to you?
0:11:19 So now you’ve got your problem and a hypothesis on how you might go about solving.
0:11:23 But this is where so many people get stuck on the side hustle sidelines.
0:11:28 Hey, this is Pat Flynn from the Smart Passive Income Podcast.
0:11:34 One of my favorite productivity hacks involves just a little note that is on my computer that
0:11:35 says one single word.
0:11:37 And that word is start.
0:11:40 You know, an object at rest tends to stay at rest.
0:11:45 And for me, I do a lot of things often that just try to fill in that space before I know I’m
0:11:46 supposed to do something.
0:11:49 So I often just procrastinate is really what I do.
0:11:53 So I just tell myself through this note, just to post a note just on my computer, very simple
0:11:55 to just start.
0:12:00 Because once you get started, it starts to go a little bit easier, you build that momentum.
0:12:05 And that’s just the best thing that has helped me is just reminding myself to start because
0:12:08 we always try to get in our own way, don’t we?
0:12:10 This is a big idea.
0:12:13 Number four, just start out of all of my guests.
0:12:14 Number one tips.
0:12:16 This is far and away the most common.
0:12:21 And when so many entrepreneurs attribute their ultimate success to simply getting started,
0:12:23 again, it’s something you got to take notice of.
0:12:26 The frustrating part is what’s often left unsaid.
0:12:27 Just start.
0:12:29 Yeah, but start what?
0:12:30 What should I do?
0:12:33 And the truth is, it really doesn’t matter.
0:12:36 This is Julie Sharonosher from episode 123.
0:12:39 It’s like a chess game.
0:12:40 It doesn’t really end.
0:12:45 If we have chess lovers in the audience, please don’t throw things at me for what I’m about
0:12:50 to say, but it’s like, it doesn’t really matter what’s your very first move is going to be
0:12:55 if you’re the first player starting a match in chess, because whatever it is, you’re just
0:12:58 trying to drive response from your opponent.
0:13:00 And this is what we’re trying to do.
0:13:06 We’re trying to get some sort of feedback from the universe, from your clients, from your customers,
0:13:11 from the people around you, from the readers of your blog, listeners of your podcast.
0:13:14 We’re trying to feel what is the right thing to do.
0:13:15 And you know what?
0:13:21 Even if you get like a horrible response and people say, boo, this is not what we want.
0:13:22 This is crap.
0:13:24 You’re still in a better position.
0:13:25 You know what?
0:13:27 Because this is not a beauty contest.
0:13:31 Now you know which path not to go.
0:13:34 And it doesn’t testify anything about you or your abilities.
0:13:39 It just means that you are one step closer to finding the right thing to focus on.
0:13:44 One thing that’s interesting about the last nine years of interviews is we’ve seen a lot
0:13:49 of entrepreneurs where the business they’re running today isn’t the business they necessarily
0:13:50 started with.
0:13:53 I mean, for me, I started selling paint jobs by going door to door.
0:13:58 Never would have expected it would lead to talking to you and tens of thousands of other listeners
0:13:58 today.
0:14:02 Brian Finley described the phenomenon this way way back in episode 72.
0:14:07 Some of the best opportunities that you’re going to find in business are going to be found
0:14:11 once you’ve already started moving in a direction.
0:14:16 Like very infrequently, you see incredible opportunities before you even start.
0:14:20 Pretty much everything that’s happened around this business, the appliance school, all the training,
0:14:25 everything that’s come out of my buying and selling at Craigslist, there were just opportunities
0:14:30 that just kept presenting themselves after I had started and after I’d put in a bunch of
0:14:31 hard work.
0:14:35 I just want to encourage your listeners, try to get something to work and then just keep
0:14:37 your eyes open for opportunities along the way.
0:14:39 There it is.
0:14:41 One of my most frequently cited pieces of advice.
0:14:45 The best opportunities become visible once you’re in motion.
0:14:50 And if opportunities become visible once you’re in motion, the only rational thing to do is
0:14:52 to get moving and stay moving.
0:14:54 I’ll call it the Loper Law of side hustle physics.
0:14:56 Get started and stay started.
0:14:58 Big idea number five coming up right after this.
0:15:01 Who, not how.
0:15:07 That’s the unlock that transforms side hustlers into business owners instead of business doers.
0:15:11 You’re always going to run into problems and problem solving is a really important skill,
0:15:14 but I’m constantly trying to remind myself I don’t need to know how to solve everything.
0:15:18 I just need to be able to find the people that do know how to solve it.
0:15:20 Who, not how.
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0:16:15 One strategy I didn’t fully embrace or maybe wasn’t fully aware of when I was starting out
0:16:18 was this idea of the piggyback principle.
0:16:22 In the startup phase, that means you don’t have to start completely from scratch, but instead
0:16:27 you can take advantage of existing tools, templates, playbooks, best practices from the people who’ve
0:16:28 gone before you.
0:16:31 A perfect example of this is our partner Shopify.
0:16:37 Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses from household names to side
0:16:39 hustlers on their way to becoming household names.
0:16:44 With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store and start
0:16:45 selling.
0:16:49 Plus, Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools to accelerate your workflow.
0:16:53 We’re talking product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhancing your product photography.
0:16:58 You can even easily create email and social media campaigns to reach your target customers
0:17:00 wherever they’re scrolling or strolling.
0:17:02 If you’re ready to sell, you’re ready for Shopify.
0:17:06 Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side.
0:17:12 Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash side hustle.
0:17:15 Go to shopify.com slash side hustle.
0:17:18 Shopify.com slash side hustle.
0:17:24 Big idea number five is to go where the cash is already flowing.
0:17:29 In fact, this idea was so big, I wrote a whole book about it in 2016 called Buy Buttons.
0:17:31 The thesis is this.
0:17:36 Go find the marketplaces and the meeting places and the connection hubs where your target
0:17:40 customers are already looking to buy the kind of thing that you’re selling.
0:17:46 That’s why we talk about Fiverr and Upwork and Udemy and Amazon and OutSchool and Facebook
0:17:51 Marketplace and Etsy and Redbubble and all of these places that make it relatively simple
0:17:57 to go put your product or service up for sale, tap into this big pre-existing audience of buyers
0:18:01 and make it easy for them to find you and do business with you.
0:18:07 I wasn’t necessarily thinking anything would come of this Fiverr account, but I made it
0:18:11 and I uploaded my first, I think it was just one gig at the time.
0:18:12 It was a website content gig.
0:18:16 And to my surprise, I got my first order within two days.
0:18:23 That was Georgia Austin from episode 479, who was doing 90 grand a month through Fiverr for
0:18:24 freelance writing when we spoke.
0:18:31 Now, think about that experience in contrast to if Georgia had just set up her own website
0:18:34 and said, I can write website content for you.
0:18:35 Crickets, right?
0:18:39 But no, she went to this marketplace where people were already looking for this type of thing
0:18:41 and put the offer in front of them.
0:18:47 Similarly, you can take a look at existing listings on these marketplaces to see what’s
0:18:47 working.
0:18:51 Here’s Rachel Jones on doing some initial product research on Etsy.
0:18:53 Success leaves clues.
0:18:58 So my biggest recommendation is to go on Etsy and just explore.
0:19:04 I mean, you can go as simple as just type in the word printables or digital download and
0:19:05 see what pops up.
0:19:08 And then one key thing you’re going to look for is bestseller tags.
0:19:13 So Etsy gives this information away, which I love for doing research.
0:19:18 But if you’re looking at listings, you can just kind of zoom out and glaze your eyes so
0:19:21 you’re not paying attention and distracted by the pretty pictures, but just look for that
0:19:22 bestsellers tag.
0:19:27 And then once you find that, you can dig a little deeper and that will give you clues as to things
0:19:32 that are selling because there’s, you know, I’m sure millions of products on Etsy and there’s
0:19:34 it’s hard to tell which ones are selling and which aren’t.
0:19:38 But you know if they’re a bestseller that they are getting sales, people are purchasing those.
0:19:39 And so there’s a reason why those are popular.
0:19:44 In just about every niche, there’s going to be a marketplace to set up shop and put your
0:19:45 product or service up for sale.
0:19:50 But if there isn’t an obvious marketplace, you can follow big idea number six.
0:19:54 And this can work with online businesses, with e-commerce products, with service businesses.
0:19:58 And that’s to fast track your side hustle with partnerships.
0:20:04 This is a super common marketing theme throughout the archives, even going back to 2013, 2014.
0:20:13 We had Ryan Cote on episode 34 talking about the value of strategic referral partnerships for his SEO agency.
0:20:19 We had Daniel DiPiazza the very next week talking about his marsupial method, he called it, I guess,
0:20:23 because you’re getting in the metaphorical pouch of a referral partner.
0:20:28 But the gist of it is thinking who your target customers are already doing business with and
0:20:34 then building relationships with those people as a fast track way to potentially connect with
0:20:34 their customers.
0:20:37 And it can be online or offline.
0:20:41 For example, here’s one way Erica Crouppen marketed her pooper scooper business.
0:20:43 What I did was something that was really creative.
0:20:49 I went to Dunkin’ Donuts and I went and got donuts and I broke them up into half a dozen
0:20:49 each.
0:20:56 I walked into local vet offices and pet supply places and I said, hi, my name’s Erica, blah,
0:20:56 blah, blah, blah, blah.
0:20:59 I have donuts and business cards.
0:21:01 May I leave both of them here?
0:21:02 Okay, okay.
0:21:03 Yeah.
0:21:04 And that worked really well.
0:21:08 And so they put my little, because I have a little hot pink cards, they put them up front
0:21:10 and center and they were like, this is the coolest thing ever.
0:21:14 Okay, yeah, that’s an interesting way to break through the clutter.
0:21:17 First, the hot pink business cards and then the donuts.
0:21:19 Like, hey, can I drop my business cards here?
0:21:20 Ah, who are you?
0:21:20 Get out the door.
0:21:21 But hey, you brought us donuts?
0:21:21 Fantastic.
0:21:23 Exactly.
0:21:28 And they get really excited, especially like I went to one pet store and they love donuts.
0:21:30 So they’re like, yes, this is amazing.
0:21:33 And so now they know me as like the poop scooping lady and the donut lady.
0:21:36 Could you go speak at a conference?
0:21:38 Could you guest on a podcast?
0:21:43 Some of the biggest spikes on the side hustle show download chart have come immediately following
0:21:49 a guest appearance on other relevant shows like Entrepreneurs on Fire, like Bigger Pockets
0:21:51 Money, Mad Scientist, Choose FI.
0:21:53 Could you display at an event?
0:21:58 These types of partnerships that allow you to tap into somebody else’s audience are super
0:21:59 powerful.
0:22:05 And I encourage you to brainstorm a list of your top 10, 20, 100 potential dream partners
0:22:08 and think of how you could be of service to them in some way.
0:22:15 We did a full episode on this recently with Dustin Lean in episode 465 and specifically on holding
0:22:20 partner workshops where you offer some free educational workshop.
0:22:24 You showcase your expertise, which is great for consultants and freelancers.
0:22:29 And in exchange, all the partner has to do is invite their audience.
0:22:30 It’s a win win for everybody.
0:22:34 Really, the biggest main question is, where are they already hanging out?
0:22:36 Where are they online already?
0:22:44 What other brand or website or company has a big, like maybe they have a really big budget
0:22:49 and they’ve already spent the money to acquire the customers that you also want to acquire?
0:22:50 So maybe it’s a software company.
0:22:55 When you’re filling out that dream 100 list of who to partner with, think about who has your
0:22:57 exact same target audience, but is not a competitor.
0:23:01 And that brings us back to talking about why niching down is important.
0:23:09 Because if you are, or in my case, I’m doing email marketing and SMS marketing for e-commerce brands.
0:23:17 So now I can go to another agency even, or someone who’s a blogger with a big audience,
0:23:21 but they teach about SEO, specifically SEO for e-commerce.
0:23:22 And now we’re not competitors.
0:23:26 So they don’t have to worry about me trying to siphon their audience for my business.
0:23:28 And I don’t have to worry about the same thing from them.
0:23:33 So we can actually form a good partnership, do a good workshop and cheer each other on
0:23:34 instead of feeling like we have to compete.
0:23:36 It’s definitely a win for everybody.
0:23:40 So let that be your homework for today to think of some potential partnerships
0:23:45 and start laying some of the initial groundwork to go out and make those a reality.
0:23:49 Now, these buy buttons, marketplaces, and strategic partnerships
0:23:52 are great ways to get customers quickly.
0:23:55 But they can also be a little bit fragile.
0:24:00 As anyone who’s ever faced a Google algorithm change or a Facebook update or getting your
0:24:04 social media account mysteriously shut down, those people will tell you,
0:24:08 yeah, you got to go take advantage of these platforms, but you also need to own your audience.
0:24:14 And even nine years later from the side hustle show, the primary way to do that is still through
0:24:15 an email list.
0:24:19 And that’s big idea number seven, build your own email list.
0:24:23 It doesn’t happen by accident, but it doesn’t need to be overly complicated either.
0:24:30 The basic formula is still to offer some sort of lead magnet, be it a cheat sheet, template,
0:24:36 a resource, a guide, a checklist, a free mini course, something of value in exchange for your
0:24:36 visitor’s email.
0:24:41 Here’s how Jennifer Maker broke it down, who, when we spoke, had an email list of something
0:24:43 like 380,000 subscribers.
0:24:46 And I’m sure it’s grown by leaps and bounds since then.
0:24:51 My big goal in everything I do is to get people onto my mailing list.
0:24:58 I don’t put a lot of faith in social media, like I use it, but at any time, Facebook or
0:25:01 YouTube or whatever could say, hey, no go.
0:25:06 So every blog post that I put out is typically it’s a how-to.
0:25:07 If it’s not, it’s something very similar.
0:25:11 And I funnel them to my lead magnet.
0:25:14 And my lead magnets are very high quality.
0:25:20 Typically, you can’t do the project without having my pattern or whatever it is that I’m
0:25:21 giving away totally free.
0:25:25 But it is something that another person might actually charge for.
0:25:31 So it’s something valuable and necessary to do the thing that I am teaching people how to
0:25:31 do.
0:25:34 So all the teaching is in the blog post or the video.
0:25:38 But to actually do exactly what I’m showing you how to do, you want to get onto my mailing
0:25:38 list.
0:25:40 Yes, there’s affiliate links in there.
0:25:42 Yes, there’s a little bit of advertising.
0:25:45 I’ve been actually decreasing that as I grow.
0:25:48 But mostly, it’s to get onto my mailing list.
0:25:52 And from my mailing list, then I nurture them.
0:25:55 I don’t like, like, hey, you want to buy this stuff?
0:25:59 I try to talk to them about me, find out about them.
0:26:00 I invite them to email me back.
0:26:05 And we build or attempt to build trust between us, right?
0:26:06 So that they feel good about me.
0:26:09 And I offer lots of awesome things free.
0:26:14 And when I feel it’s appropriate, then I say, hey, I have an ebook that might help you with
0:26:15 what you’re struggling with.
0:26:16 Or I have a course.
0:26:25 Another popular strategy is the quiz funnel, where you ask visitors to answer a handful
0:26:27 of questions in exchange for personalized recommendations.
0:26:33 This can be used very effectively in e-commerce, like we heard from Connor Meekin recently, and
0:26:35 in content businesses as well.
0:26:38 Here’s how it works for Tori Dunlap from her first 100K.
0:26:41 And here’s how she drives email signups from TikTok.
0:26:46 The caption was, if you want personalized resources, take the free quiz in my bio.
0:26:52 So I had created, along with my team, a system where if you come to my website, you can take
0:26:53 this free quiz.
0:26:56 It asks you questions about your financial experience.
0:26:58 You know, like, where are you at in your life?
0:26:59 How are you employed?
0:27:01 What’s your number one financial goal?
0:27:05 And when you take the quiz, in exchange for your email, you get these results.
0:27:07 You get this list of personalized resources.
0:27:14 And so by directing people to the link in bio, right, I was hoping that if this video did
0:27:17 well, I could, you know, increase my email list.
0:27:19 So the video blew up.
0:27:22 And within a week, we had gained 100,000 email subscribers.
0:27:24 Holy crap.
0:27:26 Which was insane.
0:27:30 So we had already had about 40,000 email subscribers on our general list.
0:27:33 And keep in mind, I had been at TikTok for like nine months at this point.
0:27:35 So we had increased our following quite a bit.
0:27:43 But that video, I think, increased my TikTok following by around 300,000 to 400,000 and
0:27:46 converted 100,000 people to my email list.
0:27:50 It also got me multiple features on BuzzFeed that then blew up.
0:27:54 Features in pretty much every language, a feature on CBS, a feature on NBC.
0:27:56 Like, it was insane.
0:27:59 And so for me, it’s not enough to just go viral.
0:28:03 I need you to have systems in place that can support that virality.
0:28:11 I need you to have very strategic ways that you can convert those followers into either
0:28:12 email list subscribers or paying customers.
0:28:19 And so for me, really how I’ve driven sales from TikTok is either sales of my own products,
0:28:23 my courses, my coaching, my workshops, or affiliate sales.
0:28:27 I’ll talk about a high yield savings account and link my affiliate partner and, you know,
0:28:29 be paid out that way through a conversion.
0:28:34 That is big idea number seven, and it’s really stood out over the last nine years.
0:28:40 Build that email list as a way to weather the storm, as a way to communicate directly with
0:28:45 your target audience without relying on some big tech algorithm to show them your stuff.
0:28:50 Building a similar quiz funnel is definitely something that’s on my project list for this
0:28:50 year.
0:28:54 I’m really inspired by what Tori’s built, and there are lots of other examples of people doing
0:28:55 similar stuff.
0:28:58 You know, building this email list is one of the most important metrics for me.
0:29:02 So if you’re listening to this, if you’re not subscribed, come on in.
0:29:02 The water is warm.
0:29:06 Sidehustlenation.com slash join is an easy way to do that.
0:29:10 You’ll get my weekly newsletter, my best side hustle tips straight to your inbox.
0:29:11 All that jazz.
0:29:13 Sidehustlenation.com slash join.
0:29:17 Now, big idea number eight is actually related to that.
0:29:22 If email is an important metric in your business, it makes sense to focus on that.
0:29:26 One common trait that you might have noticed from Sidehustle Show guests is this practice
0:29:34 of focusing on what matters as a business owner, and especially as a side hustler, you’re going
0:29:39 to face distractions all day long, but there are probably only a few core things that really
0:29:41 matter and move your business forward.
0:29:45 Rosemary Groner explained it this way in episode 268.
0:29:49 You don’t have to work 50, 60, 70 hours a week.
0:29:53 If you spend your time doing the things that make you the most amount of money consistently,
0:29:59 and you eliminate doing the things that make you less amount of money consistently, your
0:30:00 income naturally grows.
0:30:02 Like it’s almost impossible to fail at this.
0:30:08 She went on to explain what that looked like for her blogging business at BusyBudgeter.com.
0:30:14 So I eliminated anything that wasn’t the most important thing for my growth.
0:30:17 So I didn’t answer all of those spam emails that you get there that are like, hey, can
0:30:20 you put this as infographic and in your blog posts?
0:30:21 Like, no, I didn’t even like read them.
0:30:26 I didn’t answer every blog comment, which is something that pretty much everyone tells you
0:30:26 to do.
0:30:29 I didn’t do all the things that everybody else thought was important.
0:30:32 For me, this practice has a few parts.
0:30:36 First, I try and do a daily check-in as part of my nightly shutdown routine.
0:30:43 I ask myself what I got done that day and compare that to the list that I said the night before
0:30:44 were my top priorities.
0:30:45 If they match up, great.
0:30:47 If they don’t, why not?
0:30:47 What happened?
0:30:52 The next phase in this review process for me are my quarterly progress reports.
0:30:58 This is a chance to publicly reflect on what I worked on and the results of those projects.
0:31:02 It’s a great excuse to review a few times a year what’s working in your business and what’s
0:31:02 not.
0:31:07 Other people will call these, you know, after action reports or monthly or quarterly reviews.
0:31:09 But the idea is the same.
0:31:14 Stop for a second to ask yourself if the hours you’re putting in are making any meaningful impact.
0:31:19 Because if they’re not, that’s when it’s time to adjust course before you get in any deeper.
0:31:25 And finally, I run what I call revenue attribution reports once or twice a year.
0:31:28 And this is just a high-level analysis of what’s driving sales.
0:31:29 Like, where is the money coming from?
0:31:34 That way, you can hopefully pour more fuel on the fire for the channels that are working
0:31:37 and maybe cut back your hours on the projects that aren’t as lucrative.
0:31:43 And if you do the important things consistently and move to eliminate, automate, or delegate everything
0:31:47 else, you’re going to start feeling this sense of positive momentum and the flywheel gets
0:31:49 spinning, this sense of positive progress.
0:31:54 If I’m feeling a little bit antsy or stressed or whatever, I’m like, have I exercised today?
0:31:56 What am I behind on?
0:31:58 What is troubling me right now?
0:32:00 I think if you ask yourself, like, what’s troubling you?
0:32:01 Did today matter?
0:32:02 Did I do something that mattered today?
0:32:06 Or was it just kind of like a normal day where I can’t really identify something?
0:32:10 I think you want to have like more and more days where you’re like, yes, today was, it’s
0:32:11 not so much like a great day.
0:32:15 Like, it’s cool to be, to have a great day, but it’s like today actually mattered because
0:32:17 I made progress on something.
0:32:18 And that to me is very motivating.
0:32:20 That was Chris Guillebeau.
0:32:24 And that was a nugget that hit home because there are a lot of days or there were a lot
0:32:29 of days where I kind of felt like I’m in maintenance mode or I didn’t have this, you know, big block
0:32:32 of deep work time to make progress on some new projects, new initiative.
0:32:36 But this daily check-in of did today matter?
0:32:37 I think that can be really powerful.
0:32:41 My buddy, Chad Carson, even has t-shirts that say, do what matters.
0:32:43 I’m still trying to get myself one of those.
0:32:45 So hopefully he puts up some merch for sale soon.
0:32:47 But that is big idea number eight.
0:32:51 It’s this habit of reflection, analysis, and focus.
0:32:55 doubling down on what’s working and adjusting course as needed.
0:32:59 There’s this compound effect of aiming to get a little bit better every day.
0:33:05 More big ideas from 12 years of the Side Hustle Show coming up right after this.
0:33:10 Remember data from the Goonies, the guy with all the gadgets, or data from Star Trek?
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0:35:20 Big idea number nine.
0:35:21 We’re on the homestretch here.
0:35:24 Big idea number nine is growth through mentorship.
0:35:31 The idea of mentors and coaches and masterminds and paying for courses, that was all pretty
0:35:35 foreign stuff to me nine years ago, but I’ve benefited tremendously from all of the above
0:35:36 since then.
0:35:43 I definitely had this sense of maybe ill-placed self-confidence in that, yeah, you know what,
0:35:44 I can figure everything out on my own.
0:35:50 And maybe I could, given an unlimited time horizon, but there’s certainly some value in
0:35:51 shortcutting the learning curve.
0:35:58 First off, by paying attention to what other people in the space are doing, but also paying
0:36:02 for coaching, building your own mastermind group of people working towards similar goals.
0:36:07 Now having been a part of several mastermind groups over the last nine years, it’s hard to
0:36:12 imagine going at it without them, without some sort of peer accountability.
0:36:18 But more than that, it’s the camaraderie and the honest feedback and the glimpse into other
0:36:23 online businesses, it’s super helpful to have a group of other business owners to bounce
0:36:26 ideas off of and help each other work through challenges.
0:36:32 If you’re currently going at it alone, I would prioritize creating some sort of mastermind or
0:36:33 accountability group.
0:36:35 It’s an overused quote, but there’s some truth to it, right?
0:36:38 You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
0:36:41 So surround yourself with people on the same path.
0:36:45 Just a few weeks ago, Joan Farrell left us with this hit home for me.
0:36:50 No matter what you choose to do, you should educate yourself.
0:36:59 Even if you know some about it, the best thing to do is to take a course, go on to YouTube, do
0:37:03 your research before you start it, which is what we did.
0:37:12 And when Jack told me about the Flea Market Flipper University course, it was the perfect venue
0:37:17 because you need education to further yourself no matter what you do.
0:37:22 And you can still be considered learning it on your own.
0:37:28 But when you have somebody tell you exactly the trials and tribulations you’re going to run
0:37:35 into and how to perform the business and how it actually works, it’s a lot easier than trying
0:37:37 to try to do it all on your own.
0:37:40 And education is cheap compared to ignorance.
0:37:48 So you want to just continue to build your knowledge no matter what you choose to do.
0:37:50 Education is cheap compared to ignorance.
0:37:53 It’s the same reason why reading books has a tremendous ROI.
0:37:59 It’s this ability to download somebody else’s experience and skills and knowledge and apply it to your situation.
0:38:04 And it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, but mentorship and investing in your own entrepreneurial
0:38:07 education is definitely a common theme from Side Hustle Show guests.
0:38:12 And again, it probably sounds like common sense to you, but it wasn’t something that was really
0:38:14 on my radar when I started the show.
0:38:21 And that brings me to big idea number 10, which is to level up, to create systems and to become
0:38:24 the business owner more than the business doer.
0:38:31 Tyler Gillespie dropped this challenge slash thought exercise on us in episode 430 in what
0:38:32 he called the laptop test.
0:38:38 If you closed your laptop today, how long would your business survive?
0:38:44 And that’s really important because if someone’s going to buy your business, it’s a huge tell like
0:38:46 how dependent the business is on you.
0:38:53 And the more team you can have implemented and built around yourself where you could close
0:38:58 your laptop and step away for two weeks, a month, which is like kind of the goal I try
0:39:00 to set, then the better off your business is going to be.
0:39:02 That’s going to be really attractive for an investor.
0:39:04 The laptop test.
0:39:10 This is something that I’ve done okay with in certain areas, but for full disclosure, have
0:39:11 completely failed in others.
0:39:17 One exercise that I’ve used in the past is to create a detailed time audit, and I’ve
0:39:20 got a time tracking template that you can download.
0:39:21 I’ll put it in the show notes for this episode.
0:39:23 But the idea is this.
0:39:25 You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
0:39:29 So you need to measure what you’re actually spending your time on.
0:39:34 Do that for a week or two weeks, and you’re going to start to see some patterns of tasks that
0:39:38 you can hopefully eliminate if they’re not really that important, that you can automate and
0:39:42 create some recurring system or process around, or delegate those.
0:39:47 Could you write up the recipe, create the process, and have somebody else on your team
0:39:48 go and follow that recipe?
0:39:50 When is it time for a system?
0:39:57 Jeff DiOrio from EliteChess.net in episode 487, he said, as soon as I got something unmanageable
0:40:01 to where I’m staying up all night doing something, that’s when I think, okay, it’s time to get
0:40:07 a system to get to that next level and pursue some other fun projects or experiments that
0:40:08 I’d like to.
0:40:13 I really need to scale back my involvement in certain day-to-day operational tasks.
0:40:20 So this type of laptop test and systemization is kind of a high priority for me this quarter
0:40:24 and is a big idea from nine years on the show to consistently level up.
0:40:27 You’ve got to be working on your business rather than in it.
0:40:33 Hey, 2025 Nick here with a couple more big ideas to add in the three years since this episode
0:40:34 originally aired.
0:40:39 Number 11 is what I’m calling the only constant is change.
0:40:45 We’ve seen so many industries interrupted by AI or algorithm changes lately, and it feels
0:40:49 new and scary, but we kind of have to take a step back and realize this kind of change and
0:40:51 disruption has been going on for centuries.
0:40:57 The entrepreneurs and businesses that endure are the ones that can adapt the fastest.
0:41:03 The answer may lie in this excellent bit of advice from Jill Tietz in episode 535.
0:41:07 My number one tip is iterate.
0:41:15 If something is not working in the way that you want, don’t just say, you know, it must be
0:41:22 the algorithm or because that person’s lucky or, you know, everyone’s out to get me, make
0:41:22 some changes.
0:41:24 Try something new.
0:41:28 Like a lot of times we’ll do the same thing over and over and over and over and it’s not
0:41:32 working and we don’t know why, but then we keep repeating it.
0:41:37 So just like I did with my posts, make new iterations, try a new thing and then you’ll see,
0:41:38 oh, that was even worse.
0:41:44 So I should change it back or change this and like, so just be willing to try new things
0:41:46 and new versions of what you’re doing.
0:41:47 Iterate.
0:41:50 And if you’ve been listening to the show for any length of time, you’ve probably heard some
0:41:55 of those iterations, starting out with the voiceover hype guy from Fiverr, phasing him
0:41:57 out, working in different intros, different formats.
0:42:01 The latest is the little music bed at the top of the show to see if that brings a bit more
0:42:04 energy, gets people more excited to stick around.
0:42:08 That was a tip from Glenn James at FinCon, big personal finance podcaster in Australia.
0:42:13 Another iteration has been adding the, you might also like section to the bottom of my
0:42:17 newsletter, which inadvertently unlocked a new revenue stream in the form of newsletter
0:42:17 sponsorships.
0:42:23 The answer to growing your business or getting that initial traction, it’s probably evolution
0:42:24 and not revolution.
0:42:29 There may be some small incremental tweaks that you can make to your message, you know, a one
0:42:33 degree shift in direction versus a, you know, a wholesale 180.
0:42:38 And those little changes to your marketing, to your message, to your product, those can
0:42:39 have a big impact.
0:42:43 But doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, that’s the
0:42:46 definition of insanity, at least a quote attributed to Einstein.
0:42:48 Hashtag not fact checked on that.
0:42:53 The 12th big idea I want to share is to remember it’s just a game.
0:42:54 Yes, you should play to win.
0:42:55 That’s the whole point.
0:42:59 But if you’re not having fun, maybe it’s time to find a different game.
0:43:04 This is a variation of finding the work you love to do that lights you up and figuring
0:43:06 out how to remove or delegate the rest.
0:43:13 It’s about finding a state of flow and excitement and energy around your business and tasks such
0:43:15 that you wake up in the morning and you’re excited to get to work.
0:43:19 In episode 511, Matt Ruttenberg gave this advice.
0:43:26 Especially when you’re looking for a side hustle, I think using your superpower, whatever that
0:43:31 is, whether it’s are you analytical, are you kind of a networker, do you like to talk to
0:43:32 people, do you like to connect with people?
0:43:38 Find something that will always be natural for you and that’ll help you be as successful
0:43:40 as you can be and be interested in it.
0:43:44 Truthfully, I’ve always found this advice to be a little bit stressful.
0:43:45 Like, look, I don’t have a superpower.
0:43:51 I don’t have the ability to knock through walls or predict the future or even edit amazing videos.
0:43:56 But I’ll give the example of a superpower I’ve come to embrace the last couple of years, which
0:44:00 years ago never would have even considered a skill, let alone a superpower.
0:44:05 But it’s Matt’s words were, you know, what comes natural to you?
0:44:09 And so the one that came up for me was this natural curiosity.
0:44:14 And this comes up again in the Side Hustle Nation surveys or podcast reviews or conversations
0:44:19 with listeners like, hey, you seem genuinely curious or you ask the follow-up question that
0:44:20 was on the tip of my tongue.
0:44:26 And I think that curiosity is something that’s helped me produce 600 plus episodes of the show.
0:44:27 It’s fascinating.
0:44:30 What makes all these businesses tick?
0:44:31 How’d you come up with the idea?
0:44:33 How’d you find your first customers?
0:44:35 How’d you figure out how much to charge?
0:44:37 How, when did you feel comfortable leaving your day job?
0:44:39 I love all of that stuff.
0:44:43 And it works or has worked on the written side, written content side of the business too.
0:44:48 Some of my best performing pieces of content started from my own curiosity.
0:44:50 Well, how, how does this app work?
0:44:52 How do people make money doing, you know, fill in the blank?
0:44:55 And so that’s a superpower that I’ve been leaning into lately.
0:45:00 And I think the kids are helpful on the curiosity front too, because they’re naturally curious
0:45:02 about how things work.
0:45:09 And it forces you to stop and look at the leaves and bugs and stuff that you would normally walk
0:45:10 on by without even questioning.
0:45:14 Actually, on that note, a story from FinCon, I think is relevant.
0:45:17 A tale of two very different networking strategies.
0:45:21 First guy comes up and he’s like, hey, I had the goal to hand out 50 business cards tonight.
0:45:22 I’ve only got five left.
0:45:23 Would you take one?
0:45:24 Sure.
0:45:25 You know, and then he walks away.
0:45:26 They’re like, great, dude.
0:45:31 Second guy, a friend of mine, you know, looking around this crowded networking happy hour.
0:45:34 He’s like, the way I see it, I’m surrounded by teachers.
0:45:36 And I just love that quote.
0:45:37 I’m surrounded by teachers.
0:45:39 I can learn something from everybody.
0:45:42 So, so in that scenario, please try to be more like guy number two.
0:45:50 So to summarize, we’ve got 12 big ideas from 12 years and 670 plus episodes of the Sign Hustle
0:45:50 Show.
0:45:54 It was a big challenge to narrow these down to just 12 because it’s weird.
0:46:00 I felt like I was a reasonably well-educated and reasonably successful entrepreneur when the
0:46:01 show started.
0:46:04 Yeah, I have learned so much from my guests over the years.
0:46:04 It’s incredible.
0:46:10 The knowledge that rubs off both from individual conversations, but really from the repetition
0:46:16 of doing it and the cumulative advice and common themes and traits that start to bubble up to
0:46:18 the top over the years.
0:46:23 But to recap, we have number one was to set the vision and figure out why it’s important to
0:46:24 you from Brian Scudamore.
0:46:27 Number two was to piggyback on trends.
0:46:30 We’ve got a recent episode all about the piggyback principle.
0:46:32 Number three is to solve problems.
0:46:35 People pay to make problems go away.
0:46:38 Number four was to just start and stay started.
0:46:42 An entrepreneur in motion tends to stay in motion and just start.
0:46:44 Remember, choosing what’s next doesn’t mean choosing what’s forever.
0:46:45 Just start.
0:46:49 One of the most common pieces of advice from entrepreneurs when asked for their number one
0:46:50 tip for sign-ass all nation.
0:46:54 Number five is to go where the cash is already flowing.
0:46:56 Go where your audience already is.
0:47:00 In the words of Charlie Munger, the first rule of phishing, go phishing where there’s fish,
0:47:00 right?
0:47:04 Number six was to fast track with partnerships.
0:47:08 Who is already speaking to the people that you want to get in touch with?
0:47:10 Fast track with partnerships.
0:47:12 Number seven is to build your email list.
0:47:14 How are you going to algorithm proof your business?
0:47:15 Think of it that way.
0:47:19 Something that you own and control and can be proactive about communicating with people about.
0:47:23 Number eight is to do what matters and to do it consistently.
0:47:25 Remember that advice from Rosemary Groner.
0:47:31 It’s almost impossible to fail if you do what matters, what has ROI, and you do it consistently.
0:47:34 Number nine is to accept mentorship and education.
0:47:37 There’s a sense of pride in, well, I figured this out all on my own.
0:47:42 But to fast track your learning curve, lean into mentorship and education.
0:47:45 Number 10 is to level up.
0:47:48 Become the business owner more than the business doer.
0:47:50 This is the call to create systems.
0:47:53 This is Tyler Gillespie’s laptop test.
0:48:00 This is the automation, elimination automation delegation framework, like leveling up in your
0:48:01 life and your business.
0:48:07 Number 11 is the first of the new ones that we added for the 2025 edition was to iterate.
0:48:08 The only constant is change.
0:48:10 That has never been more true.
0:48:13 It seems like the pace of change has absolutely accelerated.
0:48:18 But it is a constant that we can almost, you know, set our watch to, we can rely on.
0:48:23 And so you have to be prepared to continue to innovate and iterate in your business.
0:48:24 And finally, number 12.
0:48:26 Remember, it’s just a game.
0:48:29 And if it’s not fun, go find a different game.
0:48:37 This is the call to follow what seems easy or effortless to you and follow that direction.
0:48:40 Swim downstream versus trying to paddle against the current.
0:48:46 So I owe a huge heartfelt thank you to every single guest over the years, over 600 of you
0:48:48 and to you for tuning in.
0:48:52 I also owe a big thank you to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:48:54 That is it for me.
0:48:59 If you found value in this episode or any other over the last 12 years of the show, the greatest
0:49:00 compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:49:03 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:49:05 and I’ll catch you in the next edition
0:49:06 of the Side Hustle Show.

0:00:06 Here’s an oldie but a goodie from the archives from the Side Hustle Show Greatest Hits Collection.
0:00:10 Plus, stick around for the time travel segment at the end where we check in with present-day
0:00:15 Anthony to get his update on everything that’s happened since this 2021 original.
0:00:18 What’s up, what’s up, Nick Loper here.
0:00:23 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show because your 9 to 5 may make you a living, but your 5 to
0:00:24 9 makes you alive.
0:00:31 In this episode, you’ll meet Anthony and Janilka Hartzog, who were on a mission to erase
0:00:34 six figures of debt, which they ended up doing in under two years.
0:00:39 They were making good money at their day jobs, they’re following the Dave Ramsey debt snowball
0:00:44 plan, but they came to this realization, like many listeners of the show do, there’s only
0:00:46 so much you can cut from your budget.
0:00:50 That’s when they turned to the income side of the equation and started a ton of different
0:00:51 side hustles.
0:00:57 They picked up second jobs at their gym, they were renting out their car on Turo, they
0:01:03 were dog-sitting, and inspired by my episode with Chris Schwab, 295, they started a residential
0:01:07 cleaning business called Maidstomatch.com.
0:01:14 Today, that business is doing $20,000 to $25,000 a month in sales with other people doing the
0:01:14 cleaning.
0:01:19 Anthony and Janilka are fully in business owner mode, dedicating just a few hours a week to
0:01:19 it.
0:01:24 Stick around in this one to hear how they got it done while working full time, including
0:01:28 how they connect with reliable cleaners and the marketing tactics that are paying off.
0:01:35 You can follow along with their journey at The Hartramony on Instagram, H-A-R-T, and you’ll
0:01:40 find the full text summary of this episode along with the links and resources mentioned at
0:01:45 sidehustlenation.com slash clean2, clean and then the number 2.
0:01:50 While you’re there, make sure to download the free list of 101 service business ideas that
0:01:53 you might be able to apply Anthony and Janilka’s strategy to.
0:01:59 Once again, that’s at sidehustlenation.com slash clean2 or through the link in the episode
0:02:01 description of your podcast player app.
0:02:04 I’ll be back with my top takeaways after the interview.
0:02:05 Ready?
0:02:06 Let’s do it.
0:02:15 I came across one of your interviews where it was a kid, a guy that was making $10,000 a
0:02:20 month in cleaning, but the caveat was he wasn’t cleaning houses himself.
0:02:21 That was a big caveat.
0:02:26 So I brought the idea to my esteemed wife and…
0:02:26 I said no.
0:02:32 At that time, at first I thought he meant that we were going to be cleaning and he explained
0:02:35 no, but at that time we had never run a business before.
0:02:37 So it was just kind of left field.
0:02:38 It’s like, well, how do we do this?
0:02:39 How do we know where to start?
0:02:45 He’s like, I’m telling you, I listened to this podcast and he’s been doing it.
0:02:46 So it kind of was a no.
0:02:51 And then he brought it back maybe two, three months after with more results, more information
0:02:52 that he’s gained, that he gained.
0:02:55 And that was the kickstart for us.
0:02:55 All right.
0:02:58 So this is Chris Schwab, you know, from ThinkMades.
0:03:02 It’s like, if he can do this, you know, while he’s still in college, like we ought to be able
0:03:03 to figure this out.
0:03:07 After convincing Janilka, what was the next step to make this thing a reality?
0:03:12 Before she even came back around and quote, unquote, me convincing her, the idea had to
0:03:12 be planted first.
0:03:13 That was a big part of it.
0:03:15 Plant the idea, plant the seed.
0:03:18 And then we’ll revisit it over the next couple of weeks.
0:03:21 So I spoke to Chris and he explained some of the basics.
0:03:23 I did a lot of Googling, a lot of researching.
0:03:25 And it was like, listen, we could do this.
0:03:26 We’re not going to have to clean.
0:03:28 Here’s how we’re going to do it.
0:03:29 We’re going to hire contractors.
0:03:37 It’s going to be similar to like handy.com or Airbnb or even Uber, Lyft, DoorDash.
0:03:38 We’re not going to deliver food.
0:03:40 We’re not going to have hotels.
0:03:44 It’s going to be us connecting cleaners with people who want their houses cleaned.
0:03:51 Yeah, it’s an interesting one because thinking advantage of the current state of the business
0:03:56 where a lot of these existing operators in the cleaning space and in really a lot of local
0:03:59 service businesses, they don’t have a great online presence.
0:04:03 They kind of rely just on the clients they’ve always had or, you know, maybe a little bit
0:04:08 of word of mouth, but like they’re not doing a lot of proactive marketing stuff in the digital
0:04:08 age.
0:04:14 And so you’re saying, okay, we can come in here and present a well thought out brand, which
0:04:19 you’ve done at maidstomatch.com and then go out and find cleaners for that.
0:04:24 So was it a matter of trying to book the jobs first or try and find cleaners first?
0:04:26 Oh, that’s our number one question.
0:04:29 The chicken, which come first, the chicken or the egg?
0:04:34 Well, we always say that we get the contractors first because we don’t want to do the clean.
0:04:38 So if you start booking the jobs and they come in, unless you’re able to go out there and
0:04:40 do the clean, you need to have the contractors.
0:04:44 And I know sometimes people are saying, well, I don’t have enough work for contractors.
0:04:46 So why would I continue to bring them on?
0:04:48 But as a contractor, they have other jobs.
0:04:50 They’re not just relying on you.
0:04:55 So that’s okay for them to just be waiting, you know, maybe a week or two to get jobs from
0:04:55 you.
0:04:59 But we definitely say get the contractors unless you are comfortable going to clean the
0:05:00 home yourself.
0:05:04 And we tell all of our students that because it’s important to know what you’re going to
0:05:07 do first because a lot of them get stuck on that, what comes first part of it.
0:05:10 And if we tell you what should come first, you should just go and do that.
0:05:14 So we try to make it as simple as possible when we’re talking about,
0:05:17 this business structure, not only for us to learn it, but also for our students as well.
0:05:21 What was that process like for you guys to find those cleaners?
0:05:22 That’s why I’m finding the business.
0:05:23 People.
0:05:28 Finding people to this day when people always act as we would say, always be hiring.
0:05:33 So we’re always marketing the same way we market for our cleaning business.
0:05:35 We market for contractors as well.
0:05:40 Because, you know, as a contractor, they have the flexibility of one day saying, yeah, I don’t
0:05:42 want to work anymore or moving or whatever the case may be.
0:05:46 So if we want to continue to grow, we need to continue to market to them.
0:05:48 So that is the ongoing process for us.
0:05:51 And we try to market in various different ways.
0:05:52 So we do.
0:05:54 We talk about free marketing versus paid marketing.
0:05:58 So a lot of free places where you can find people are Facebook groups, believe it or not.
0:06:00 A lot of people are looking for jobs on Facebook.
0:06:02 Craigslist, a lot of cleaners.
0:06:04 When you’re talking about looking for contracts, you look for cleaners.
0:06:07 They’re still marketing in places like that to find cleaning jobs.
0:06:11 So if they’re still on Craigslist looking for jobs, they’d be on Craigslist looking for work
0:06:11 as well.
0:06:16 Nextdoor.com is another big place we look for cleaners on the free set of things.
0:06:22 But paid, looking for people on Yelp, Thumbtack, also Indeed, ZipRecruiter.
0:06:28 So we teach people different ways to kind of find the cleaners, but there’s numerous ways
0:06:28 to find them.
0:06:33 And let’s say you find somebody through a Nextdoor, through a Craigslist.
0:06:35 What’s the pitch to them?
0:06:37 Is it just, we’d love to add you to our roster.
0:06:38 We’re a new cleaning business.
0:06:43 If you have any availability in your calendar, we’d love to be able to try and help you fill
0:06:43 that.
0:06:44 Like, what’s that conversation like?
0:06:47 We basically let them know like what we can provide for them.
0:06:50 Why would you work with us, basically?
0:06:51 What’s in it for me?
0:06:52 What’s in it for them?
0:06:56 And how we, how frequently we pay, how much we pay, all those type of things we go over
0:07:01 with them in the process before we continue on with the interview process.
0:07:03 So yeah, we do pitch the services in that way.
0:07:04 It varies.
0:07:06 Some people like have done it before.
0:07:08 They know the platform.
0:07:09 They know like how it works.
0:07:11 So they’re like totally understand.
0:07:12 And some people feel like it’s too good to be true.
0:07:15 And so they’re like, huh?
0:07:17 Like, so I just get this amount.
0:07:19 So we basically say like, you do the job well.
0:07:21 We handle everything else.
0:07:22 We handle the marketing.
0:07:22 We have everything else.
0:07:24 You just got to show up, do the clean.
0:07:25 And that’s it.
0:07:27 You don’t have to worry about the pricing.
0:07:28 You don’t have to worry about the customer service.
0:07:29 You don’t have to worry about rescheduling.
0:07:33 We handle, we handle all those things that they’re usually not good at.
0:07:35 And most cleaning technicians are good at cleaning.
0:07:38 So most people in the local service business is really good at cleaning.
0:07:39 Right.
0:07:43 Talk to me about the pricing conversation because this is, I mean, you got to make money on the
0:07:43 spread.
0:07:49 If they’re used to charging, I don’t know, 80 bucks to do this job and you’re going to charge
0:07:51 the customer 80 bucks, there’s no margin left over.
0:07:54 Tell me about how that piece of the puzzle works.
0:07:55 Okay.
0:07:58 So when it comes to pricing, we do, we’re very upfront about that.
0:08:03 Our cleaners get 60%, we get 40% and they’re able to see right away how much they’ll get paid
0:08:05 for a job when they’re accepting it.
0:08:10 We also encourage them to go onto our website so they can see how much we are charging clients,
0:08:12 but also it’s a partnership.
0:08:16 So if they are somewhere and they feel like, hey, the client should be charged a bit more,
0:08:18 they kind of communicate that to us as well.
0:08:24 So that’s an ongoing conversation, but we’re very upfront about the pricing and we’re priced
0:08:26 a bit higher so that the split does make sense.
0:08:31 And we also ask them when we start working with them, how much do they charge their clients
0:08:34 so we can get an idea of, okay, once we split this, does it make sense?
0:08:35 Is it too high?
0:08:37 Is it too low to kind of go from there?
0:08:41 And it also makes sense for our clients as well, because we always get the conversation
0:08:44 as to, oh, I had a private cleaner and it was a lot cheaper than you guys.
0:08:45 Why are you guys more expensive?
0:08:49 But there’s a reason why you’re talking to us, why you’re having a conversation with us,
0:08:54 because either your previous cleaner wasn’t good enough for you or what happens more likely
0:08:55 is that they cancel.
0:08:55 Yeah.
0:08:57 And now you’re stranded and you need somebody last minute.
0:09:01 But if someone cancels on us, we have an entire team that we could get out to you versus just
0:09:02 having one person.
0:09:08 Is there a target hourly rate that you’ve found cleaners are happy with?
0:09:09 Yeah.
0:09:14 What we say is the rate kind of breaks down to even with the 60%, it ranges from about $25
0:09:16 to $35 an hour.
0:09:19 But honestly, it’s usually probably 30 plus.
0:09:20 Yeah.
0:09:24 Usually, depending on how fast they clean or how good they are, how many jobs they were to
0:09:25 take.
0:09:27 Do they have a team so they can take bigger homes?
0:09:28 All those things varies.
0:09:31 But I would say it’s usually no less than $30 an hour.
0:09:32 Okay.
0:09:35 And do you guys have it where it’s somewhat fixed pricing?
0:09:36 Like, hey, if you’ve got a two-bedroom place, it’s this.
0:09:38 If you have a three-bedroom place, it’s this.
0:09:40 Yes, we have a flat rate.
0:09:45 But obviously, if you add on things, if it’s a deep clean or if you’re looking for a move
0:09:50 in, move out, where we’re doing inside fridge and oven, square footage does come into place
0:09:52 when it’s like 2,500 square feet and higher.
0:09:54 So those type of things.
0:09:55 Mostly, it is the flat rate.
0:09:57 What you see there is what you’re going to pay.
0:10:01 And that works out for our clients as well because they don’t feel like if you’re doing
0:10:04 the hourly rate, they may feel like we’re trying to milk the clock, but also it helps us with
0:10:05 our cleaners as well.
0:10:09 So we don’t have to worry about them or anyone attempting to milk the clock while they’re cleaning
0:10:10 as well.
0:10:13 So our clients know once we get there, that’s the price.
0:10:16 And our cleaners know once you get there, that’s the price that you’re going to make.
0:10:20 So if you finish it really well and you do the job well, that’s what you’re getting paid.
0:10:23 If you want to take your time, that’s totally fine because you’re getting paid the same rate.
0:10:24 The owner’s going to pay the same rate as well.
0:10:28 Do you ever roll up to a house or have one of your cleaners roll up to the house and be
0:10:29 like, no way.
0:10:32 There’s no way I’m getting out of here and making any sort of money.
0:10:33 This is going to take days.
0:10:35 We have a very open relationship.
0:10:40 So if they get somewhere and it’s more than what the client had put on the booking form,
0:10:42 because all these homes are sight unseen.
0:10:44 All of our clients are booking us online.
0:10:48 So we go by their word, but we tell our contractors, you’re our eyes and ears.
0:10:51 If you get there and it’s not what it says, we need to know.
0:10:56 So we’ve had that happen and we have them send us pictures and we have the conversation
0:10:59 with the client of like, you know, this is more than what was said.
0:11:00 You know, this is what the price will be.
0:11:01 Yes or no.
0:11:02 And that’s how we proceed.
0:11:07 And even with that flat rate pricing, we have an asterisk that says this is for the
0:11:11 average house that’s normally cleaned up on a periodic basis.
0:11:15 So if we get to the home, we have the right to give you a new pricing based on the conditions
0:11:19 that we see and you have the right to decline the service at that time, which is totally fine.
0:11:22 But that’s why we tell them as soon as we get there so that it’s not like we’re cleaning
0:11:25 and then four hours and they’re like, yeah, no, I don’t want you to, I don’t want to pay
0:11:26 that.
0:11:31 So you’re kind of building this informal Rolodex of cleaners who have agreed to, you know,
0:11:35 open up their schedule or be open to extra bookings at this price flip.
0:11:40 And then you go about the marketing stuff for the clients.
0:11:41 Tell me about that.
0:11:43 Tell me about how you guys found your first bookings.
0:11:44 Oh, yeah.
0:11:46 So our first booking was from Thumbtack.
0:11:46 Yeah.
0:11:49 And we got, we got them on Thanksgiving Day?
0:11:51 The day after.
0:11:53 The day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, we were with family.
0:11:56 And one thing about Thumbtack, it’s very hands on.
0:11:59 You have to have, you have to nurture the client multiple times.
0:12:03 And we tell our students very early on, get as many reviews as you can.
0:12:05 Try to do free cleaners for family and friends.
0:12:09 So that by the time you start paying for marketing, you already have some initial reviews there.
0:12:11 So on Thumbtack, you got to nurture the client.
0:12:13 You got to massage the conversation.
0:12:19 And then also early on, we priced ourselves a little bit lower so that we can start getting bookings on those platforms as well.
0:12:22 First booking came in on Black Friday.
0:12:27 And we had a contractor ready for the job night before she says she can’t make it.
0:12:28 Of course.
0:12:30 Why wouldn’t, why would the first thing be easy?
0:12:35 So we went into like a group out here in Dallas that has cleaners.
0:12:37 And we said, hey, we need assistance.
0:12:39 Can anybody take this job tomorrow morning?
0:12:44 And we found someone who ended up working with us as a contractor who was able to go to the job.
0:12:46 And she did a great job.
0:12:49 This first job actually had a farm in their backyard.
0:12:49 Yeah.
0:12:52 Which was just like, what?
0:12:56 She was like, yeah, they have like pigs back there and like four or five dogs.
0:12:57 So the place is very hairy.
0:12:58 Well, she said a pig sty.
0:12:59 And we was like, oh, it’s dirty.
0:13:00 Yeah, I thought she was funny.
0:13:02 Literally, it’s a pig sty.
0:13:03 I was like, what?
0:13:05 But she got the job done.
0:13:07 And that’s how that first job went.
0:13:13 But we’ve had other jobs at the beginning that like somebody, it was a married couple.
0:13:13 They got into an argument.
0:13:15 Somebody left somebody on the side of the road.
0:13:16 Yeah.
0:13:19 We actually went and did that one.
0:13:23 Luckily, that was kind of just a quick, they were just taking pictures.
0:13:25 So we just have to kind of like wipe down and sweep and mob.
0:13:28 And we got that client from next door too.
0:13:28 Right.
0:13:34 So those were, we’ve, in our total, we’ve, we’ve done about 2,700 bookings.
0:13:36 And we’ve cleaned three homes ourselves.
0:13:36 Yeah.
0:13:38 And that was way at the beginning.
0:13:42 At this point, if someone can’t make it, we would just reschedule the client.
0:13:48 Versus early on to say like, all right, well, I can’t find anybody to get it done.
0:13:51 So I’m going to go and roll up my sleeves and do it myself.
0:13:52 Yeah.
0:13:55 We did those three bookings on one weekend and then we was like, uh-uh.
0:14:00 Because early on, you’re, you’re very nervous about your reputation and your, the reviews
0:14:00 you’re going to get.
0:14:03 So you want to be mindful of that early on.
0:14:05 But now, you know, worse, we’ve gotten negative reviews.
0:14:07 Most of our reviews are five-star reviews.
0:14:09 We get a one or three-star here and there, which we understand.
0:14:12 But people like to threaten you with reviews, we realize.
0:14:15 So we’re at the point where we’re not going to be threatened or bullied because you wanted
0:14:18 a specific thing that we weren’t able to accommodate.
0:14:23 But we try to live by the business model that customers are always right unless they’re wrong.
0:14:25 And we try to convey that in the nicest way possible.
0:14:31 So Thumbtack is kind of a pay-to-bid type of platform, right?
0:14:34 So somebody will come on and say, I need a cleaner for this date.
0:14:37 And then you will say, okay, I can, I want to bid on this job.
0:14:38 Yeah.
0:14:42 And Thumbtack, you pay based on the qualifications of the lead.
0:14:47 So if they want a larger home and they want it to be a reoccurring booking, Thumbtack is
0:14:48 going to make you pay more.
0:14:51 And their mindset is that you’re going to pay more for this booking because you’re going
0:14:53 to make more money if you do book the service.
0:14:55 But also now you have their contact information.
0:14:58 They actually do book reoccurring services.
0:15:02 It kind of gets pricey pretty quickly, especially with people who just, there’s a lot of tire
0:15:03 kickers on there.
0:15:07 So you can kind of rack up some serious money just trying to get leads on Thumbtack.
0:15:12 So that’s one of the reasons why we left that platform very early on within like six months.
0:15:17 But our oldest client is actually, our longest tenured client is actually from Thumbtack.
0:15:17 Yeah.
0:15:21 Their home’s been cleaned every week for three years now, every single week.
0:15:22 Wow.
0:15:23 So it actually worked out.
0:15:25 Very worthwhile to pay for that lead.
0:15:26 Yeah.
0:15:27 Yeah.
0:15:30 Chris kind of mentioned the same thing in our last conversation with him.
0:15:35 I want to say last summer where Thumbtack is, maybe that ship has sailed a little bit.
0:15:38 It’s a little bit more difficult to kind of get a toehold in as they’ve adjusted their pricing.
0:15:41 But Nextdoor, you mentioned, is another channel.
0:15:42 What’s worked on there?
0:15:45 So Nextdoor, you get a lot of people who are just in the neighborhood.
0:15:47 Nextdoor is a neighborhood platform.
0:15:51 Nextdoor is just a bunch of neighbors just talking about what’s happening in their community.
0:15:54 So you’ll get things from, I’m looking for a recommendation for a restaurant to, I’m looking
0:15:57 for a recommendation for a handyman and a cleaner.
0:16:01 So normally that happens that people will just be on that platform looking for cleaners.
0:16:02 What do you, who do you recommend?
0:16:04 And then it starts talking about pricing.
0:16:07 If you’re just pretty accommodating to answer their questions, they’ll book with you, but
0:16:12 you got to just be on the platform pretty frequently and available to answer any questions that come
0:16:12 up.
0:16:16 And also on there, you hear sometimes they say like, oh, my cleaner is looking for more
0:16:17 work.
0:16:18 Does anybody have it?
0:16:20 And so that is something that we look out for as well.
0:16:20 Yeah.
0:16:22 Because then we’re like, oh, we can make them a contractor.
0:16:23 Let’s see.
0:16:25 Let’s see what’s their availability.
0:16:26 Let’s reach out to them.
0:16:29 So that’s another way that Nextdoor can be used.
0:16:30 I actually just recently did that.
0:16:32 Someone said that the cleaner wanted more work.
0:16:34 So I asked for the contact information.
0:16:36 I haven’t followed up with them regarding a sidetrack.
0:16:39 But like I said, that’s a great place to find cleaners and work.
0:16:42 It just requires a little bit more availability.
0:16:46 Anything else on the marketing front to connect to 2,700 bookings?
0:16:48 Where are all these people finding you?
0:16:53 Anthony and Janilka’s response to that, plus how they’re collecting positive customer reviews
0:16:55 and hiring help to answer the phones right after this.
0:17:00 When you’re running a business, every missed call is money left on the table.
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0:19:13 Oh, yeah.
0:19:16 Our biggest one today is Yelp and SEO.
0:19:20 And I know that some people are indifferent with Yelp, but it’s helped us tremendously.
0:19:22 So that is where it goes.
0:19:23 And then SEO.
0:19:23 Yelp.
0:19:26 And also to go back to Yelp, it depends on your market too.
0:19:29 We got people in Dallas who, you know, who love Yelp.
0:19:33 We got people in other places of the country who absolutely hate Yelp.
0:19:37 And my thing is, I would say just try all marketing platforms, just see what sticks for you.
0:19:44 And then we also did Google Ads very early on, which was very, it took up a lot of time and money.
0:19:45 We weren’t ready for that.
0:19:48 So we’re going to actually go back to Google Ads probably sometime this year.
0:19:56 But SEO, search engine optimization, we’ve been cranking out leads from people just finding us organically on Google for three years now.
0:20:04 It took us three, we actually use a, actually a company for SEO, but it took us three years to kind of get to where we are with the SEO marketing.
0:20:10 So now we’re ranking on the first page for a lot of keywords, maids, Dallas, cleaning Dallas, things like that.
0:20:14 So people just find us just by typing in those, those keys.
0:20:18 I want to talk about that for a second because Dallas, it’s not a small city.
0:20:21 We’re talking like 7 billion people, one of the biggest cities, you know, in the country.
0:20:28 I imagine there were already a handful of well-established cleaning service, number one, like well-entrenched competition.
0:20:37 And number two, it seems like that’s, I guess, why go after cleaning business Dallas or maid service Dallas versus, you know, Arlington or Frisco.
0:20:40 Or like trying to pick off like some of these, like maybe slightly smaller suburbs.
0:20:44 Oh yeah, so we started with the suburbs early on.
0:20:51 So that’s kind of how we got our footing in some traffic because when we first started with SEO, it was like, there’s no way you’re going to be able to dominate Dallas, which we still aren’t.
0:20:55 We’re on the first page with keywords, but just, it just depends on the keyword.
0:20:59 But we started with some of the smaller areas, Richardson, Plano is actually a huge market.
0:21:01 And we didn’t know that until we started doing SEO.
0:21:05 And it was like, yeah, you might want to just focus on Plano instead of trying to focus on Dallas.
0:21:10 So we kind of went to Garland, Richardson, Plano, Arlington, Grand Prairie.
0:21:13 So we went around the suburbs of Dallas before we started focusing more on Dallas.
0:21:17 But now like 90% of our jobs are in Dallas though.
0:21:18 Yeah, that’s interesting.
0:21:23 We had a guy who was doing web development out of Phoenix or actually a suburb of Phoenix.
0:21:31 And so that was his like, don’t try and go for like, you know, the whole metro, like try and find this little sub neighborhood that you’re a part of.
0:21:33 Because people might be looking for that local stuff.
0:21:37 Is that a factor of being on Google My Business?
0:21:39 Like what else is working local SEO wise?
0:21:43 The thing about our physical location is that we’re located in Dallas.
0:21:46 So area that we’re in is pretty centralized to Dallas.
0:21:51 So being on Google My Business, when you’re in a Google map, you type in cleaning service near me.
0:21:52 Guess who pops up?
0:21:54 Because we’re in Dallas as well.
0:21:56 So that helps us a ton.
0:21:57 And we try to keep those pictures updated.
0:22:00 That’s another one that brings us free marketing.
0:22:02 We try to keep our pictures updated, our hours updated.
0:22:04 So before and afters.
0:22:09 And it helps us in our rankings because they’ll see last updated, you know, this week or last week.
0:22:11 So they know we’re a live cleaning business as well.
0:22:12 So that helps a ton.
0:22:13 Oh, okay.
0:22:14 Interesting.
0:22:19 So there is some element that’s less set it and forget it, but just, you know, kind of keep it clean, so to speak.
0:22:19 Keep it up to date.
0:22:20 Yeah.
0:22:26 So anytime there’s a new blog that goes up, anyone who searched for our pictures, they may get in a little alert or something like that.
0:22:27 So it does help.
0:22:31 Where do you prioritize sending customers for reviews?
0:22:34 Because Thumbtack has a review platform.
0:22:35 Yelp is obviously a huge review platform.
0:22:37 Google has their own review platform.
0:22:39 Facebook has their own review platform.
0:22:41 Where do you, where do you prioritize that?
0:22:46 So we don’t send anyone to Thumbtack anymore because we’re not on it anymore.
0:22:49 And we got a good 70, I think it’s like 60, 70 reviews.
0:22:50 Yeah, we have a good amount there.
0:22:52 So we don’t send anybody there now.
0:22:55 So our priority is Googling Yelp.
0:23:01 And we did do, we haven’t pumped Facebook as much, but we have done that as well because we’ve booked clients from Facebook.
0:23:04 But Googling Yelp, but it really depends with Yelp.
0:23:09 I say definitely Google because anyone that has a Gmail can leave the review.
0:23:14 With Yelp, you have to basically be a Yelper for it to stick.
0:23:15 A Yelper.
0:23:21 You can leave the review, but it would not show up basically for everyone to see.
0:23:22 Like we can see if you left it.
0:23:28 But if it’s the first time you made an account and you don’t have any friends or pictures and this is your first review, it’s not going to stick.
0:23:39 So instead of having to know for a fact who has Yelp and who doesn’t, we really push Google more than anything else because there’s no question there that it’s definitely going to go up regardless.
0:23:43 So when you’re asking for reviews on especially Yelp, they got to have a few things.
0:23:45 So they got to have a picture.
0:23:46 They got to have a profile.
0:23:50 They have to have friends and they also have to have left reviews before.
0:23:50 Yeah.
0:23:54 So those are four key criteria for a person to kind of leave reviews on Yelp.
0:23:55 Yeah.
0:24:00 Because we have over 80 reviews and only 50 of them still are showing.
0:24:01 Yeah.
0:24:03 So we can see the other 30, but you can’t.
0:24:04 But your clients can’t.
0:24:07 And they say non-verified reviews or something like that.
0:24:11 So when you’re looking for reviews, I would say stick to Google.
0:24:15 But if you think people don’t leave them on Yelp and they’re a Yelper, then go for it.
0:24:17 Sometimes we just ask for both.
0:24:18 Gotcha.
0:24:19 That makes sense.
0:24:19 Yeah.
0:24:21 I didn’t realize all that stuff about Yelp.
0:24:24 That’s, I mean, they’re trying to protect their platform.
0:24:27 And if it’s your first review, you come here five stars.
0:24:31 Well, yeah, clearly you have some connection to these people, you know, but that’s interesting.
0:24:37 I focus on the Google stuff because that will be visible and helps dominate those local near
0:24:38 me types of searches.
0:24:40 Anything else on the marketing front?
0:24:41 This is, this is all great.
0:24:45 I would say with the Google reviews, that’s to go back to that, that’s important too, because
0:24:48 when you do search for the review, we search for the cleaning business.
0:24:51 They got this thing called the local service pack.
0:24:54 Where local services can be featured on the top of Google.
0:24:58 If you have a certain amount of reviews and you apply for it, that’s a paid platform as
0:24:59 well.
0:25:03 But that gets you to the top of the Google ads so that people can say, all right, well, my
0:25:06 three choices are these three businesses who has the most reviews.
0:25:07 So that, that goes a long way too.
0:25:08 Yeah.
0:25:10 There’s some social proof in there for sure.
0:25:11 Oh yeah.
0:25:13 Tell me, and this is a cool, so I’m on maidstomatch.com.
0:25:16 There’s like these cool sliders that say, well, how many bedrooms do you have?
0:25:17 Where are you located?
0:25:20 How do you want to sign up for, you know, weekly, every two weeks?
0:25:21 That’s very cool.
0:25:27 Like what happens after somebody goes through this kind of online booking process?
0:25:31 Let’s just say I fill this in and I want to sign up.
0:25:31 What happens next?
0:25:36 So once they book, we get an email saying that a client booked, they get an email saying that
0:25:38 they booked the service.
0:25:43 And we basically see the time and day and we would reach out to our contractors saying,
0:25:48 hey, we have a two bedroom, two bathroom in Frisco on Friday with arrival 8 to 10 a.m.
0:25:49 Do you want it?
0:25:51 That’s basically how it goes depending on the availability.
0:25:52 They say yes or no.
0:25:54 We assign it to the contractor.
0:25:59 Then the client gets an email saying that like this confirms your clinic.
0:26:02 Because when you book, it doesn’t really confirm that we’re going to come out, but it just says
0:26:03 like, okay, we got it.
0:26:04 We received it.
0:26:04 We received it.
0:26:07 So then they get an email saying that it’s confirmed.
0:26:09 Was that invite to the contractor?
0:26:10 Was that a one-on-one?
0:26:13 Like you sent that to them or was that some like automated system?
0:26:14 That’s through the platform.
0:26:15 That’s through the platform.
0:26:19 In the beginning, we were having to manually just text everyone individually.
0:26:21 So we only had one person, two people.
0:26:22 So yeah.
0:26:25 So we were just texting in a group chat like, hey, this is what we have.
0:26:29 But now through the platform, we just kind of send a blast and kind of whoever answers
0:26:31 first would get the job.
0:26:34 And they could say if they, yes, if they want it or no, and it will get an email saying
0:26:35 this person wants this job.
0:26:35 Yeah.
0:26:37 And then we make a decision there.
0:26:39 So you’re having about eight to 10 contractors.
0:26:40 It makes that process a lot easier.
0:26:45 Early on, we didn’t mind sending a text here and there, but now that we got, you know, so
0:26:45 many, we’re still growing.
0:26:47 We try to automate as much as we can.
0:26:48 Yeah.
0:26:49 That makes sense.
0:26:50 What platform is that?
0:26:51 That’s Launch 27.
0:26:56 And the, like I said, sorry, though, when the client gets a reminder three days before
0:26:59 we come and a day before we come so that they just, you know, let them know we’re
0:27:03 coming, make sure everything is correct with address and everything like that.
0:27:04 And we show up.
0:27:06 And then you show up.
0:27:13 So they pay through the website and you guys take your 40% and pass on 60% to the cleaner.
0:27:15 And then everybody walks away happy.
0:27:17 They pay through the website.
0:27:19 And I think the back end is actually Stripe.
0:27:21 So it’s a platform they’re familiar with.
0:27:23 So it’s not like we’re collecting any money.
0:27:25 We don’t collect money, number one.
0:27:26 So everything goes through the website.
0:27:30 Everything goes through Stripe and then we pay our cleaners every Friday via direct deposit.
0:27:32 And it’s no cash transactions.
0:27:33 Right.
0:27:36 The only cash is if a client gives our cleaner a tip and that’s all there is to keep.
0:27:38 And but they can even put the tip on the website as well.
0:27:39 So.
0:27:39 Okay.
0:27:42 Are you guys, I noticed there’s a phone number on here too.
0:27:46 Are you answering the phones yourself and trying to balance the day jobs and everything
0:27:47 else that goes on?
0:27:54 So we were, we currently, and we’re not, thankfully, we have virtual assistants to do
0:27:54 that.
0:27:58 But we were answering the phones for a good while before we had to like pass it off before
0:28:01 we were running out of meetings and be like, okay, this is becoming too much.
0:28:03 Then we got virtual assistant.
0:28:03 Yeah.
0:28:06 Earlier we weren’t getting that many calls where it was impacting us.
0:28:12 But now we get enough calls where it’d be a nuisance trying to run out between meetings
0:28:13 and picking up the phone.
0:28:15 And we were losing business.
0:28:19 So we want to make sure we answer all those calls because, you know, if someone calls you
0:28:21 and you don’t answer, they go right on to the next person.
0:28:23 And so you could have lost them there.
0:28:23 So.
0:28:26 And they answer our phones Monday through Saturday.
0:28:34 Was that an individual contractor that you found for that answering service or was it a
0:28:37 company that, you know, that was just on their menu of service offerings?
0:28:43 It’s a company that answers for different cleaning businesses, which we recently actually
0:28:44 just bought.
0:28:49 We now have a virtual assistant company less than a month in.
0:28:49 So.
0:28:50 Yeah.
0:28:51 We just started with that.
0:28:55 And yeah, pretty much it helped clean your business owners, run and manage their business
0:28:55 like they helped us.
0:29:00 So opportunity came up and we purchased the business from the previous owners.
0:29:01 So now we have a virtual assistant company.
0:29:02 Oh my gosh.
0:29:05 This is like the, this is like the Rockefeller habit.
0:29:07 Like, you know, why am I going to pay a profit to somebody else?
0:29:08 I’ll just bring this in house.
0:29:11 And you’re like, we got side hustles on side hustles.
0:29:12 Yeah.
0:29:17 This is going to be a fun one because we knew, we knew the value that they were bringing and
0:29:20 we were like, we can’t let this company just, you know, because they were going to close
0:29:20 it.
0:29:21 We said, we can’t let this company close.
0:29:27 So I kind of did my diligence and started hitting up the owners and texting them and calling them
0:29:30 because we also had a relationship with the owner, the owners as well.
0:29:32 It was like, we don’t want you guys to close this business.
0:29:33 We want, am I taking it over?
0:29:34 What can we work out?
0:29:37 We worked it out and now we’re running this business as well.
0:29:45 With the automations and assistance that you have in place, what kind of time does it take
0:29:47 on a, on a daily, weekly basis to run this thing?
0:29:48 Early on, it was a lot.
0:29:49 Yeah.
0:29:50 Early on, it was way more.
0:29:55 Now, if I had to put it all together, just the amount of time I may speak to a contractor
0:29:57 just for the week, I don’t know.
0:29:58 I’ll probably say an hour, hour and a half.
0:30:03 I’m not sure if it is even that much, but one time we measured it, like we were literally
0:30:04 doing it by the second.
0:30:08 Each time we spoke to someone that said yes or no, and like on a Saturday, I think we
0:30:11 had like five or six bookings and it came out to be like 12 minutes.
0:30:15 It really doesn’t take that much out of our day at this point, at least.
0:30:19 That’s, and that’s also, that’s just the labor you do, but you think about the business and
0:30:23 you talk about it so much, but in terms of just physically being in the business, less
0:30:25 than an hour a week, but we’re always talking about it.
0:30:27 We’re always thinking about something.
0:30:31 So it feels like it’s a lot more than that, but like labor, it’s literally just an hour a
0:30:32 week, if that.
0:30:33 That’s awesome.
0:30:34 I’m excited for what you guys have built.
0:30:39 Any surprises along the way or things you wish you’d known starting out?
0:30:41 What would we have done earlier?
0:30:42 We say we would have done SEO earlier.
0:30:47 Especially because we had the revenue, not even from this business, but we also were saving
0:30:47 up money.
0:30:49 So we had the ability to do it.
0:30:49 Right.
0:30:51 But we just didn’t do it early on.
0:30:53 So yeah, we didn’t start SEO until like six, seven months in.
0:30:55 We would have done that.
0:30:59 A big surprise that we had, which I guess it depends on the state, is we weren’t charging
0:31:00 sale taxes.
0:31:07 And so the government made it very clear that they wanted their money right away.
0:31:09 And we started charging sale tax.
0:31:10 We didn’t know that we had to.
0:31:12 So we did see other businesses have it.
0:31:16 But we’re like, oh, we’ll just do a flat rate so that we can stand out.
0:31:20 And then we got an accountant and she was like, oh, no, it’s not an option for you where
0:31:20 you live.
0:31:22 You have to charge it.
0:31:23 We’re like, oh, OK.
0:31:28 So a year and a half into the business and we had to pay like all of that.
0:31:29 So, yeah.
0:31:33 But again, we weren’t taking out a profit from the business.
0:31:37 We were just putting it all in an account for taxes or whatever.
0:31:38 And so we had to cut the check.
0:31:39 It was like, OK, that’s fine.
0:31:40 Yeah.
0:31:41 We just won’t do it again.
0:31:42 That was a big surprise.
0:31:44 And that was one of our biggest surprises.
0:31:47 Other than that, I don’t know if there was anything else.
0:31:47 Yeah.
0:31:48 That stuck with us.
0:31:50 Hire someone early.
0:31:51 Yeah.
0:31:52 Yeah.
0:31:53 Those surprises are the worst.
0:31:56 I got a note from the city of Livermore.
0:32:02 It was like, you owe us, you know, three years of back taxes for like home use of your business.
0:32:04 It was like some ridiculous made up thing.
0:32:07 And I was like, what, you know, what is this for?
0:32:09 And it was a time when the business wasn’t doing so well.
0:32:12 It’s just, you know, I never you never want to get those.
0:32:18 I’m always nervous when I get a letter that says like, you know, return address, IRS or something like, oh, this is not good.
0:32:20 They did the same thing for us.
0:32:23 The amount that they said, I don’t even remember, was something outrageous.
0:32:25 And it’s like, we need it in like a week.
0:32:28 And we’re like, well, when we finally spoke to them, like, how did you get this number?
0:32:32 They’re like, oh, well, we estimate what other people around you are usually making with the business.
0:32:33 So we’re not really sure.
0:32:34 We’re only a year in.
0:32:35 So how did you get this number?
0:32:37 And we’re like, no, that’s not what we made.
0:32:39 They’re like, oh, OK, it can be adjusted.
0:32:40 Oh, thanks.
0:32:42 We would have sent them a huge check.
0:32:42 Yeah.
0:32:43 They would have kept it.
0:32:48 That was like, oh, no, we got that squared away.
0:32:52 So I guess another thing would have been hiring an accountant earlier or at least someone to look at the books.
0:32:54 It doesn’t have to be an accountant or a CPA.
0:32:55 Just someone overlooked the books for you.
0:32:57 Probably something we would have done earlier.
0:33:01 Yeah, all of that, you know, legal back office stuff.
0:33:02 It’s so time consuming.
0:33:06 It’s so frustrating because you’re like, this has nothing to do with the operations.
0:33:16 But on the other hand, it kind of does because that’s what separates, you know, the people that you’re hiring to do the cleaning from you guys is that existing infrastructure and everything in place.
0:33:18 But what else is coming down the road?
0:33:19 What are you guys excited about for this year?
0:33:22 We’re really trying to scale the business.
0:33:24 So we’ve said that usually.
0:33:28 But now we’re at a point we recognize, OK, we put more money into marketing.
0:33:30 We get more clients.
0:33:31 It’s just simple math.
0:33:36 And so we’re really trying to bring on more contractors to continue to grow.
0:33:39 Like last month, we did our highest month ever.
0:33:39 And then.
0:33:41 Thank you.
0:33:41 So we’re looking.
0:33:43 And then this month would have been higher than last month.
0:33:46 January would have been higher than the month than January.
0:33:48 Sorry, January was the highest month ever.
0:33:51 And then February would have been high, but we had to close down for a week because of the storm.
0:33:53 So that show does.
0:33:56 But then like last week, we did our highest week ever.
0:33:57 It just keeps growing.
0:34:01 So we’re like, we really need to get more contractors in here to continue to grow our business.
0:34:03 We want to do like 40K a month.
0:34:06 Right now we are between like 20 to 25K a month with sales.
0:34:08 So we want to continue to scale that.
0:34:10 And that’s our big focus.
0:34:15 And then also bringing in, maybe hiring people to kind of help us scale or people to help us run the business.
0:34:20 Because I know right now we can both do it and have our, you know, nine to fives and things in all these other businesses.
0:34:21 But we need help.
0:34:26 So that’s going to be our big thing for 2021 to elevate it and bring help in as well.
0:34:30 And, you know, another part of our business is that we, as we mentioned,
0:34:33 we sell courses on how to get your business up and running.
0:34:36 And then we have a community where we help people to do it as well.
0:34:42 So that’s another thing that it’s not necessarily the cleaning business, but it’s still part of, and it’s an extension of it, basically.
0:34:44 That’s a huge part of it, too.
0:34:44 Yeah.
0:34:49 So growing that is, that’s some of the stuff that we’re looking forward to this year.
0:34:50 Yeah.
0:34:52 You guys have a lot going on.
0:34:53 There’s no question about that.
0:34:56 I mean, do you see, like, we’re just going to dominate Dallas?
0:34:59 Or do you see this, like, mates-to-match brand going national at some point?
0:35:08 No, I’m saying we toy with that, but we think that we need to excel at the Dallas one first before we even think about franchising anywhere else.
0:35:14 Like, at least get it to a point where we want it to be, and then we can consider anything other places.
0:35:19 Yeah, our SEO guy, he’s like, you guys are bringing enough traffic where you can start thinking about other locations.
0:35:23 Because, like, Dallas may take a long time to get to one, two, or three.
0:35:24 So you guys are dominating those suburbs.
0:35:29 He’s like, we can still focus on Dallas or maybe start moving to other cities where you guys can start focusing on.
0:35:31 So it’s an option.
0:35:33 You never know.
0:35:35 People ask us all the time, do you want to do a franchise?
0:35:38 And, like, we have no idea what that looks like.
0:35:42 Let us focus on what we’re doing right now, and we’ll figure that apart out later if it does come up.
0:35:53 Yeah, well, this is a really cool example of one of these really fragmented businesses where there’s no dominant, you know, regional, definitely national, but, you know, there’s no dominant player.
0:36:07 They’re the go-to brand for that, and so there’s an opportunity for you guys to come in, present a well-thought-out, easy-to-use interface, you know, for the customer side of things, and really perform well in a pretty short period of time.
0:36:13 So I think it’s one that’s replicable, repeatable, not just in cleaning, but in any number of local services.
0:36:15 So I’m really excited for what you guys have built.
0:36:20 At the Hartremoni, which is a play on the last name, you find them over on Instagram there.
0:36:25 Anthony and Janilka, thanks so much for taking the time to share the ins and outs of this thing.
0:36:30 Let’s wrap this up with a couple number one tips for Side Hustle Nation here.
0:36:39 So number one tip for me would be, it may sound cliche, but keep going because you never know what’s on the other side of that quitting factor.
0:36:42 Early on, you know, we were about seven months in.
0:36:43 We had a dry summer.
0:36:46 We was like, it’s not worth it, the time commitment.
0:36:48 And we were like, we were right on the edge of quitting.
0:36:51 And that August, we boosted up.
0:36:52 Our numbers doubled out of nowhere.
0:36:54 No new marketing, nothing.
0:36:55 It just doubled.
0:36:56 And we just kept going from there.
0:36:59 So if we were to quit, we would have never known where we would have been today.
0:37:02 We wouldn’t have been able to help as many people as we have so far.
0:37:02 So keep going.
0:37:10 My tip would be, at least with Side Hustling, pick something that I think is flexible and maybe something that you’re good at as well.
0:37:15 So I know like one of the Side Hustles that I’ve done, you know, I’m a mental health therapist.
0:37:17 I started to do therapy online.
0:37:20 Like I know sometimes people think this is an extension of their career.
0:37:22 It’s not a Side Hustle, but it is.
0:37:24 You know, it’s not necessarily your nine to five.
0:37:30 So if there’s something that you enjoy doing and if there’s something that’s flexible and doesn’t cause, you know, stress, then go for it.
0:37:31 I like it, guys.
0:37:33 Thanks again for joining me.
0:37:34 Awesome story.
0:37:36 I’m excited to see what you guys will continue to build over there.
0:37:38 And hopefully we’ll be able to keep in touch.
0:37:39 So thanks so much.
0:37:40 And we’ll catch up soon.
0:37:42 Thank you for having us.
0:37:42 Enjoy.
0:37:48 I think this is a really cool business model.
0:37:57 It’s almost like drop shipping for physical products where you don’t buy the inventory until you’ve gotten paid by the customer or Anthony and Janilka.
0:38:01 The way they have it set up, they don’t pay for the labor until they’ve got a booked job.
0:38:05 And that makes for a very flexible, low risk type of setup.
0:38:06 All right.
0:38:07 Takeaways from this episode.
0:38:09 A couple of things stood out.
0:38:17 The first was building relationships with existing cleaners or cleaning crews who might be interested in picking up more jobs.
0:38:30 If you’re a service provider and someone comes and offers you more work that you didn’t have to go out and market for yourself, you didn’t have to sell it, and the compensation is in line with what you’d like to earn, I think that’s going to be compelling.
0:38:32 That was number one for me.
0:38:43 The bigger challenge here is on the customer marketing side of things, especially trying to gain a toehold in a market that already has established players, which is probably going to be just about any market, right?
0:38:54 But if Anthony and Janilka can make it work in Dallas, which obviously had a ton of cleaning services already, it’s something that can probably be replicated where you are.
0:38:58 From the sounds of it, there were a couple of things going on at once.
0:39:02 There was this listening aspect, trying to be where customers are.
0:39:14 They mentioned Thumbtack, Nextdoor, Google Ads early on, trying to build up some positive feedback and reviews, enough social proof and credibility where it becomes easier for customers to give you a chance.
0:39:15 You’re no longer this unknown quantity.
0:39:20 The second thing was reinvesting in organic SEO, local SEO.
0:39:27 This is something that they mentioned they’d been doing for a couple years, but are really only recently starting to see the full impact of.
0:39:33 And I wanted to call attention to that because it can be a very long game, especially in a big metro market like this.
0:39:45 Smaller town, you’re going to have a much shorter road to getting on that first page, but it’s a slog to climb the ranks and then all of a sudden you hit that first page and the floodgates are open.
0:39:49 I thought the comparison between Google reviews and Yelp reviews was really interesting.
0:39:55 And I’m kind of in the same camp, like prioritize those Google My Business reviews for maximum visibility.
0:40:01 Because oftentimes that person’s search is going to begin on Google and not Yelp and Google is going to prioritize those.
0:40:05 Inside your company dashboard in Google My Business, there should be a direct link.
0:40:17 And send people to ask them to leave a review, which was a tip Matt Raul shared as something that really helped his knife sharpening business gain over 100 reviews in, I want to say, less than a year.
0:40:32 So if you can bake some sort of feedback loop like that into your process for a local business, I think you’ll start to see some real positive results in Google, which becomes self-perpetuating in a way, as long as the service remains good and customers stay happy.
0:40:40 But once again, you’ll find the full text summary of this episode, along with all the links to the resources mentioned at SideHustleNation.com slash clean2.
0:40:50 While you’re there, I put together a free bonus download of 101 service business ideas that you might be able to apply Anthony and Janilka’s strategy to.
0:40:57 Once again, that’s at SideHustleNation.com slash clean2 or through the link in the episode description of your podcast player app.
0:41:04 Now let’s fast forward, jump in the time machine, and catch up with present day Anthony after a quick word from our sponsors.
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0:43:26 All right, Anthony, it’s been four years.
0:43:32 A lot has happened in the Maids to Match business, closing in on $3 million in lifetime revenue.
0:43:33 Catch us up.
0:43:36 What have been some of the biggest shifts since we last recorded?
0:43:40 Yeah, last time we spoke, our cleaning business was around $20,000, $25,000.
0:43:42 That was a couple years ago.
0:43:46 Now, we normally close out between about $45,000, $50,000, $60,000.
0:43:51 So, it’s been a lot of adjustments and a lot of life during that time.
0:43:56 We had two daughters since then, which means that we had to take our foot off the gas on certain businesses.
0:44:02 But the good thing is that right when we had our first daughter, Alani, we hired an operations manager to run our business.
0:44:09 And she has ran it successfully since then, which gave us a lot more time back to do and have conversations like these.
0:44:11 Yeah, that’s fantastic.
0:44:13 Congrats on the new additions to the family.
0:44:20 And congrats on, it sounds like, removing yourself from a lot of the day-to-day and inserting a manager in your place.
0:44:22 What do you look for in an ops manager?
0:44:26 There’s a certain revenue milestone or someplace you’ve got to be at.
0:44:30 You’ve got to have some margin available to hire somebody, to be able to pay somebody to do this role.
0:44:37 Talk to me through that because it’s always like, well, if I hire somebody to do it, then there’s not that much left over.
0:44:39 But, you know, there’s trade-offs.
0:44:40 I had the same mindset when we first started.
0:44:45 And I think a lot of the trade-off is, what do you value more in that season that you’re in?
0:44:50 As entrepreneurs, we always say we want more money, but we don’t start businesses to get more money.
0:44:52 We start businesses to get our time back.
0:45:00 But as entrepreneurs, you realize that you trade in a 40-hour workweek for an 80-hour workweek as an entrepreneur, leaving a 9-to-5.
0:45:06 So when we first had this conversation, we knew we were about to have a kid, so our time was going to be extremely limited.
0:45:10 So one of the first things we did was we go where a lot of people go, overseas, right?
0:45:16 You could find very qualified candidates on outwork.com, onlinejobs.ph.
0:45:24 Fortunately enough for us, our operation manager came as a referral from a previous business venture that we had with virtual assistants.
0:45:28 So she worked out of Jamaica, and I think her first salary was maybe about $8 an hour.
0:45:39 So we said, you know, if we pay ourselves $20, $30, $40, $50 an hour, if we gave somebody, you know, $9, $10, we should have plenty of cushion for us to at least get a couple hours back.
0:45:40 Got it.
0:45:42 And you don’t have to jump in and hire someone with 40 hours straight.
0:45:44 You could just do part-time.
0:45:46 And we just knew we needed someone since we had the baby.
0:45:48 Is she answering the phones for you?
0:45:52 Is she, you know, playing puppet master and saying, okay, this crew needs to go over here?
0:45:55 Like, there’s a lot of moving parts to this business, plus customer support and all that.
0:45:56 Absolutely.
0:45:57 Well, when we first started, she handled everything.
0:46:04 So we knew the biggest thing we wanted to get off our plate was the customer service, because that took most of the time, especially since we had nine to five jobs.
0:46:06 We handed her over the customer service.
0:46:08 So that could be new inquiries.
0:46:09 That could be client complaints.
0:46:10 That could be challenges.
0:46:13 And then also the hiring aspect as well.
0:46:15 So what crew is going to show up?
0:46:19 What time she became essentially the person that’s moving all the pieces into the right places?
0:46:23 As long as she needed us, we were there in the background for her to support her.
0:46:28 Any tools in tech that you like to use or have her use to manage all those pieces?
0:46:29 Yeah.
0:46:32 So one of the things that we used from the very beginning was Slack.
0:46:36 We created communication channels in Slack and then also WhatsApp for our cleaners.
0:46:38 So we maintain communication there.
0:46:43 But then also we use a platform called Basecamp, which is a project management tool.
0:46:49 So Basecamp allowed us to have all of our documentation, all of our SOPs, all of our conversations inside of one place.
0:46:52 So whenever she needed to pull it, she would go use that.
0:47:03 And also a big platform that we use was Launch 27 when we first started, which is a booking platform for essentially local service businesses where clients can book you online, pay you online, and also find you online.
0:47:06 And you can also manage your cleaner’s pay and things like that in there.
0:47:07 Oh, okay.
0:47:07 I didn’t know that one.
0:47:12 Jobber has come up from time to time as like a dispatch all in one.
0:47:13 Jobber is another big one.
0:47:15 Book and Koala, Zenmaid.
0:47:16 Yep.
0:47:17 All of them are pretty much the same thing.
0:47:22 Now we actually create our own, which is called Tidy Track, which we decided to bring everything in-house.
0:47:24 And now we just use that platform.
0:47:24 Oh, okay.
0:47:25 Dang.
0:47:26 Scratch your own itch.
0:47:27 Develop your own tool.
0:47:27 Yep.
0:47:29 That was exactly what it was.
0:47:33 We had all these different platforms, email, text, phone numbers.
0:47:37 And we just said, you know, we could use this to create our own CRM and we have everything inside of it.
0:47:40 Now you’re operating in a pretty big metro.
0:47:55 And I’m curious about the level of competition or, you know, the next generation of Anthony and Janilkas that are coming in and trying to steal market share or the drop servicing model or this remote cleaning model has become really popular.
0:47:59 So I’m curious your take on that from somebody who, you know, maybe had a little bit of a head start on it.
0:48:08 We definitely had a head start on it, but we have students coming in now and one of our top students, he did a million dollars in two and a half years.
0:48:08 Wow.
0:48:11 And he only operated out of, you know, one city.
0:48:15 So there’s still room for people to come in and do it at a high level.
0:48:18 Our advantage was an early start, but now we have AI.
0:48:22 We’re talking about creating emails, we’re talking about creating flags, we’re talking about creating social media.
0:48:27 There’s so many tools that we didn’t have when we started that people were coming in like, Anthony, you’re a little bit outdated on this.
0:48:28 Now we’re using AI.
0:48:35 We had a virtual assistant company, which is now no longer needed because AI can pick up the phone for you and answer it and book the client.
0:48:37 And we’ve tested this out.
0:48:43 So I think the new competitive advantage is using these AI automation tools, which is going to put you ahead in the competition from day one.
0:48:44 Okay.
0:48:51 For somebody starting today, what are one or two of the effective marketing tactics to try and get new clients, new cleaning customers?
0:48:55 The old handy one I would say focus on is Google local services.
0:48:59 I would still say that because those are people who are more intent based.
0:49:03 They are actually looking for the services versus like we also do Facebook ads.
0:49:06 But most of the time, that’s more interruption based services, right?
0:49:07 You’ll see an ad come up.
0:49:09 It’s like, oh, I might need a cleaning service.
0:49:11 I would always say start with Google local services.
0:49:12 It’s the easiest to manage.
0:49:18 Now, based on your area, it’s going to be a little bit more expensive because it is so user-friendly, easy to manage.
0:49:21 I will also say Google ads would be another one.
0:49:23 It’s more controllable and managed by the user.
0:49:28 But again, since it’s more controlled and managed by you, it’s going to be a little bit harder to use.
0:49:29 It’s not as user-friendly.
0:49:34 So those would be the first ones I’d say to start with Google local services and then probably Google ads.
0:49:40 And then obviously, if you do have a network, it doesn’t hurt to tell people, you know, in the area who you are and what you do always.
0:49:52 Do you see for people with, you know, that profile but zero reviews, there’s like a, well, I got to discount my rates because I’m just trying to get a critical mass of social proof here?
0:49:55 If you want to try to undercut the competition, you absolutely can.
0:49:59 But still, since you have no social proof, it’s going to be really hard to do that.
0:50:05 We got one of our first reviews from someone calling us accidentally because she said five other companies didn’t pick up.
0:50:08 We just happened to be the sixth person that picked up the phone.
0:50:12 And she left us a five-star review without even using our services.
0:50:15 She said, this is the only company that picked up the phone.
0:50:16 They were nice.
0:50:17 They were courteous.
0:50:19 And they allowed me to book online.
0:50:22 And even though I didn’t use them, you know, I’m here to just sing their praises.
0:50:25 And those are things that you can control in your business that you don’t have to worry about.
0:50:26 Yeah.
0:50:28 You know, we talk about being a competition, just picking up the phone, right?
0:50:30 So those are things you can do in the very beginning.
0:50:31 What’s your take on this?
0:50:40 This was an early response to four-hour work week and even the fire movement of, well, everybody wants to have this remote cleaning business.
0:50:45 At a certain point, do we run out of boots on the ground, cleaners doing the actual work?
0:50:50 Like, if you had our time recruiting or finding talent, it’s like, you know, nobody wants to do the dirty work anymore.
0:50:51 Yeah.
0:50:55 Recruitment in any business is the hardest thing you’re going to do.
0:51:00 When I worked my nine-to-five job, it was, we, that was something that we had a recruitment department that I was a part of.
0:51:03 That’s all we did every single day, right?
0:51:09 But when you’re talking about this four-hour work week, it’s a lot more challenging to find people if you’re not willing to put that work in at the very beginning.
0:51:13 One of the things we, we have a mindset around now is always be hiring.
0:51:15 That’s one of our quotes.
0:51:15 That’s one of our mantras.
0:51:17 That’s what we tell our operations manager.
0:51:20 I don’t care how many people we have, always be hiring.
0:51:26 We also tell our students that because I just had a conversation with someone and she’s like, I had five cleaners at one point.
0:51:27 Now I’m down to one.
0:51:29 I was like, what happened during that time?
0:51:30 She’s like, I got comfortable.
0:51:31 I had five.
0:51:31 I thought I was good.
0:51:33 So always be hiring.
0:51:35 Now, will there ever be people that stops cleaning?
0:51:36 I don’t think so.
0:51:43 Unless, you know, someone creates a cleaning robot like in the Jetsons back in the day, there’s always going to be a home that needs to be clean.
0:51:45 There’s always going to need to be a person to do it.
0:51:48 And I don’t see us moving over to robots anytime soon.
0:51:48 Yeah.
0:51:54 It’s one of these you’d imagine, at least in the near term, semi-AI proof businesses or stuff is going to keep getting dirty.
0:51:59 And the robots aren’t yet that sophisticated, although we love our little robot vacuum that goes around.
0:52:03 Yeah, we got the Roombas and stuff like that.
0:52:11 But for actually someone to come in and lift things up, put them down clean under it, there’s always going to be a need for at least people, at least in our generation.
0:52:13 After that, we’ll figure it out.
0:52:14 But we won’t be here then.
0:52:27 Do you see this model of essentially matchmaker where I’m going to be the marketing and administrative arm of this business, build the digital presence, go out and find customers and then find people qualified to do the work?
0:52:31 Have you played around with it in any other niches?
0:52:33 You kind of alluded to the virtual assistant service.
0:52:38 Do you see it working or do you see students applying it in other areas?
0:52:39 Absolutely, man.
0:52:51 The matchmaking market is essentially, I would say around 2008 when Airbnb said, we’re going to put you in a stranger’s home and you don’t know who they are, what they do, and you’re just going to be okay with it.
0:52:53 And during that time, I was like, okay, we could try this.
0:52:57 And then Uber said, we’re going to put you in a stranger’s car and you’re going to be okay with it.
0:53:00 And then obviously there’s going to be levels of protection.
0:53:01 You want to make sure they got reviews.
0:53:02 You want to make sure you do background checks.
0:53:05 You want to make sure you do all of those things that make people feel comfortable.
0:53:08 But we have seen this work in other business models.
0:53:10 For us, we had a virtual assistant business.
0:53:12 It was the same exact thing, right?
0:53:15 Another business model we’ve seen was mobile massages.
0:53:18 That was another one we’ve seen what was pretty interesting.
0:53:25 Another one we saw was, it was another version of a daycare where assisted home living is another one we’re seeing people doing.
0:53:28 I’ve seen it go as far as medical assistance.
0:53:28 Okay.
0:53:37 Which not as far as, but I’ve seen it go as high as medical assistance where people are finding people are qualified, trained, and they have medical backgrounds and the person just managing the business.
0:53:43 I’ve seen that actually as a new demographic of people getting into the medical assistant business as well.
0:53:48 Those are a few business models where they’re exactly the same thing as what we do, just on different levels.
0:53:49 Yeah.
0:53:55 I guess that’s care.com or Papa Pal, the caregiving type of marketplaces.
0:53:59 We’ve used Zeal, like the massage matchmaker service.
0:54:06 You punch in what time you want it, and they send it out to their network of licensed massage people, and they come to your house.
0:54:09 Another example of that, we just hired an au pair.
0:54:16 And essentially, all the agency does is find people who are qualified to take care of kids, and they match us with them.
0:54:20 It’s the same exact process, and we have her living in our house right now, and this is our second one.
0:54:23 So, I mean, we pay a lot more money for that.
0:54:24 What was the name of the au pair service?
0:54:26 So, that was a cultural care.
0:54:26 Okay.
0:54:28 Because we had a woman on the show, and that was her business.
0:54:32 She was, like, franchising out this, like, nanny matchmaking service.
0:54:36 It was like, hey, you know, it’s hard to find the right people, but, you know, our proven system.
0:54:38 It was like, okay, this is cool.
0:54:38 It is.
0:54:41 And I’ve met someone who does the nanny service, and I was like, how do you do it?
0:54:42 She’s like, oh, I don’t go out a nanny.
0:54:45 She said, I have a roster of nannies that I’ve interviewed that I background checked,
0:54:49 and I refer them out to people, and that’s exactly how she runs her businesses.
0:54:55 So, it’s more common than we realize, but I think just because we talk about it so much,
0:54:58 people just can’t comprehend the, oh, I don’t have to go out and clean aspect of it, but it
0:54:59 happens all around us.
0:55:00 Yeah.
0:55:04 In the online world, we call it, like, the freelance trap of getting stuck, selling your
0:55:06 skills, selling time for money.
0:55:11 It’s like, well, if you start with the intention of being the owner-operator and hiring other
0:55:15 people to do the work from the very beginning, you kind of avoid that freelance trap.
0:55:20 The matchmaker model, the agency model, you know, lower margins, but more scalable because
0:55:22 you’re not tied to your direct time.
0:55:22 Yeah.
0:55:27 Sounds like this is, you know, the full-time income at this point, plus the influencer business,
0:55:28 which we’ll get to in a second.
0:55:29 Was there a revenue target?
0:55:33 Like, at what point do you feel comfortable saying goodbye to the career?
0:55:37 So, I don’t think you ever feel comfortable when, and even when I handed in my resignation
0:55:41 letter and I had the whole goodbye speech ready, we were never ready.
0:55:42 We just had a kid.
0:55:44 We just bought a house.
0:55:45 It was the end of the year.
0:55:48 But I just had the blessing of my wife that we were able to do it.
0:55:53 And we said, worst case scenario, I could go back to work and go back to my same job if
0:55:55 I wanted to, or get another one.
0:56:00 But I think the level of comfort we had was when we had six months of emergency savings
0:56:02 in our bank account, Liquid, just in case.
0:56:03 Yeah.
0:56:05 We didn’t have that consumer debt anymore.
0:56:05 Mm-hmm.
0:56:07 We had enough savings for our new baby on the way.
0:56:10 And we was like, it’s not going to be a better time.
0:56:12 And, you know, we just took the lead.
0:56:12 Yeah.
0:56:13 I’m glad you said that.
0:56:15 Like, it’s never comfortable, right?
0:56:17 It’s still like, oh, what am I doing?
0:56:19 I’ve got this, you know, track record.
0:56:23 I got this business that’s doing well, but can I really cut my own paycheck?
0:56:25 Is this, you know, how sustainable is it?
0:56:25 It’s scary.
0:56:26 All of these things could disappear.
0:56:30 And my wife keeps telling me, like, you know, she keeps telling me that how likely is it
0:56:31 that everything disappears at the same time?
0:56:35 It’s not very likely, but, you know, as an entrepreneur, you’re always thinking like, what
0:56:35 if this happens?
0:56:39 Like, obviously you got more upside, but you never know.
0:56:40 So, um, that was my fear.
0:56:42 Like, what if, what if, she’s like, what if this works?
0:56:43 Yeah.
0:56:46 And now, uh, four years later, you know, I’m a full-time entrepreneur.
0:56:51 And then funny enough, Janoka, she actually got laid off a month into her maternity leave.
0:56:52 Okay.
0:56:53 Yeah.
0:56:53 Is that even legal?
0:56:57 That’s a whole nother story, but she got laid off a month into her maternity leave.
0:56:59 And we were like, well, okay, here we are.
0:57:00 Here we are.
0:57:01 Yeah.
0:57:03 Sometimes it’s almost, it’s never fun to get laid off.
0:57:07 It’s almost easier if somebody else forces your hand and you’re like, okay, well now
0:57:08 or never, I guess.
0:57:11 Now we’ve been talking about it for years, who would leave first and when we’re going to
0:57:11 leave.
0:57:14 And it was kind of like jumping into a rope and we never did it.
0:57:15 I didn’t.
0:57:17 Then her job, you know, forced her to do it.
0:57:18 So, uh, yeah, that was, that was a funny one.
0:57:20 Not funny, but you know.
0:57:20 Yeah.
0:57:23 Talk to me about the education side.
0:57:27 People started to take notice of your success with the cleaning business.
0:57:30 You’ve got cleaningbusinessmasterclass.com.
0:57:35 I see the two comma club, uh, you know, cook funnels plaque on the wall behind you.
0:57:40 There’s been a lot of interest in other people learning to do what you do.
0:57:44 Yeah, it started right at the height of the pandemic and coincidentally enough, people
0:57:48 think that the cleaning business was doing bad and they say, oh, well, why do you sell
0:57:49 courses?
0:57:54 And actually the cleaning business hit its highest months during the pandemic, which proved that
0:57:55 the business model was efficient.
0:57:57 And then all we did was we just started sharing.
0:58:02 I mean, we’ve been sharing our journey since 2017 online, but we never really thought people
0:58:07 cared about the cleaning business because it was unsexy and we got a little bit of interest
0:58:07 in it.
0:58:12 And what it turned into was a full blown, you know, multiple seven figure business where
0:58:16 now we had about 2000 students inside of cleaning business university.
0:58:19 They’ve done over $18 million in their own cleaning businesses.
0:58:24 They’ve cleaned over 50,000 homes and opened up businesses in 40 plus states.
0:58:26 And it took on a whole life of its own.
0:58:27 How crazy is that?
0:58:32 Think about like the cumulative dust removed from America.
0:58:37 It’s some cool metrics to think about, like the influence that you’ve had.
0:58:37 Yes.
0:58:41 And we never thought people cared about it, but we realized the more we shared, the more
0:58:42 people we impact.
0:58:46 And then also, you know, as long as we’re helping students get a result, whether it’s to help
0:58:51 them pay off an extra bill, like when we started or travel a little bit more, pay down some
0:58:56 debt or some people have, you know, left their nine to fives and gone full time into this
0:58:56 thing.
0:59:01 And that’s when we realized that there was true impact in sharing our story outside of
0:59:02 the debt freedom story.
0:59:02 Yeah.
0:59:11 As a typical funnel to speak, your social media, YouTube podcast to, you know, to email opt-in
0:59:12 straight to a sales page.
0:59:15 What is the journey look like for a typical student?
0:59:17 We’ve tried a few different things.
0:59:21 So when we first started, we went completely low tech, no tech.
0:59:26 It was an Instagram live of us sharing everything we know in one video.
0:59:32 And we had people like, if you want us to turn us into a program where that’s adjustable
0:59:36 for you, you could go through your own pace, you know, and send us a DM.
0:59:37 And that was it.
0:59:39 And we got, I think, 10 sales at $99.
0:59:42 And we said, okay, now we got validation.
0:59:43 Yeah.
0:59:45 Quick validation, lowish price point.
0:59:46 Yep.
0:59:48 So we was like, okay, now we have to go and do this thing.
0:59:54 So we spent a weekend building out the curriculum, recording it on Zoom, just like this.
1:00:00 And fast forward four years later, now we have a whole community inside of Mighty Networks.
1:00:03 We have a full-time staff admin assistant.
1:00:05 We got a full-time customer service agent in it.
1:00:08 We got full-time or part-time coaches in it also.
1:00:12 And it’s developed and become its own thing at this point.
1:00:14 But it was really just a DM.
1:00:18 And then now we have Clean It Business Masterclass where we got so many questions on a weekly
1:00:18 basis.
1:00:24 And it’s like every single week, I go and perform the same exact masterclass for a full year.
1:00:28 Russell Brunson style, do it once for a year, see how it goes.
1:00:29 And so that’s what we’ve been doing.
1:00:30 Yeah.
1:00:33 It seems like it’s working really well and your students are getting great results.
1:00:39 So you are the Hartramoni on Instagram, cleaningbusinessmasterclass.com.
1:00:40 We mentioned that.
1:00:43 You’ve also got the More Than a Side Hustle podcast.
1:00:43 Love it.
1:00:45 Lots of episodes out over there.
1:00:46 What’s next for you?
1:00:47 Where are you guys taking this thing?
1:00:49 That’s a great question.
1:00:54 The way I see Clean It Business University is I want it to be an all-in-one platform for
1:00:57 entrepreneurs who happen to own cleaning businesses.
1:01:02 I think that’s one of the biggest differences between us and cleaning business owners is
1:01:05 this is just one way we’re able to achieve an outcome.
1:01:08 So even inside of our platform, we talk about taxes.
1:01:10 We talk about strategy.
1:01:11 We talk about investing for your kids.
1:01:12 So we had kids.
1:01:15 People want to know, how are you investing for Alani and Amaya?
1:01:21 So we brought in our strategists who are helping us invest so that by Alani’s 18th birthday,
1:01:24 she’ll have close to a million dollars saved and invested.
1:01:29 So we’re bringing everything that’s in our entire world, our all-pair, how we found them,
1:01:31 how you guys could use them as well.
1:01:37 So everything that we’ve learned over the course of these eight years as we’ve been sharing this
1:01:41 journey, we bring that back to our community so that they could use resources as they see
1:01:41 fit.
1:01:44 And the cleaning business just might be one stopping point along their entire journey.
1:01:47 They might learn from us about the cleaning business.
1:01:49 They might say, I want to go start a car rental business.
1:01:53 Or I might want to start a micro-influencer business, or I might want to just share my
1:01:53 story online.
1:01:58 So we see it as an all-in-one platform and curriculum for anyone who wants to learn about
1:02:01 entrepreneurship by the vehicle of having a cleaning business.
1:02:03 And then also, obviously, raising our two kids.
1:02:04 Yeah.
1:02:09 People learn right alongside you as you’ve grown and the family has grown.
1:02:12 And, you know, different seasons, different stages come up all the time.
1:02:13 So I’m happy to hear that.
1:02:13 Absolutely.
1:02:16 Again, CleaningBusinessMasterclass.com.
1:02:17 Check it out over there.
1:02:19 Big thanks to Anthony for sharing his insight.
1:02:23 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
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1:02:28 sponsors in one place.
1:02:29 That is it for me.
1:02:31 Thank you so much for tuning in.
1:02:33 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen.
1:02:36 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show.