Bonus: 7 Ways to Scale a Service Business

As we’ve mentioned, “scaling” a service business can be one of the biggest challenges with this business model. In fact, it’s a sticking point that keeps a lot of people away from freelancing altogether.

But if your goal is to get big or even to just avoid trading time for money your whole life, there are lots of ways to scale a service business.

If you’d like to learn more about starting a service business and connecting with your first clients, check out this in-depth interview with Abbey Ashley (Episode 328).

Abbey’s claim to fame is she booked enough virtual assistant work during her maternity leave that she didn’t have to back to that job she hated when her leave was up!

Abbey also put together this killer free training on how to launch and grow your freelance business.

In the meantime, here are the 7 Ways to Scale a Service Business from this episode:

1. Raise your rates
2. Go From one-to-one to one-to-many
3. Hire subcontractors
4. Create productized packages
5. Play Matchmaker
6. Look for affiliate opportunities
7. Create a product

Enjoy!

328: How to Start a Service Business to Replace Your Income, Step-by-Step

Starting a service business on the side is one of the fastest ways to build extra income. It’s flexible, low-overhead, and you can probably start with skills you already have.

“I had a lot of drive underneath me,” Abbey Ashley told me, about starting her service business back in 2013. “I was super pregnant and I hated my job so much,”

Abbey started offering her services as a virtual assistant, and connected with her first clients at local networking events in Washington, DC. My the time her maternity leave was up–just a few short months–Abbey had booked enough work to not have to go back to that job she hated.

On top of that, she only had to work 20 hours a week to do it, and could work from home.

There are almost no barriers to entry to starting a freelance service business, and the startup costs are minimal. (All Abbey did was make business cards for networking.)

In fact, it was a service business, a house painting business in my case, that was one of my first entrepreneurial adventures.

Over time, Abbey scaled her virtual assistant business from just herself at $20-30 an hour, to her own little virtual agency, to $75 an hour and up for some specialized work. Before long, the questions started coming in:

• How can I do what you do?
• How can I work from home and set my own hours?
• How can I do work I enjoy?

In response, she built up a complete training program for would-be virtual assistants. She’s helped thousands of people start their own service businesses and has built a thriving free community of virtual assistants. 

If you want to dive in deeper, check out her free training called Become a Booked Out Virtual Assistant. (That’s an affiliate link; if you buy her full program, I’ll receive a commission.)

Full Show Notes: How to Start a Service Business to Replace Your Income, Step-by-Step

327: How to Get Unstuck: 6 Levers to Pull to Level Up Your Business

Todd Tresidder took his own personal net worth from less than zero at 23, to self-made millionaire and retired at 35.

When it comes to building wealth, he’s the smartest guy in the room.

His latest book is The Leverage Equation: How to Work Less, Make More, and Cut 30 Years Off Your Retirement Plan.

We met through the FinCon community several years ago and I’ve learned a ton from our conversations. Todd has a unique perspective on business and investing, and our conversations over the years always get me thinking a little differently. He blogs at FinancialMentor.com.

Tune in to hear Todd talk me through his 6 types of leverage and how you can apply those as needed in your business:

1. Financial Leverage
2. Time Leverage
3. Technology and Systems Leverage
4. Communications and Marketing Leverage
5. Network and Relationship Leverage
6. Knowledge and Experience Leverage

Enjoy!

Full Show Notes: How to Get Unstuck: 6 Levers to Pull to Level Up Your Business

326: Reselling on Amazon with a $1 Million Seller: Let’s Go Pick Up Profit!

Jessica Larrew and her husband Cliff have been reselling on Amazon for years. And though it started as a part-time side hustle, it turned into a serious business–they’ve sold more than $1 million worth of stuff on Amazon!

What’s surprising – and I think exciting – is that they’ve done this is by finding profitable products to resell primarily in nearby retail stores.

How Reselling on Amazon Works

Jessica takes advantage of Amazon’s FBA program, or Fulfillment by Amazon. This is Amazon’s way of crowdsourcing its inventory, and letting regular people like us tap into its world-class logistics network.

That means this Selling Family doesn’t have to ship anything to the end customer, handle returns, or write up product descriptions.

How the business works is like any other retail business: you profit on the spread between the cost of your product and what it sells for. Now you have to account for Amazon’s fees and shipping costs, but it’s basically buy low, sell high.

And the best part of this side hustle is that you can get started today with whatever initial inventory investment you’re comfortable with.

Full Show Notes: Reselling on Amazon with a $1 Million Seller: Let’s Go Pick Up Profit!

325: The Million Dollar Hobby: How to Monetize What You’re Already Interested In

Marc Andre made over $1.1 million dollars from his photography hobby.

But what’s interesting is that he never:

• got paid to take pictures
• sold any of his photos
• held any photography workshops

So, what did he do instead?

He built and subsequently sold 3 websites related to photography – that sold digital products to other photographers.

His journey started in 2012. Marc wanted to upgrade from a point-and-shoot camera to a nice DSLR and some lenses but couldn’t justify the $5k price tag for the equipment.

Instead of settling for something else, Marc set himself a challenge to see if he could raise the $5k starting a photography-related side hustle.

Things escalated quickly, from starting a site to creating digital products, he made that $5k in a few months.

Marc carried on scaling his business, creating more products, starting two more photography-related sites, and over the next 6 years pulled in more than a million dollars in revenue.

Tune in to hear Marc’s unique process for starting and growing sites, why he decided to create products before having an audience to sell to, how he used sites that already had traffic to drive sales, and how he scaled up his business to more than a million dollars in revenue in such a short space of time.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The Million Dollar Hobby: How to Monetize What You’re Already Interested In

323: Financial Independence Fast-Track: How to Replace Your Salary by Buying Mini Businesses

Stacy Caprio was desperate to leave her day job.

She ended up doing just that after acquiring – and improving – a portfolio of mini online businesses. In her case, these were websites that make money from advertising.

Now, this asset class can be risky, and Stacy is open about her early failures.

But if you have some online skills, (or management skills to bring people in if you don’t want to run the site yourself) this can be a fast-track to the cash flow you need to fund your lifestyle.

Since websites often sell for 20x monthly earnings, they’re perhaps 10-15x “cheaper” than if you were to rely solely on traditional investments and a 4% withdrawal rate.

Sound like the kind of investment that suits your lifestyle?

Tune in to hear where Stacy finds these businesses to buy, her unique filtering criteria, and a few quick ways she’s been able to accelerate the cash flow of her portfolio for even better returns.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Financial Independence Fast-Track: How to Replace Your Salary by Buying Mini Businesses

322: My 5 Favorite Books of the Year and My Top Takeaways from Each

“We are simultaneously gods and worms.”—Abraham Maslow

Power plus humility, right? It’s a great combination and something to keep in mind as we try and build our businesses.

We can accomplish amazing things, and yet, we’re gone in a flash. Mere blips on the historical radar.

But let’s be the gods of our side hustle universe today, and focus on shaping that business in a way that best serves ourselves and others.

In this special solo edition of The Side Hustle Show, I’m breaking down my Top 5 books from last year, and the actions I took (or am taking) as a result of reading them.

Hopefully there are a few nuggets you can borrow!

Full Show Notes: My 5 Favorite Books of the Year and My Top Takeaways from Each

321: Hosting Trivia Nights for Fun and Profit: Turn Useless Knowledge into Cash

Can you make money hosting trivia nights at local restaurants and bars?

I’m a bit of a trivia nerd, so this week’s show was especially interesting to put together!

To help walk me through how this business works, is probably the best-qualified guy in the country to do so.

Adam Johnston is the co-founder of LastCallTrivia.com, a business that started with just $300 and now powers trivia nights all around the country and provides tools for side hustlers to do the same.

Over the last 10 years, Adam has managed to help turn “useless knowledge” into a 7-figure operation.

Tune in to hear how this business works, how to pitch and price a trivia night, how to get a new venue off the ground, and most importantly, what makes for a great game.

Adam and I even fire some trivia questions at each other, so have your score sheets ready!

Full Show Notes: Hosting Trivia Nights for Fun and Profit: Turn Useless Knowledge into Cash

320: Multiplying Money, Morning Routines, and $100k Side Hustles: 20 Questions with Nick

It’s time to dive into the ol’ listener mailbag and answer a few questions in this week’s edition of The Side Hustle Show.

I’ve had quite a few interesting questions come in since the last Q&A episode, and picked 20 to talk through in today’s show, including:

1. Let’s say you’ve got $100. How do you turn it into $200?
2. What’s your #1 morning ritual?
3. Should I create a course around self-care? Am I even qualified to?
4. I haven’t made a single sale (on Etsy) and am super demoralized. What can I do?
5. How hard is it to make a website?
6. How do you find a “tech” person for a reasonable rate?
7. Why don’t you use ads to monetize your website?
8. In starting my online business, which social media platforms should I focus on?
9. What side hustles do you recommend that could generate $100k a year within a year?
10. When you started Side Hustle Nation, how’d you get engagement from Day 1?
11. No one is buying my book. How can I market it?
12. What WordPress template do you suggest?
13. How do you refer to affiliate links when you haven’t used the product?
14. How big of a content backlog do you have / should you have?
15. I’m a college senior interested in entrepreneurship. What do you recommend with the “real world” fast approaching?
16. How was your trip to Mexico? Did you feel unsafe?
17. How do you balance family, job, and business?
18. What’s the goal of your local meetups?
19. Why’d you give away the PDF version of The Progress Journal for free?
20. How do you organize your side hustle financially?
21. Which gigs should I create first on Fiverr?

Full Show Notes: Multiplying Money, Morning Routines, and $100k Side Hustles: 20 Questions with Nick

319: Master, Multiply, and Monetize your Message: From Ranting in His Car to “Immortality”

“What I want is immortality,” Jack told me. “But I don’t want it in my name, I want it in actions of others.”

With the size of his audience today and the number of people he’s helped along the way, there is a very real chance of this happening.

Jack Spirko of is a little bit of a legend in the podcasting space, and he’s built a really cool and unique business on the back of his show–which of course started as a side hustle.

Actually, it started with him recording the first year and a half of episodes in his car on his commute to work!

For the last 10 years and 2300+ episodes, The Survival Podcast has covered topics related to “modern survival.” That is, things like growing your own food, generating your own power, and of course starting your own business.

Tune in to hear how Jack built an incredibly loyal and active listener base, how he started leveraging his audience to help grow his podcast, how he built his no-extra-content-required membership site model that drives 90% of his revenue, and his tips for starting and growing your own podcast and audience today.

Full Show Notes: Master, Multiply, and Monetize your Message: From Ranting in His Car to “Immortality”