Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jolene. Thanks for having me. I host the Side Hustle Show a long running podcast about part-time business ideas, ways to make extra money in your spare time in a way that serves you and serves others. That’s my main focus. You find that at sidehustlenation.com. Outside of that, I’m a husband and a father. Our two boys are almost five and two and a half ish now. And so they keep us busy the rest of the time and I try and get up to the mountains and do some skiing when time allows and the storms allow as well.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Okay. Well, I invited you here today, cause I know with your podcast that you’ve been exposed to a wide variety of side hustles and side hustlers. And one of my top tips for prospective law students is that in order to reduce their debt load, try to make more money, whether it’s on the side or taking gap years and working two jobs or finding something that maybe they can do, you know, on their vacations, anything like that. So what kind of side hustles would you recommend maybe a college student could start with maybe a little startup or little effort.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Oh my gosh. Yeah. I was very, very grateful and very fortunate to graduate debt-free through a combination of scholarships and graduating a little bit early and the bank of mom and dad and part-time jobs and businesses during college. But it’s like, I can’t imagine. And this is to date myself, this was years and years ago. So tuition is not what it what it is today. It’s a huge burden to come out of school with, with some of the eye-popping numbers that especially law students are seeing. So, I mean, you probably covered a lot of these, but the part-time work is definitely an option. The scholarships definitely an option. The, I don’t know if it’s really common to try and cram as much in as you can and save quarters off of the end and like graduate early.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
But that was something that worked for me a little bit. We, you want to dive into maybe two or three different models that might be worth that might be worth tackling outside of kind of traditional part-time jobs?
Speaker 2
I’d love to.
Speaker 1
Okay. Here’s the first thing that is very hot right now is just anything related to home services, local service-based businesses. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. Number one is just people are short on time and they’re like becoming more and more specialized. Like I don’t want to clean my gutters. I don’t want to wash my car if I don’t have to be bothered by this, I don’t want to pick up the dog’s poop in the backyard. I think we did an episode with a woman who had a pooper scooper business in Michigan and what I loved about that business was like super not glamorous, right?
Speaker 1 (02:49):
So probably pretty low competition, but also a recurring weekly revenue. Right? So it was became very predictable over the course of, you know, I think she’d been at it now a couple of years, I’d say 80 to a hundred, maybe recurring weekly clients. Like as long as the dog’s alive, they’re going to continue to have that problem. And now she’s got it to the point where I think she’s got enough margin built into the service where it doesn’t have to be her picking up the poop every now and then. So it’s like, okay, I’ve got team members who are reliable and trustworthy who can go and get this stuff done for me, which I think is another maybe important point to make, because I’ve been guilty of this myself. Like when you think of what kind of business can I start, what service could I offer?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
It’s natural to look down your inventory of existing skills and say, well, I am a decent writer, I’m an English student. I have painted houses in the past. Like whatever skills, you know, might be on your resume, but that kind of limits you where if you pick something that, you know, that you know is a problem in the world and for Erica and the poop scooping business, she was like, well, I don’t like doing this myself. It’s not rocket science. I can go do this myself. Like, okay, fine.
But another example was Chris Schwab, who also started this business in college to a cleaning business called Think Maids in the Washington DC area where he was like, I’m probably not the world’s cleanest person. I mean, I guess I know how to clean, but there are professional cleaners out there. Like, why don’t we let them do what they’re good at?
Speaker 1 (04:19):
And cause he went on Yelp and he found like the reviews for these different services. And he’s like, nobody complained that the cleaning sucked, they complained, they couldn’t get ahold of the company. They didn’t know when they were coming out. They couldn’t get a quote. It’s like, I can do that stuff. I can be a better marketer, a better administrator. And that was a really interesting one for me because I would kind of flip the switch of like, okay, the service that you provide doesn’t necessarily have to be based on a specific skill that you have, like maybe there’s other complimentary skills. You can end up playing a matchmaker. And I think that local service arena is an interesting place to play because of increasing demand and a lot of the competition is just plain old, outdated, you know, it’s the kind of, some of these companies been in business for 20, 30 years. They don’t have a website or if they do, it’s not very functional, like getting on Google, Google my business, just, you know, doing the little things, especially if you’re not in, like, if you’re not in downtown LA like fine, if you’re not, you know, if you’re in a suburb, you’re going to have a really easy way to the first page of Google for some of these local searches.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Yeah. I think the service-based business idea is great because it’s something that you could do and then eventually pass it off, but make a few dollars off the top. And there’s so many different things that you could do with it. I know about a year or two ago, I just had too many things to do. So I had to hire someone literally to just close accounts, open accounts, see if I was getting the best deal on stuff. Just, you know, housekeeping stuff like a personal assistant would do. But if somebody actually created a little business, Hey, we have people that you can trust with, you know, your bank account or your social security number or whatever it is, that type stuff that you don’t really want to give out. But you know, how many people do that? You know, unless they have a full-time personal assistant or a secretary or whatever, but yeah, I just needed to get through a few months because everything was backing up.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
And if I had a company that has some kind of promise, right. Some liability insurance that, Hey, you know, you can trust us. That would have been so much better than me trying to look at Fiverr and say, can I trust this person? And you know, ultimately I ended up hiring a friend because I just didn’t trust anybody on Fiverr with my social security number. Yeah. So, but that would be a business I haven’t heard of, but similar, pretty easy service. And once you get that clientele, I mean, they would be probably happy to refer you to their friends who might also be busy, especially in industries like what I do with law, you know, doctors and lawyers, we’re busy, we want to outsource everything we can.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Yeah. I mean, you think about like people in professional services, like they are professional outsourcers. Like they focus on only doing the thing that they can do really well. It makes a perfect client for some of this type of stuff. I think the dentist is like the perfect example of that. Like most people will, will relate to, it’s like, he’s got people to do the appointment booking. He’s got people to do the insurance billing. He’s got people to do like the cleaning and the x-rays he’s like in the back room only doing like root canals and only the stuff that he’s like trained to do. And he’s an example I think of like on the outsourcing world. And I think that more and more people are becoming really specialized and saying like, I don’t want to be bothered. My time is better spent elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Lots of opportunity in that space. And especially in the niches where you can think of where there isn’t a dominant regional or national player. Like if you think about the market share for like in a virtual assistant type of service, for example, where it’s like, it’s really fragmented. It’s like a lot of mom and pop type of operations, solo operators working from home. Maybe they’ve been doing it 10, 15 years, but there are very few kind of like well-known established brands and it’s the same thing for lawn care, mobile detailing, pooper, scooper, right? Like it’s one of the reasons Brian Scudamore with 1-800-GOT-JUNK has had such the success that he’s had franchising, the junk removal business. Totally. You know, non-glamorous business too, but they’ve become over the course of 25 years, a household name in that space. And it’s like, there’s opportunity to follow a similar path and he did it through franchising.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
So we maybe don’t want to do that, but like even locally, could you build a brand and then find other service providers who were probably already out there doing that thing and like in the virtual assistant space belay solutions, it is a good example of this. Like, Hey, we’re going to layer our branding, our processes on top of this industry that already exists. And because we can do that, we can charge a premium price for that. And they are like Inc 5,000, like five or six years in a row. And they’ve been growing really fast. So definitely some opportunity in the service space and ways to do it such that you kind of get out of the hours for dollars trap that I know is it’s difficult when time is limited.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, definitely. In the first year law school, when there’s just zero time, it would be lovely to still make, even if it’s a few dollars an hour. So something like these service-based businesses where you might start out, so you get all the income, but then you pass it off to a friend or you hire outside sources and you’re either just managing it or again, hire a manager just again, I guess, depending on what your business is, but it would be lovely just to make even a few dollars while you’re sitting in law school, stressed out.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
That’s right. And you can drop your own contracts. You got a leg up with all this legal knowledge that some people don’t have.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yes. In your first year you learn enough just to be dangerous. So what about things like tech? Cause I’m sure a lot of tech business things like learning how to develop specific types of websites or something like that have probably low entry level. You know, there’s not a lot of cost involved in that kind of thing. Are there certain things that are maybe a little bit better to focus on?
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Definitely low barrier to entry on that type of stuff. Potentially just to be aware of like, as opposed to pooper scooper, like when you think online now you’re competing with people from all around the world. So you have to figure out, okay, how am I going to differentiate myself either with, you know, the service that I offer or the type of client that I am going after in that space who have seen people do well in like the web design, web development type of space in the graphic design, like, Oh, I’m going to become a dedicated you know, Pinterest manager, I’m going to grow your Pinterest account and all that, you know, lots of different kind of remote virtual freelancing options as well. I did a list somewhat recently on like the top freelance skills or the most in-demand freelance skills. And it was a lot of you know, IT stuff, security databases, cyber security, like it was very tech heavy which, you know, there’s 1,000,001 resources to learn this stuff, very inexpensively online. And I’m fully confident that you can, but whether or not that’s something that you’re excited about, interested in, you know, remains to be seen. But I do like that online, remote freelancing option as well, because that’s something where you can do. I mean, everybody’s working from home these days anyway, so it’s become the new norm.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
So aside from the tech and the service base, is there another type of business that might be a good model, a student?
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Well, depending on the available storage that you have at your disposal, one of the fastest ways that I’ve seen to multiply money is just this age, old buy low, sell high flea market, flipping yard sale, type of model. And this could be as simple as you know, the free section of Craigslist. If you don’t have any money to spend on inventory to Facebook marketplace, there seems to be a little bit of an arbitrage opportunity there right now there’s some logistics involved like, Hey, can I meet with the seller? Or I got to ship this stuff out if I’m putting it on eBay. But we had a fascinating story on the podcast with a woman named Stacy in Arizona, who she started with 50 cents. She’s like, I wonder if I can multiply this if you’ve never invested anything else beyond the proceeds for whatever she bought for 50 cents sold for.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
And she worked her way up to like a hundred grand in sales and, you know, she’d scaled back her job in nursing to do this. And it was fascinating because you know, her attitude was like, I can figure this out. She told me the story. One of her first sales was a motorcycle sidecar. And I’m like, this is beyond anything that I’ve ever sold on eBay. Like, how does this work? And she’s like, Oh, it’s not too big. You roll up to the grocery store, they’ll give you a free pallet. And then you got to, you know, go find your freight shipping center and you just roll it up to the dock. And, you know, it’s like, I had no idea, but you know, she had bought it well enough such that, you know, it was fine to pay 300 bucks to ship it or something like that.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
So I really liked this as a way you know, especially like opposed to like stock market investing where it’s like, okay, I’m gonna buy into these ETF funds. And I’m gonna hope to, for my eight to 10%, a year, 50 years, I can retire. It’s like, Oh, I could spend a hundred dollars on inventory and turn that into 200, 500 and stuff like that. It, it’s not passive. There’s a lot of effort in sourcing and stuff involved, but once you kind of develop some sources I think this is one that has, has potential and definitely has potential to increase your capital quickly increase the bank balance.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yeah. I like this one a lot because it’s something that when their school starts, they can drop it and then they can start up again during Christmas vacation and then drop it again the next semester. And then just start up the next summer. It doesn’t interfere necessarily with any other job or internship they may have. But again, that first year of law school is so intense that a lot of things just get dropped. So this is one that is completely droppable and yeah, I’ve, I’ve actually made my small attempt at this. I really like it. I had a five gallon fish tank with like some filters, right. I mean, it’s used who wants it, right. Normally if you try to sell it, you’d be lucky to get five bucks. And I got a computer with like windows 10 in it, just on a trade yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
On trade. So so yeah, any of this, like selling, trading up, all that kind of stuff, it’s amazing what you can do. And I did it on the Facebook marketplace, so same thing. I was, I traded a travel flat iron I had gotten for Christmas and I’ll never use, you know, for your hair and, and $30. And I got a nice Kindle with a cover and the charger and the whole thing. Oh, nice. Okay. So yeah, so, you know, it’s, I, I’m a little slow at it cause I’m busy, but you know, just that, whether you’re reselling it or you are trading up, it’s all at your time and it’s on whatever deal you’re interested in. So it’s completely like you said, with the stocks, you’re a little bit subject to what’s going on with it. Right. Do I sell now, what do I do? You know, you have to kind of know what you’re doing and, and then when you turn away, all of a sudden they drop, I mean, you just don’t know, but this it’s just a matter of waiting for the right trade or waiting for the right buyer.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah. And there’s lots of different flipping business models from books to, you know, clothes on Poshmark and stuff. The people who I see really making it go with this are focusing on like these bigger bulkier items that other people are kind of like afraid to touch because they don’t want to deal with the logistics surrounding that. But that seems like that’s where a lot of the margins are in a volume of transactions that seems doable rather than, rather than it being a total volume game. It’s like, okay, I could do the, you know, flipping textbooks things where you may have a, especially a source of leads on inventory there, but it’s like, okay, if I make even 20 bucks a book, then it’s like, I gotta, I gotta flip a lot of these to buy groceries, you know?
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah. With
$200,000 tuition. It’s, that’s a lot of books. So definitely something, yeah. More like a sidecar some kind of, yeah. Mortorcycle type thing. I traded a 1980s moped. That was my grandmother’s for a 3d printer with equipment and everything. So, yeah. Right. So again, I can sell the 3d printer. I can use the 3d printer a lot more than the broken down 1983 moped. Even just something as simple as if I have to move someday, I don’t have to move the moped. I can move a 3d printer, much better deal. So yeah, it’s I like this, whether it’s for trading or for sale, this is a really good model. I think for me, I always misjudged the shipping. I think I know how much shipping is going to be, and then I always do it wrong on the bigger items. Do you know how avoid that problem?
Speaker 1 (17:51):
So I think they were going directly to the freight center, either the website or calling them up and being like, here’s the dimensions, like just getting a quote upfront. So they know and bake that into the price.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Or charge customers for it say, Hey, like, you know, it’s going to be 500 bucks to ship because it’s going cross country and I got to build a pallet and all this stuff, rather than just, you need to, you’re not rolling up to the post office with the thing on a hand truck and be like, here you go.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah. Now I know a lot of students talk about, they want to create a blog or a vlog of their law school experience, their admissions experience. And they may or may not want to monetize that. You know, they may just want to do it for their own, you know, self, but if they were trying to monetize that, do you have any tips on how to go about that?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Oh, I love this. I love this idea. And even if it never makes a dime, right. This practice of creating content, this practice of writing for an audience writing for the internet, even just writing for yourself, like learning WordPress, like these are really, really valuable skills. Or at least they have been in my life. I like the YouTube angle as well. Cause it seems to be less competitive in terms of like ranking for specific keywords than, than it would be if you had a brand new website, for example, like I, you know, I, a relatively young YouTube channel with a properly keyworded title can show up on the first page. Whereas a brand new website is really unlikely to see the light of day for, for months in traditional Google. So I like the YouTube angle. I like the idea of documenting your journey along the way, if you can, I would create those videos around specific questions either that you had and found the answer to like, what challenges have I overcome or that, that kind of journey like here’s, you know, here was the struggle or the assignment or something cause other students are going to be looking for that information.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
So we’ve had some friends of mine building like a Mario’s math tutoring. Like he’s like a YouTube celebrity now, like when we hung out, he had like the 10,000 subscribers and now he’s like, I don’t even know. So, but it’s like through consistent content answering people’s questions and him putting himself out there you’ve built a, you know, this is a long, slow type of climb and it’s a little bit risky, you know, you’re playing in somebody else’s sandbox with the whole YouTube algorithm thing, but very, very really like this idea of in thinking of each video as a little mini digital asset, right? Like it, it may not go viral. You know, you might probably not gonna be a big YouTube celebrity, but if you can answer people’s questions, you will start to accumulate some views. And then over time your channel gets, you know, has the ability to be monetized so that they put some I want to say 4,000 hours of watch time and maybe a thousand subscribers before you can click the monetization button. And even then, you know, it takes a lot of use to make any serious money there, but once it’s up there, it feels so passive. It’s like, nevermind, the five hours I put into creating this video, it’s like, Oh, I made that. I made the $3 in passive royalties.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of people do it already and I love what I’ve seen. And then yes, I constantly see new students wanting to do it as well. And of course everyone’s got their own take and you can never get too much advice before you spend $200,000. So I think there’s a lot of room for more people to come and share their story of how they, you know, made it through their first day, through their first tests, through their first everything to help those students just feel a little more secure when they go in.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Yeah. See what’s going on. And then after graduation, Oh my gosh. This woman in the fin con community this year has blown up her YouTube channel, like, especially with all of the stimulus packages and everything that was going on. Cause it was, you know, her title of her video was like a lawyer explains, you know, this latest stimulus thing and she blew it up to 20 grand a month or something it’s like, Oh, you know, from a channel that had almost no subscribers at the beginning of the year.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Gosh. Yeah. And I think that’s what we all foresee for ourselves. Right. Let me start out, like, I’m going to be that person and it is hard. And I warn the people. You gotta be careful with your first year to not invest too much time. But overall, yeah, at some point you click that monetization, but all right. So YouTube over blog is what it sounds like then.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah. I mean, once you have the written content, it’s easy enough to turn that into blog or rather, you know, for me, I haven’t, I usually start the videos with some sort of outline or script. And so once you have that, it’s relatively straightforward to create the blog content from that. You’re probably going to see faster results on the, on the YouTube front.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Okay. So we’ve got service based, we’ve got some of the tech stuff, the trading and flipping and then yeah. The people who blog or vlog. Any other ideas that would be easy for students?
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Can I go through my list here and see if any of these other ones stand out? One of the ones that might be worth exploring is just the world of print on demand. E-Commerce. So if you have a, if you have a little bit of a design bone in your body maybe it’s making shirts for your classmates. Maybe it’s just, you know, coming up with a clever design or inside joke or saying this is relatively straight forward to breaking even into as well because it’s uploaded design to red bubble to Amazon or Amazon. You know, if you’re relying on getting discovered at Amazon search is not what it once was very, very competitive, but red bubble still seems to be humming along you know, for clever designs and clever sayings over there, all print on demand, meaning you don’t touch any inventory, they ship it, they fulfill it, they handle all the customer payment processing stuff. So that can be relatively hands-off. If you want to try your hand at making a few clever designs.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
That’s a great one because when, you know, when you’re in class, especially in law school, you have somewhere depending on the size of your school between 80 and a hundred students in your class, and you take all your classes together. It’s almost just like elementary school. So you are with them from eight to three every day. And if you become known as this person who has these cute little designs, that little law schools, sayings, and stuff like that, or even pre-law sayings or lawyer sayings, you know, you could easily build a clientele because Hey, you see these hundred people every single day and the word’s going to get out. So, and similarly, I think even just the digital prints for whether it’s an outline, how to do something, how to study for your tests, how to block out your time schedule. That similarly would be something where I know people on Etsy sell digital prints and can make a lot of money. And it’s just, it’s one thing they designed in Excel or whatever. And for years they’re selling to law students. And again, if you became known in your class as the person who has the perfect little study schedule, you know, okay, they pay five bucks or something for it. And then you multiply that by hundreds.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Yeah. I like that a lot too, you know, the digital product Etsy route. And that could be a cool way to start by recruiting your existing network classmates, Hey, go buy this, go leave some reviews, send some nice nice juice over to the algorithms there, and hopefully they start spinning in your favor outside of your network.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Exactly. So yes, everyone who’s I think in law school knows at least one other person who’s at another law school. So you can just kind of spin it that way. So. Great. Okay. Well, thank you, Nick. You gave us so many great ideas for trying to create some income before we go into law school and then stuff that we could even do during our first year law school, which is kind of the scary and kind of the dead zone time. And even honestly, after law school, I mean, digital things can last, you know, forever. You don’t have to close that down just because you’re a lawyer now. So I love it. Do you have any other overall tips for students in general, if they’re trying to start a business and just something to look out for?
Speaker 1 (26:24):
The main thing, or the main advice that I would give is to think of all these side hustles as an experiment, right? You’re trying to find something that is worthwhile to do, but you’re trying to figure out, is this something that I enjoy doing? Is this something I could see myself doing? Is it worth the rewards? I got another friend, actually. It was kind in the architecture space where he was flipping products on Amazon to fund the architecture content business that he really wanted to run. It was like, I needed kind of like the silent partner, which wasn’t a passion of mine to fund something that I really did care about. But you know, think of it as an experiment because that lessens the sting of the inevitable failures that come along the way, it’s like, ah, yeah, some of these ideas may or may not work for you, but rather than, you know, hanging up here, your hat at the end of the day as well, I guess it’s just back to studying, you know, it’s like, well, okay, so that one thing didn’t work. You know, why, or why not? And then trying to take that learning into the next venture. And in that way, I think it would be able to keep some positive momentum.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
That’s a really good tip. All right. Thanks so much for joining us today.
