Resourceful College Dropout Earns Two Paychecks from One Employer

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Hey there, what's up, welcome back. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. Really different kind of story for you today. First of all, it's about helping nonprofit organizations, but in a profitable way. And there's a lot we could say about that.

We'll look at it at least a bit, but also how about this? Can you start a side hustle within your own company? I don't mean a company that you own, I mean your employer's company. Well, a lot of the time, or perhaps even most of the time, the answer is probably not, but that doesn't mean it's never been done. Today, I'll tell you about how a resourceful college dropout earns two paychecks from one employer.

That story in just a moment. [Music]

Zach Shefska is a proud college dropout. I'm not applying that label to him. That's the first way he describes himself on his website. And like a lot of people who've dropped out of college and are happy about it, Zach is self-motivated and he has a lot of skills.

He originally left the University of Pittsburgh after three semesters when his mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. And he moved back home to live with his family. And during that time, he also decided that college might not be the best fit for him anyway. He liked to work, but he had always struggled to focus on his studies. And he was constantly bouncing business ideas off of his friends.

Now, usually at this point, I'd tell you what the person in our story does for a living and then how they earn a second income. Well, for Zach, it's a little complicated. Let's start with the first more traditional job. Before college, he had taught himself how to use Adobe Illustrator and hack together WordPress websites. Those skills, as well as that proven ability to learn, helped him join the development team at Market Smart, a company that helps nonprofits raise more money at lower costs.

Market Smart has worked with more than a hundred organizations, including Human Rights Watch, the Smithsonian Institute, and various universities. Zach spent a year doing front-end development for them. And then one day, his boss came to him with an intriguing proposal. When he was first hired at Market Smart one year earlier, Zach had made it clear to that boss, who was the founder and CEO, that he was entrepreneurial. The boss must have remembered this because after his first year was up, he approached Zach with the proposal to create an all-new product, which would also be an all-new department.

One of the recurring complaints that Market Smart heard from their clients was a lack of clarity when it came to understanding data. That's where the fundraising report card, the all-new product that became a department, came in. Partly under the direction of his boss, but also with a great deal of autonomy, Zach spent a couple of hundred hours developing the fundraising report card. Initially, they thought this would just be an internal tool to help clients make more sense of their donor data. But as they beta tested a rough early version of the product, they got overwhelmingly positive feedback.

And so Zach and his boss took their arrangement even further. Not only was Zach in charge of the fundraising report card, he would also have ownership over it and would profit from it, with a significant portion of sales being added to his regular paycheck. Zach remains a salaried employee in addition to this new source of income he also receives. It is admittedly a very unusual dynamic. He describes it as the parent company being kind of like his investor, bankrolling the product development.

So how's it all going? Well, it's going pretty well. That overwhelmingly positive feedback from the beta version turned into a bigger release in July of 2016. And this year, the project is projecting gross income of up to $200,000. Net income should be around $40,000, or a bit more than $3,000 a month.

Now I'm not normally a skeptic, but I try to think about you over there listening to this show, pondering different ideas. And if I were you, I might have a pretty obvious question at this point. It's a bit of a skeptical question, but I think it's a fair one. So I asked Zach this question, why in the world would a company do this? Why wouldn't they just own this idea completely?

Why did the boss even propose to pay a portion of profits to the person who made it? And Zach said, well, the CEO of our company is crazy. Good crazy. He sees the possibility to retain me for a long time by giving me ownership of fundraising report card. Everyone knows that turnover is expensive, and fundraising report card is his attempt to make sure I don't go anywhere.

And it's working. So Zach still has a job that he's happy in, but now he also has something that he has more ownership over, not just operationally, but also financially. He is motivated to maintain that product well and to help it grow. And as entrepreneurial as he is, he may very well go on to do something else at some point, but for now it's a great situation. So with this side hustle, he has to work extra hours, but he doesn't have to go far to change job locations.

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All right, so as I said, a couple of different points of analysis here. First of all, the needs of nonprofits, and second, the side hustle within a company. Nonprofit organizations or charities of all kinds have a lot of needs. And one of the most consistent needs is money. Fundraising or development is really key to a nonprofit being able to thrive or even survive in the first place.

So the fundraising report card, which makes data analysis easier for organizations, is naturally an appealing and attractive product. If you can help people save money or make money somehow, and it's demonstrable and proven, well, great. No wonder it's doing well. But then secondly, the other point of the story, obviously Zach is smart, but so is his boss. And he realizes that Zach could probably start something like this on his own.

Maybe not exactly like this. Maybe he couldn't build it to $200,000 in sales in a year. To achieve that result, he's probably relying a bit on the existing resources and connections of the company. But he could start something different, and his boss values him, wants to keep him around. So I know we have a lot of small business owners listening to the show.

I wonder if this idea might be something for you to consider, or if you have the authority in a larger corporation. Now, I realize that it's unusual, and a lot of people don't have that ability. So if not, maybe just ask yourself what you could do to create more freedom for someone else. To kind of open doors, or offer a foundation for someone else to get ahead, or to build something of their own. I'm a big believer in the concept that we all have a certain amount of influence in the world, whether by formal title, or by experience, or just by recognition.

And we should use that influence for good, both for ourselves and for others. That's why I love that so many of the stories we feature on the show are about making something that is ultimately helpful to other people, while enriching the life of the person who made it as well. So I hope you enjoyed this unconventional story. Hope you take something from it with you today. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better.

If you would like to learn about Zach, about Market Smart, the fundraising report card, or anything else I mentioned today, those show notes are up on sidehustleschool.com/130. That's 1-3-0. I hope you do at least one thing today to get closer to the freedom you're trying to create for yourself. Thanks for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau.

This is "Sideuscleschool." [Music]