This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Side Hustle School listeners, welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau. And let's talk today about professions. Professions, guilds, tribes, any kind of advanced or just specialized career, in which there is a specific process or certification or protocol, steps you have to go through in order to call yourself a whatever it is. So what I mean is there are some professions you can just kind of decide to do them and do them yourself.
If you want to be a writer, you should just start writing. You can say you're a writer tomorrow and no one's gonna complain. But you probably shouldn't decide tomorrow to just be a dentist. For something like that, there's definitely a prescribed path you have to go down. Now, if you're in one of these professions, because they can be exclusive or as I said, just specialized, there might be a number of ways to make money as a side hustle.
Way back on episode 111, I told you the story of James, who's an organic chemist, makes six figures, helping pre-med students get higher scores on their standardized tests. And I really like that story because I often hear from people who say they have a background in something like organic chemistry, and they're not sure how to apply it in the world of side hustles. Well, James has been very successful and there's probably other ways to do it as well. Anyway, today you'll hear about a physician assistant who earns not six figures, but still a bit more than $1,000 a month coaching people who want to join her profession. And I'll tell you how she does it and what you might learn from it right after this.
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Today's story comes from Savannah Perry in Augusta, Georgia. By day, she's a physician assistant in the field of dermatology, helping around 30 patients a day with skin conditions. Her side hustle is the PA platform, a website that's a resource for those interested in becoming PAs themselves. In addition to free blog content, Savannah offers mock interviews, personalized assessments for aspiring students and a review of applications and letters of recommendation. She also sells a mock interview guide.
Before starting this site, Savannah had tried blogging about lifestyle and fashion, but that was just a hobby and didn't feel like her authentic self. She realized that the thing she knew the most about was how to become a physician's assistant. And it was also something she felt much more passionate about. So she created a website and side hustle to help pre-PA students be more competitive. Savannah started this site to fit a need.
When she was a student herself, she couldn't always find the information she was looking for about her future job, how to perform better in interviews and write better application essays. And so once she graduated, she decided to provide it to others. She'd already done a ton of research using every possible resource when applying for school. So it was relatively easy to take the knowledge she'd gained and help others. In fact, her biggest regret was thinking she wasn't ready yet or didn't know enough.
She spent a lot of time researching blogging and web design when she could have just gotten started. The harder part was developing the site itself. At first she tried WordPress and got the site up and running from guides she found online, but just didn't love the way it looked. After spending hours trying to move a sidebar from the right side to the left side of the page and shedding tears of frustration, she decided to figure something else out so she could worry about content instead of design. She wasn't ready to invest in a designer, but discovered Squarespace while researching options.
She played around with the site during a free trial, and for her at least, she found it more intuitive. So she moved her site from WordPress to Squarespace. About a month after the site went live, Savannah got her first customer for a mock interview. This is her biggest money maker. She can earn $100 to $150 in an hour with basically no overhead.
She shares tips and tricks for interviews in PA school and looks for distracting habits or repetitive phrases during those interviews. She also lets students know if their answers sound too generic or if there's certain topics they should just avoid. But most importantly, she helps them build confidence about their own qualifications. When she was getting the site going, Savannah worked hard on putting content there to improve her SEO and rank high in Google. She shares weekly blog posts on different platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Reddit, and does monthly webinars on YouTube.
She's grown her site to 20,000 monthly visitors without any paid ads. Savannah also works to connect with undergrads by going where they are. Now this is pretty cool. She spent a week searching for pre-physician assistant clubs across the nation, made a list of 500 email addresses associated with those clubs, and then sent out an email offering to speak virtually to the clubs. And since then she's Skyped to about 40 of these pre-PA club meetings, speaking to students ranging from freshmen to seniors.
And this has helped to establish herself as an expert and raise awareness of her site. Every year there are 25,000 people who apply to PA school, and she's connecting with many of them while they're still undergrad students who aren't even ready to apply yet. Because hopefully when they are, they'll be more likely to become clients. Now in her first year of doing this, Savannah made $4,000 and had expenses of just $200. She tripled that in the following 10 months, making $12,000 with a total of $700 in expenses.
Naturally she's still working full-time as a PA, and she wants to continue offering coaching, but also work on some more evergreen or passive income sources. So she's writing a book she plans to self-publish that's specifically tailored to PA school interviews. She says there are a couple of other books available, but they are a bit outdated, and she also disagrees with some of the advice given. So she's excited to put her fresh spin on the topic. Beyond that she plans on creating an interactive workbook, maybe creating a course, maybe doing something on contract negotiations for new grads and current PAs, and so on.
She has a lot of ideas. And luckily for Savannah, there are a lot of topics that are lacking in information in the physician assistant world, giving her the perfect opportunity to bridge those gaps. [Music]
All right, so let's talk about how you might do something like this. Do you work in a profession that is competitive at all, or has some kind of gatekeeper or a restrictive process to entry, anything that's specialized or requires certification, or has a cap on the number of people who can be in that profession? Well, there is value in decoding that process for others.
And it could be true in a lot of different fields. I knew someone who was a firefighter, or at least he was working on being a firefighter. I think it took about two years. There were a lot of tests, a lot of requirements, but also just a lot of waiting. So if you're in any kind of profession like that, or again, in any profession that requires certification, advanced process, et cetera, you might ask, how could this process be easier, or quicker, or just more efficient for someone else who was trying to enter it?
And what could I create that would help them and also be valuable to me? Well, think about that and see where it leads. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Savannah's side hustle grows well beyond this $1,000 a month range, which of course is great and is a success of its own, but I bet it's gonna go up. And I hope you enjoyed this episode. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better.
Don't just listen, take action. To find the show notes for today's episode, go to sidehustleschool.com/202, give me a shout on social media, use #sidehustleschool, let me know your listening and what you're working on, and I'll be back tomorrow with another story. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
