Brother-and-Sister Turn Dad’s Medical Practice Into Online Store

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

[Music]

Hello and welcome. This is episode 251 of Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I'm glad you're here. Today, we're gonna hear about a physician whose family turns his practice into a six-figure side income selling dermatological products online.

But first, question of the day, what do you give your best time to? Like most of us have peak periods in which we do our best work. For a lot of us, it's early in the morning. Some people, it's different. Could be afternoon, could be evening, depending on your own rhythm.

But a lot of us give our best time to something other than ourselves. And I know very well that most of the people who listen to the show are very busy and don't have a lot of free time. But I wanna encourage you today to give some of that best time to yourself. To this mission that you believe in, your goal of creating more options for yourself, it doesn't have to be a ton of time. 20 minutes of focused work today and tomorrow and the day after that can go a long way.

In some ways, it's actually more effective than trying to catch up on everything over the weekend. So that's my challenge. Try to give some of your best time to yourself. I keep these episodes short by design so that you'll learn something. Hopefully it'll be enjoyable, but you'll also go away with something to think about.

Anyway, today's story about a family who turns a medical practice into an online store, coming right up. [Music]

For 10 years, Jason Parks watched his father sell physician-strength dermatological products from his medical practice. Stocking 10 brands, his father capitalized on a small audience and grew his own income by helping to pair the right patient with the right product for their problem. Jason had always felt there was more of a market for the products and when he decided to start a side hustle around his day job in marketing, he immediately thought about his dad. And he felt it was time to find the true potential of reaching more than a small group of people with these products.

Now, because of the nature of dermatological products like creams and ointments, they can only be sold by dermatologists and not at your local drug store. And Jason knew with his limited supply, especially considering that most other dermatologists don't sell online, meant that there would be a high level of demand, or at least he thought so. So bringing his father in as a business partner, Jason spent a year investing his early mornings and weekends into building an e-commerce store they called Derm Warehouse. He also enlisted the help of his sister who helped create relationships with brands and vendors, expanding the original 10 brands their father had worked with to a whopping 54 brands by the end of the first year. And to complete the family tree, Jason's mother joined the team to help with the shipping, warehousing, and logistical sides of the business.

Working with the family, Jason says, has been one of the best parts of the entire undertaking. And he played his part too. He wrote all of the website copy himself, including hundreds of product pages, offers, and emails that go along with the site. This allowed him to keep his startup costs low and allocate funds to other places where they could be better spent. Now, this wasn't an overnight success.

There were a couple of slow early months. And during that time, the site was costing money to run and wasn't generating much income, but still success came pretty quickly. And the hard work of the family paid off when Derm Warehouse went on to make $30,000 in its eighth month of business. I always ask people when you get your first sale or you accomplish a milestone, do you celebrate in some way? Do you observe that occasion?

And Jason said his family didn't do anything special. They just kept packing products. Okay, cool, just keep trucking along. Now, like we heard in yesterday's story, search engine optimization, SEO, was important. Jason and his family have used social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but the majority of their sales are coming through Google search results.

Going forward, Jason is hoping to capitalize on Derm Warehouse's early growth, expand their awareness through social media, and keep pairing more people with the right solution for their skin. [Music]

Like Jason said, when he was thinking about starting this hustle, I think one of the key factors here was supply and demand. A lot of people use these products that they sell, but there's not a lot of people selling them. Now, I wouldn't be surprised in a situation like this over time that changes. And over time, there's much more competition online, so it gets harder.

However, if you're in this kind of situation and you can establish yourself first, or not necessarily the very first, but one of the first, and you do a good job just like Jason and his sister did, in terms of building a great experience for customers, building good relationships with partners and vendors, then you pretty much are positioned to succeed and do well in the long term. I also think it's good that Jason is thinking about new channels. It's wonderful when you get a good ranking in Google and you can get people coming every day, but that doesn't always last forever either. Every few months or so, or at least once or twice a year, Google kind of changes their algorithm. And a lot of sites that were ranked really well suddenly aren't ranked at all.

And so if your whole business is dependent on a Google search result or a series of them, you're not necessarily in the safest position. So Jason is mindful of that. He's thinking ahead. Just think about that as you think about your project, what you're trying to create, what you're trying to build for yourself. And I hope you spend some time on that today.

Show notes for today's episode are at sidehustleschool.com/251. If you have a question for the show, give me a call in the Hustle hotline, 844-9HUSTLE, or 844-948-7853. I'll have another story for you tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]