This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Oh, hey there, what's up? This is "Side Hustle School." My name is Chris Guillebeau. Welcome back, episode 502 for you here. It's all about a part-time music teacher who tunes up a piano school to $100,000 a year. And I have a question for you as we begin today's episode.
Are you someone with a hybrid lifestyle? Somebody who has a lot of projects, somebody who is not satisfied just doing one thing, but actually likes to have three or four, sometimes even more things? Well, I identify with that myself and I totally respect it. However, here's a tip. Sometimes it's helpful to compartmentalize or otherwise focus on just one of those projects for a period of time.
So I don't mean forever, not trying to tell you don't do three projects, don't do four, whatever it is. I just mean for a while. I was thinking about this because in the "Side Hustle School" submission process, we sometimes get stories from people who have seven different projects, for example. And they're like, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. I've got a whole world of "Sidelessles." And what we usually say to that person is, "That's awesome, but tell us about one of them." Okay, and that's because we're thinking about our listeners, like for the most part.
And for you out there, especially if you're working a day job and you're otherwise busy, potentially new to the world of starting "Sidelessles" or otherwise needing support in that process, you're usually gonna be more successful when you're not trying seven things at once. And also the whole point of the show isn't just to say like, "Hey, look at this awesome person." Like, "Look at what this awesome person did." Like that's part of it, but it's more like, "Hey, look at this awesome person and consider what you could learn from their experience. Is there something from their experience that you can apply for yourself?" Either tactically, practically, or just a different shift in mindset or some kind of example that inspires you to go on and do something for yourself. Like that's our entire vision. So that's why we're kind of like, "Hey, I don't wanna hear about seven projects.
I actually wanna hear about one. I wanna hear the details." 'Cause that's probably gonna be helpful to the majority of our audience, okay? So today's story features that part-time music teacher tunes up her piano school, learns to work with subcontractors, and goes on to make that significant, mostly passive income. Overall revenue is more than $100,000 a year and her net profit is $24,000 a year from this project. As I said, she's got other projects too, but we're gonna focus on this one.
And last but not least, at the end of the episode, I might have some critique or just some comments of this kind of model of starting seven projects or more, just based on my own experience of having a similar thought process at one time. All right, so stay tuned. You'll get some different perspectives. And of course, you'll get all the details of this story after this quick thank you to today's sponsor. [Music]
You could say that Emily Mae Feeley is a full-time side hustler.
Her list of side hustling roles include property manager, slash art model, slash kids cake baker, slash musician manager, slash bachelorette party coordinator. It is perhaps an understatement to say she's always liked to stay busy. But for her most profitable side hustle to date, she has her old high school boyfriend to thank. So that's what we're gonna focus on here. Emily was 16 when she started this project, Feeley Piano School, which began as a way to fill the gaps in her afterschool schedule.
In a problem that has plagued the world of music teachers worldwide, she noticed that her students weren't consistently showing up to their lessons, which left her with free time, but no income. Those students were supposed to pay even if they didn't come, but that didn't always happen. So Emily modified her high school business plan and began offering in-home lessons to her students instead of having them visit her. She figured this would help cut down on missed classes because her students wouldn't have an excuse to not show up. As she went off into university, she kept offering piano lessons and she used what was now a long distance relationship as a happy coincidence to expand her client base into a new city.
Although the relationship didn't last forever, Emily saw her business expand and use the momentum along with some rave reviews to branch out into other nearby towns. How was she able to be in more than one place at one time? Well, first consider this. In the five years since her university days, Emily has grown her piano school side hustle into a $100,000 a year business, all without investing in any marketing and all while starting various other projects as well. She's been able to reach that figure largely through subcontracting the lessons to other teachers, which also helps her add new cities to Philly Piano School's repertoire.
Side note, I'm not sure that's a proper, precise use of the word repertoire, but since it's a musical term, we're gonna go with it. All right, the first teachers that Emily hired were through mutual friends or people she already knew that were piano teachers themselves. Luckily, that meant that difficulty with any employees is minimal. Also, these are contractors, not employees. Now that she's been able to build a name for herself over the past five years, Emily is lucky that instructors now approach her, which makes hiring the best people even easier.
How does the money work out? Well, Emily charges $400 per eight-week semester for one hour of lessons each week, and she pays each subcontractor either half or three-quarters of that, depending on their level of experience. Because every lesson is literally in-house, there aren't any overhead costs to consider. Any printed materials, like music sheets, are covered by the students themselves, and her subcontractors pay for their own transportation. So just to emphasize there, aside from the initial setup costs of website hosting and purchasing a domain name, which costs about $100, Feely Piano School has had zero expenses.
All of the money generated through Emily's business, which is around $8,000 a month, goes toward paying her subcontractors or paying her. From all of her different side hustle efforts, most of which we're not gonna talk about in this episode, Emily earns about $7,000 a month net income, with the money from her piano school making up about $2,000 of that total. So $24,000 a year net income for Emily. She does spend some time teaching lessons herself and dealing with the administrative tasks that come with running a five-city piano school. And because of that, she's played with the idea of expanding into more cities, but that would, of course, mean more administrative work for her, leaving her less time to focus on other projects.
Another challenge she experiences is that all of her friends have nine to five jobs, so they don't always understand that a lot of her work falls outside those hours. Sometimes when she's out with friends, she's distracted and thinking about her work, but she's also been able to learn a lot from her journey of building these projects. Her biggest piece of advice, after doing this for five years and starting other things as well, is to be decisive. The success of a business depends on a person's ability to take the plunge and start their project, even if they're worried they might fail. She says if you have an idea, go ahead and make a Facebook page for it right now.
Then write down a list of other things you can do right away. The Feely Piano School is also proof that you don't have to spend a lot of money on advertising or marketing to make your hustle a success. Emily used only free resources like Craigslist postings, Facebook groups, community networks, bulletin boards, and Instagram to spread the word. And because all of these outlets and resources are free, you have the opportunity to be creative with how you post without being worried about wasting money. She also suggests you think backwards about where you would look to find your business and start posting there.
Now that her piano school is bringing in mostly passive income thanks to those subcontractors, Emily's now thinking about what's next. True to form, her ideas are ambitious. She now has a year-long goal to start a new online business each week for the next 52 weeks. That's right, for the next 52 weeks, she wants to come up with an idea each week and then make that idea happen. Presumably not every idea will lead to a big success, but perhaps some will.
And she'll do this all while continuing to cash the checks from Feely Piano School. Why did the piano player get arrested? Because he got into trouble. Oh, but wait, how did the piano itself get out of jail? It used its keys.
And I do have an actual comment about today's story. I want to talk about the problem of scale. Okay, so obviously this is a success, like good for Emily. However, to just kind of look at it big picture, this is the kind of thing that can't simply be replicated over and over without some changes to its structure. And this is why she's not able to expand to an unlimited number of cities.
Because even though she's got those subcontractors hired, which is definitely a win, it's a next level win, she's not really able to just keep expanding and keep expanding. Because she's doing other stuff, but also because it would require a lot of changes to its structure. Like the project structure would have to change. And so the way that you solve this kind of problem, if you're like, okay, I actually want to make a lot of money with the piano school, I don't want to teach any lessons. I really want to grow this as a business.
The way that you solve that problem is by focusing much more on structure, usually from the beginning. But you can sometimes go back and change things later. But this way, if that was your goal, you can then be more like the story I mentioned in the weekly recap the other day. And that was a story about a college student who earns $20,000 a month from cleaning houses, all without actually cleaning any houses of his own. So it's not to criticize this project in any way.
I mean, she's making more than $2,000 a month passively. That's fantastic. So many of our listeners would be thrilled with that. But I think the next next level goal would be to start with a project like this, or start with this as a structure, but be a bit more intentional about how you grow it so that it can be even more passive than it is now. So just put that in the good to great category, because like I said, Emily is doing really well.
I will also be curious about which of these 52 online projects she starts ends up taking off. That is indeed an ambitious goal. It reminds me of something I would have tried myself a number of years ago, but I never actually did. So it doesn't do any good to say I had this idea and I didn't do anything about it. What matters is the ideas you have that you put into action, right?
Because inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you would like to see the show notes for today's episode, learn a bit more about this project or a couple of other things that I mentioned, just go to sidehustleschool.com/502. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
