Notes from Chris

Episode 515

For organic baker Mimi Council, it was the dream of building a new family home that brought her to side hustling. With sky-high California house prices, Mimi knew her current level of income wasn’t going to help her raise the $100,000 she needed to build the first part of the project. If she was going to turn dreams and ideas into bricks and mortar, she’d need a second source of income. But Mimi was faced with a problem.

As the owner of a successful bakery, she found herself with a full schedule. She was working six days a week, for at yeast 10 hours a day, trying to rise to the top. This meant if Mimi was going to start a side hustle, she’d need to draw on her existing skills, and use the free time she did have. There was no room for learning new skills or taking Saturdays off work!

So instead of seeing her job as an obstacle, Mimi saw it as an opportunity to find side hustle ideas.

As a scrappy small business owner, she’d learned lots of skills to help her market and grow her venture. For example: she’d learned photography to capture beautiful images of her creations, Instagram marketing to make her more visible, and SEO to ensure that her website was consistently receiving traffic. Most of all, she remembered what drove her to learn these skills in the first place: they were expensive to outsource, and it was hard to find someone she could trust who really understood her needs as a small business.

Her friends often asked questions regarding how she started her bakery. Things like that list of skills she’d acquired—how she created an Instagram following of over 45K in just a year, how they could create visually stimulating photos like hers, and even what kind of promos they should run for their own businesses. It was then that she figured she could be making money instead of just telling her friends all of these things. So, she started marketing to people outside of her friend group.

Mimi felt she was competent enough with all of these skills to perform them for other businesses. She also figured that she could charge an affordable price which could give her an edge over the competition. Since she’d been in the trenches trying to grow her bakery and could empathize with many of the day-to-day problems small business owners deal with, she decided she would start a creative agency and offer her services. She called it Above 8000 Creative.

Thanks to her focused marketing techniques and clear branding, Mimi has been able to generate $2,000 a month through the business. This money goes directly into the savings account for her new house, which she’s hoping to be able to start work on in January of 2019.

Looking to the future, Mimi wants to keep growing Above 8000 Creative’s client base and put more away towards her dream home every month!

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Above 8000 Creative: Learn more about Mimi and the work she's doing over on her website. And don't forget to order some cookies over on her bakery's website!
• Unsplash: Beautiful high-quality free images and photos you can download and use for any project—no attribution required.

SEE ALSO:

• “Graphic Design for Dogs” Earns $84,000: A graphic designer and pet lover unleashes a side hustle that earns $84,000 a year. Dog-ear this episode!
• Texas Blogger Turns Weekend Adventures Into $2,000/Month: Hair today, gone tomorrow: a Texas woman turns her Instagram account into a mane event
• Ohio IT Director Earns $31,000 Setting Up Wordpress Sites: How an Ohio IT director earned more than $31,000 empowering others by providing them with the tools and resources they needed to set up their own websites

Inspiration is good; inspiration combined with action is better. Now get back to work!

Yours in the revolution,

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