Fire Protection Engineer Finds a Hot Side Hustle

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

[Music]

Oh, hey, what's up? Listen, we are on fire here today. We are bringing the heat. This episode is lit. You can tell I had a good time working on this story.

It's all about fire, or specifically, it's all about a San Francisco fire protection engineer who uses his unique expertise to teach continuing education workshops. He charges double what his competitors do, and he is filling seats across the country. Really a fantastic success here. In fact, these workshops are bringing in a fantastic second income. In fact, it's enough to be a full-time income.

He really could do just these workshops, but he chooses to keep his job and do it on the side and in his own way. So I love a lot of things about this. I also had a lot of burning questions about how it all worked. So fortunately, we were able to get a lot of detail for you. This story is coming in hot right after our sponsor message.

[Music]

Saakiv Weiss-Ishai is a fire protection engineer for the city of San Francisco. His day job is to inspect fire plans and building permits to make sure they're all up to code. He specializes in high-rise constructions and elevator fire codes. Here's a fun fact. He was involved with the first building in the world, the 60-story Facebook building in San Francisco, that can evacuate people utilizing the elevators during a fire.

Because of his expertise in these systems, he was often invited to speak at professional association conferences all over the country as a volunteer. The stellar reviews for these 60 to 90-minute presentations were coming in hot. I know I used that phrase in the introduction, but it's just a good phrase, coming in hot. Seeing the potential in his insights, many participants encouraged him to teach an accredited full-day class, since engineers are required to get continuing education units, or CEUs, to keep their licenses. Writing the spigot of those glowing reviews, Sakeev reached out to a professional association to see if he could become one of their teachers, but they said they already had enough.

The elevator door was slammed shut in his face. Now, that rejection turned out to be a bit of a false alarm because it was the moment he decided to produce his own trainings. The first critical step was to get CEU accreditation for his course. After reviewing the requirements, he developed a day-long class and sent in the application with a fee to the National Training School. They reviewed his credentials and syllabus, and like a building with fully functioning sprinkler systems, he passed inspection with flying colors.

But then came the question of where he would teach. He wanted to hold his sessions in a hotel and serve breakfast, coffee break, and lunch, which is much nicer than what other trainings provide. It also needed to be in a convenient Bay Area location. His sister-in-law, a professional meeting planner, found the venue, the Oakland Airport Holiday Inn. The meeting room was free, and they only charged a per-person cost for catering.

This reduced Saagiv's risk because he only had to pay for the number of people that signed up. Now it was time to set the price. His brother-in-law this time gave him the best advice. He said, "If you think you're offering a better product than everyone else, charge double the going rate. Then if people don't show up, you can lower your price.

Otherwise, you'll never know how high you can charge." So, Saagiv charged $400 per person instead of a $200 going rate. The next step was setting up the website and getting the word out. He sent emails to his personal contacts, and then he posted the class to his LinkedIn account. That first class was in 2016, and he was ecstatic when 60 students signed up, bringing in more than $20,000 in registrations. His side hustle was on fire, and it's steadily grown since then, with five different course topics offered on a rotating basis.

He taught four classes in 2016, six in 2017, eight in 2018, and plans to teach 10 in 2019. The attendance averages about 45 students per class, with 118 being his largest. He's expanded from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, Seattle, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Overhead costs are low. It's a family business, with Saagiv's wife taking care of the registration, his mother-in-law producing the handouts, name tags and certificates, and his sister-in-law is his on-site support.

This project has led to private consulting as well. Former students hire him to work on projects that have taken him as far as his native Israel. One crazy private client experience happened when an organization needed training right away. It turned out to be an emergency. They sounded the alarm.

40 inspectors' licenses were about to expire. So just one week after hearing about this, Saagiv flew out and conducted four days of on-site training to make sure that those inspectors got their CEUs in time. The fire was extinguished, and no one was hurt. Saagiv enjoys being able to go outside California and learn how people do things in other parts of the country. He also gets a lot of satisfaction from people telling him that they appreciate his expertise.

The extra income has allowed him to travel with his family and be more generous with charitable donations. He's got some advice for other people out there who want to teach a course. First of all, specialize. There are many organizations offering courses. Be unique and offer something no one else does.

The second is to do what you enjoy. With the success of his project, people have encouraged him to put his class online or do webinars, but he isn't interested. He enjoys the personal interaction of being in class. One thing he wished he'd done differently. He wishes he would have hired some professionals from the start instead of trying to save money and doing everything himself.

At first, he just used his own email list and contacts to promote the class, but he eventually did some advertising, buying an email list to increase his reach. He also hired someone to rework his website. Fortunately, Saagiv's Elevator Safety Side Hustle has a lot more ups than downs. [Music]

Amazing story, big congrats to Saagiv. I love people that are looking at their professional experience and finding a way to transfer that into something that's not just working for a company or an organization or a city, a government in this case perhaps, but for themselves.

In his case, providing this necessary, very helpful training while building an asset for himself. Now, Saagiv has had more than 500 students since starting up just a few years ago. Why doesn't he quit his job and go all in? Again, this is really successful, but we asked him and he said, well, I'm doing this mainly for fun and for that extra income, not to replace my regular steady job. I guess you could say he didn't wanna burn any bridges.

Okay, but seriously, I think it's really cool when people have this job that they love, but they also find a way to create this really substantial side hustle in addition. So it's my hope that all these stories will perhaps get you thinking, maybe spark some inspiration every day on the program. And of course, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. To check out the show notes for today's episode, learn all about everything I mentioned, just come to sidehustleschool.com/871. Remember, there's something out there for you too.

I hope you do everything you can to find it. I'll do everything I can on my end to keep bringing you different examples every single day. Be sure to listen tomorrow and thank you so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.