High School Teacher Spins His Way to Profits

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

[Music]

Girl, put your records on. Welcome to Side Hustle School. In today's story, a high school teacher spends his way to profits, operating several side hustles in the world of vinyl records. He stumbles on this largely by accident, but it's now his full-time work and has taken him all over the world, and to events such as Coachella and the Super Bowl. When you start doing something you're interested in, when you kind of take a big step, even a small step, you never know where you're gonna end up.

That's the whole point of a side hustle, exploration, discovery, perhaps uncovering something that could even change your life, whether it's a complete career change, like this guy that I'm gonna tell you about, or it's just some additional income. You know, that's pretty good too. That's a big part of what we talk about every day on the program. Before we get started, I wanna give a shout out to another podcast. This one's pretty cool.

It's called From the Heart, Conversations with Yoga Girl, when she's not practicing handstands on her stand-up paddleboard, which is cool, I've always wanted to do that. International yoga teacher and New York Times bestselling author, Rachel Brathan, is inspiring listeners with this podcast. Each week she delves into topics like love, trust, finding balance of her coming adversity and managing wellbeing. She recently sat down with Girl Boss founder, Sophia Amoruso, talked about redefining success and the importance of finding time to reflect and practice gratitude. All good things.

Again, it's called From the Heart, Conversations with Yoga Girl. It's available wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, stay tuned. High School Teacher Spins His Way to Prophets is coming right up. [Music]

Michael Dixon has more of a side hustle theme than one specific service or product.

He runs several projects, all based in one way or another, around vinyl records. Why records? Well, Mike became obsessed with his parents' old vinyl records as a kid. He believes there's value in a tangible product that's not mass-produced, unlike streaming digital audio files. About a decade ago, he was working a full-time job as a high school teacher when he began his first vinyl-related business.

He would order small batches of records from New Zealand from one of the only lathe-cut record makers in the world at that time. Now, in case you did not know, because of course I didn't, cutting a record using a lathe means that sound waves are focused into a needle tip. As the needle vibrates, it etches grooves into the disc. The grooves are the physical equivalent to the sound waves, and voila, you have yourself a record. Lathe-cut records are made one at a time, so small orders can be easily handled, whereas records made at a pressing plant are mass-produced and require large minimum orders.

But when Mike's orders from New Zealand started taking too long to fill, he wondered if he could learn to cut those records himself. He began buying old, broken lathe machines that were built in the 1940s and '50s. It took him about a year, but he figured out the process. This led to Mike's second business, vintage records, lathe repair, restoration, and part sales. He runs this business with the help of a business partner named Chris.

Mike and Chris started working live record cutting booths at museums and small festivals, doing the work just for fun. One day, the Converse Shoe Company took notice. They contacted Mike about cutting records for Coachella, where the majority of their party guests were in the marketing and entertainment industry. Captivated with the process, people started hiring Mike and Chris for corporate parties, festivals, and other events. It hasn't slowed down since.

Just being at the events is their best form of advertising. Three months after the Converse event, Mike's teaching contract was due to be renewed. He made the decision to leave his steady, reliable income as a teacher and go all in with the record business. He's never looked back. Since then, Mike and Chris have appeared around the world at over 60 festivals and events.

They've worked with acts such as the Flaming Lips, Justin Timberlake, and Wiz Khalifa. They've also been hired to cut records at the Sundance Film Festival and the Super Bowl. Since Mike didn't initially intend for his hobby to become a business, it's difficult to calculate startup costs. At the time, he would basically buy equipment whenever he had the expendable income to do so. Also, when he originally bought his gear, it was much less expensive than it is today.

So it's actually appreciated in value. But overall, he estimates his startup costs for approximately $5,000. And his monthly profits are approximately $3,500. Working in a specialized industry can sometimes be a struggle. Paychecks are unsteady and the work comes and goes.

But more important to him than the monetary profit is what he calls standard of living profitability, which he has in spades. He gets to go on company-sponsored work trips all over the world and spends his time hustling music, art, and vinyl, all things he loves. He also gets to meet and work with artists he's admired for years. He says he doesn't know anyone who has half as much fun doing their job as he does. Turning the side hustle into his full-time work has dramatically improved Mike's quality of life.

Next on the turnstile is more of the same. He's got some events in the US and Europe coming up in a Southwest tour for his Science of Sound presentation. He's also developing new equipment for record cutting and working with some of his favorite artists. [Music]

Well, if I took one thing away from the research of this episode, aside from learning about late records, is this notion that Mike has of the standard of living profitability. An interesting little metric to live by, not just how much money are you making, which, you know, and let's be clear, aside from school, we're all about making money.

It's good to make money. But the reason why we wanna make money is because it can sometimes give us more choices and options in life to do what's important to us. It is certainly not the be all end all. That's why I like this standard of living profitability, a little metric or matrix or whatever you wanna call it. It reminds me of something I wrote about on my blog a long time ago, a concept called units of momentary happiness.

And I forget exactly where this came from. I think I cited it in the actual article. But the idea behind that is, like we're always thinking about how to be happier, how to better ourselves, improve our situations, et cetera. If we focus not so much on the big things, you know, because we're always hearing about like really big things, but just ask yourself, how can you increase every single day your units of momentary happiness? And those units may just be like when you're aware of something or when you're enjoying something or when you're like, you know what?

Life is good right now. Maybe I'm having some struggles or some stresses or challenges somewhere, but this particular moment, like this moment while I'm having my coffee, this moment while I'm out in the sunshine, this moment while I'm listening to some music that I like or having a conversation with a friend or whatever it is, pay attention to those little moments, units of momentary happiness and just see what you can do day after day to increase them. I will leave you with that today. I've got a busy weekend and busy week coming up. The "100 Side of Souls" book is coming out on Tuesday.

I'll be on the road to five different cities next week, and hopefully we'll get a chance to hang out somewhere. Even if we don't, I'll be talking with you about it as I go along. So thanks so much for listening. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. If you want to learn all about Mike's various businesses, just come to sidehustleschool.com/882.

We will link up everything I mentioned in the episode and more. I'll be back tomorrow and then all over the place next week. You are a rock star. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the "Onward Project."