Former White House Aide Teaches People to Make Friends

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

He'd always been great at building relationships with the right people, but could he really make money from teaching this skill? In today's story, a former White House aide from the Clinton administration becomes a lawyer, then uses his skills from both roles to reinvent himself with a blog, a series of webinars, and now a focus on LinkedIn. I sometimes mention how if you pay attention in life, one opportunity can lead to another, sometimes even a remarkable set of career changes. Well, in the side hustle world, this is true as well, and it can also connect the dots from one strategy to another. Because what works for a time won't always work.

Strategies and tactics are always changing. That's why it's important to stay fresh. Not just focus on what is relevant now, but perhaps what might be relevant in the future. Now I'll say more about that at the end of the story. Welcome to Side Hustle School.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. Here is a shout out to our sponsor, and then on with the show. When John Corcoran was 22 years old, he was an English major at a party school, and not sure what he was going to do with his life. But just a year later, thanks to strategic networking, he was writing President Clinton's words at the White House. From there, he landed a job as the main speech writer for the then governor of California, Gray Davis, where he served until Hollywood superstar turned politician Arnold Schwarzenegger ousted his boss to become governor.

Suddenly, John found his job literally terminated. But unlike many of his colleagues, John had a new job the next day, all because of the relationships that he had built and nurtured. Next, he did what some might call a curious choice. He went to law school and became a lawyer, which is where he found himself in early 2008. Like many of his classmates who sought big law firm jobs or government work, John decided he wanted to work in a small law practice.

Working in a small firm, it means that you do it all, serving clients, appearing in court, research and writing, marketing, and anything that comes up, which is exactly the type of experience that he wanted. But even with lots to do and long hours, John almost immediately found himself constrained by what he thought was a stodgy industry. He said his first goal was to find a way to use innovative marketing to help his young practice serve entrepreneurs and small business owners. Even if he didn't recognize it at the time, his desire to be more entrepreneurial was guiding him to something else. John knew that he had a skill for writing.

After all, he'd written for the president and began to think about writing a book. It would serve as great branding and could also allow him to use his existing skills. He quickly learned that it was wise to build an audience first and that a blog would be a great way to do that. He got started right away with a simple and free blogging platform. Blogs were still in their infancy then, and his legal writing began to build a readership from around the world.

As you might imagine, John was excited about this progress, but he quickly encountered two problems. Number one, he could only practice law in California, meaning that he couldn't serve many of the potential clients that came to his website. And two, most people want to deal with their lawyers as little as possible and reach out only when they need help. He felt disappointed but not deterred. Pivoting, he refocused his blog to write more on entrepreneurship.

But that wasn't quite right either because talking to peers in a mastermind group, John realized that the topic was still very broad. He had recently given a presentation to that group entitled, "How to network with A-listers in any industry," and it had been a big hit. His peers suggested that he focus more on that topic. Looking at his career history, John realized it had potential, so he began writing on how to grow your business through good relationship building or basically how to make friends. To build the following in the early years, John wrote a lot of guest posts on all kinds of blogs.

It was labor intensive, but it allowed him to use his love of writing to expand his reach. Then he partnered with a business coach to teach a webinar course. He was really excited about it and believed that he had a lot of value to add to others. He promoted the webinar like crazy, but there was zero interest, literally zero. Finally, just before the deadline, one person registered.

That one person may have saved the project because John says he's not sure he would have kept going otherwise, but because one person signed up, John and his partner taught that webinar to the single student, and he was then able to reuse that content for other purposes. He has since expanded and launched several other online courses. In 2012, John expanded further and launched a podcast. That podcast has now featured interviews with over 400 entrepreneurs, business leaders, and authors, including Adam Grant, Dan Pink, and Marie Forleo, among many others. The podcast has allowed him to grow and promote his online courses, and he's expanded into live events, which also helps the podcast and vice versa.

John credits his side hustle success to his ability to be flexible and make changes when something isn't working. Back when his blog started, email marketing was very effective. Many people would open and view your emails. Today, more than half of marketing emails go straight to the trash. So he pivoted and discovered webinars.

Those worked great for a period before their effectiveness faded as well. He knew he had to find new strategies, so he dug deeper into LinkedIn, and now uses it for lead generation. By adjusting as he goes along, John's one-time side hustle now averages revenue of $300,000 per year, and he's closed his law practice to focus on it full-time. He's been able to relocate his office closer to home, and now instead of a long commute and the Bay Area's notorious rush hour traffic, most mornings you'll find him on his bicycle, leading his son and five or six of his bike riding friends to school. From there, John makes the short ride to his office alongside the beautiful San Francisco Bay.

All right, so what can we learn from this story? Well, a lot of stuff, but to me the key point here, I mean, first you could talk about focusing and narrowing, and he goes from being a lawyer and writing about general lawyer stuff to writing about general business stuff, and then really kind of understanding he's got this specific expertise in building relationships, which is highly valuable. A lot of us don't know how to make friends, it's true, but I kind of want to look at his business transition because I think this is something that's greatly overlooked. People who are successful, especially with online writing or other online content, kind of building a brand around something that they have to say or share or a message that they're trying to put forward, it really is key to adapt to new mediums and not just technological mediums, but how are people communicating and sharing information online. And so in his case, he started out by focusing on blogging, doing a lot of guest posts, then he did a bunch of webinars, now he's doing something with LinkedIn, and then we'll see what develops.

Oh, and of course he had the podcast as well, can't forget that, podcast with more than 400 episodes. Now for me, I kind of see a similar trajectory, some variation there, but first and foremost I'm an author, that's kind of my number one thing, but just career-wise, this trajectory, I also started with blogging, doing lots of guest posts, I had a small publishing business selling information products for a while, that kind of turned from ebooks into multimedia courses as those got to be bigger and people started expecting more than just a basic ebook. Then of course, I started the podcast two and a half years ago, I've been doing live events for 10 years as part of all of that stuff. And I could say more about that in different strategies I've tried and mediums and platforms and what I've learned that I'm good at and what I'm not good at. But the point is, it's also this journey of adaptation.

So I don't quite know what's next, but I think the values will stay the same, but the tactics or the techniques or the platforms, who knows, those could change. So what is the best fit for you now? What is the expertise, the experience that you're going to share with people? What's the best means of doing so? What's the best medium or platform or avenue?

And what will your story be? Are you going to write your own story of freedom or greater security, confidence, creative outlet, all the good stuff that we talk about every day on Side Hustle School? I hope you'll take some touch point from what I've shared today with you and whatever else you do. And don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. That's right.

Today's show notes, including links to John's site, anything else I mentioned, his podcast, perhaps, go to sidehustleschool.com/894, episode 894. Thanks so much, my friends. I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.