Texas Couple Turns Test Scores Into Treasure

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

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Welcome to a new week. August is almost here and I will be traveling a bit. I'm excited to be in Chicago in a couple of days. I've got some more trips coming up. I don't have all the itineraries planned, but I should know more soon.

I look forward to being back out on the road. And in today's story, this is Side Hustle School, by the way, I'm Chris Guillebeau. In today's story, a Texas couple turns test scores into treasure, creating a profitable consulting firm that brings in multiple six figures a year and an all new side hustle. Because, you know, once your side hustle goes full time, obviously you need another project. This is also a lesson in providing too many services, which is such a common problem in the service industry.

You know, you start out by providing a service, ends up going really well, and you stumble upon what seems like a logical extension. And it very well may be a good idea to pursue it. In fact, I often encourage people to do just that. You know, one service can lead to another. You discover more about your clients and so on.

The problem is that you then discover something else and something else and something else. Pretty soon you just kind of open the door to whatever your client wants or needs. And before long, you're overextended. You're not able to do a great job and you're at risk of burning out. So fortunately in this case, the couple in this story learns that lesson before too much time goes by.

They're now focused on standardizing and systemizing, as you will hear shortly. Stay tuned, that story is coming right up. [Music]

Shayna and Adam Pond met in grad school at Baylor University while studying science. However, Shayna soon transitioned to education. Both knew they wanted to be leaders.

Adam started his career in biotech while Shayna became an assistant principal after teaching for three years. On top of her day job, Shayna started operating a tutoring business in the evenings and on weekends. When her first client signed up, Adam called her at work to tell her someone they didn't even know had just paid for tutoring services through their website. The client even signed the needlessly long contract. Adam was so in shock he checked three times to make sure the sale wasn't fake.

During the next few years, Adam worked both his full-time job and helped Shayna launch what they called action potential learning. They wanted to recruit a small army of tutors and go into schools across the district and the state. Adam worked on the website with their newborn on his lap while Shayna tutored to put cash into the business. They planned to work with struggling schools with programs geared toward improving student test scores quickly, since those test scores serve as a measurement of school success. Soon they began hiring and training people to tutor for them.

After a few years, Adam was able to quit his biotech job to work full-time on action potential learning and they added additional services. Too many services, it turned out. The business offered private tutoring, school tutoring, live personal development training for teachers, after school camps, curriculum development, and more. Ponds had overstretched themselves. Shayna and Adam had to figure out their company's strengths in order to be as effective as possible and to keep from burning out.

In short, they needed to focus. They realized their business's biggest strength was partnering with struggling schools through providing programs that improved student performance. So three years ago, they stopped providing private tutoring in some of the after school programs. This reduction of services allowed them to focus on their passion for helping schools and to experience this weird thing called work-life balance. Going out on their own brought other struggles as well.

Shayna remembers one time in the beginning they considered taking out a title loan on their car to make payroll. Another time, action potential lost all their contracts in a school district. Shayna says there were many difficult moments like that, in the beginning especially, but she wouldn't change anything because all of it just made them more resilient. Personal freedom has always been Shayna and Adam's goal. It's what got them through working long nights and weekends.

It's what helped them overcome those challenges. And now they're looking for ways to reduce their personal workload since they're still doing much of the work themselves. As part of that, they're planning to delegate some of their daily responsibilities to their program manager. Standardizing their work has been a big part of what's allowed them to grow. Adam realized that conducting trainings live for each school just cost too much.

So he began converting some of them to online courses. The new format gave Shayna and Adam side hustle number two, model teaching. One of the toughest parts about running action potential has been managing the people because at any given time they have between 30 to 50 tutors. With so many of them, it's difficult to keep their product consistent. And the online courses through model teaching solve this problem.

Model teaching also allows them the opportunity to scale. Since action potential is more of a consulting firm with a personalized feel, the ponds determine they needed to work locally in Texas. But with the online format of model teaching, they intend to expand this market nationally. In 2018, action potential learning brought in over $700,000, a $300,000 increase over the previous year. This year they're on track to do something similar, whereas model teaching is new.

After adding more courses and refining their brand, it brought in $4,600 just last month. For now, they're putting those funds back into creating more content that teachers want. [Music]

So in a situation like this, when you've got a service business and it's going really well, and you see other opportunities along the way, whether through your existing clients or customers or through some other sort of expansion, horizontal or vertical, do you expand or do you just kind of double down and focus on what you're doing? Here's an approach that might be helpful. I mean, first of all, there's no one size fits all solution.

I think everybody needs to do what's best for them. And your answer could be different than mine, et cetera. But here's an approach, think about your core competency. Think about that thing that you are particularly good at. If your side hustle is growing, if you're doing something that really makes you come alive, you are particularly skilled at it, you have found this gap in the marketplace, or maybe all three of those things, if your expansion idea is still in that realm, great.

Like say you discover something else that you are just as good at, that's also a median gap in the marketplace, then that might in fact be a wise idea to pursue. However, what often tends to happen in these situations, and kind of what sounds like happened with China and Adam, is they've got this thing that they're really good at, there probably are a couple of things that they're really good at, but then they start seeing these other things that are kind of on the periphery of that. And they're like, "Oh, we could also do this, "and we could be okay at it, "and we could probably do it fairly well," but not exceptionally. And it's not the one thing that we are known for, but we can just easily pick that up, right? And so that's where the problem comes in, that's where you need to be careful, because as your business grows, you're not gonna be able to do everything.

And essentially what happens is, you end up with a whole bunch of different opportunities, a collection of projects, a collection of services, and I've had this happen to myself before, I'm trying to be more intentional these days, but instead of just doing that thing that you're good at, you end up just doing a whole bunch of things that you can do. So that's what you wanna be careful of. And then last, I will also say, either way, even if you do do a bunch of stuff, even if you do experiment, which of course is totally fine, even if you find multiple things that you're really good at, as you go along, it's also okay to pare down, because as you actually proceed and as you expand, some things will become clearer, and you'll see what is working more versus what is working less, you'll see what takes up more of your time, you'll see what brings you more energy, what you're particularly motivated to do, and over time, you should pare down some of that other stuff to focus more on those things that bring you the energy that are making the biggest impact that are the most sustainable and profitable. So a service business can be a great opportunity for lots of people. A lot of service businesses, you can start with very, very low startup costs, just like I believe happened in this story, and so many others that we have featured.

So I will leave you with that today. Thank you so much for listening. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Our show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/940. I'll link up everything I mentioned in the episode, and we've got a lot more coming up later this week.

So be sure to subscribe, tell your friends, it is completely free. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.