High School Teacher Starts Baseball Pitching Academy

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

[Music]

In today's side hustle school story, an Ohio high school teacher pitches a perfect game with his six figure side business. He actually has multiple side businesses all within the same field. We had a hard time keeping up with his three different side hustles, which all relate to baseball as best as I can tell, but he's diversified his income even within that industry. So super smart. He also has a full time job and a family with two young children.

And to me, this example just reinforces what I see over and over. Busy people tend to be more productive than people who just complain about being busy. You ever noticed that? Somebody who's like, "I'm so busy, I'm so busy." And they actually never get anything done. Meanwhile, other people out there just get a bunch of stuff done.

They don't talk about it a lot, they just go and do it. Also, when you start with one problem or need, you sometimes learn that there are multiple possible solutions. We often look at starting an income generating project by focusing on a problem or a need. So there's multiple solutions often. Should you do only that one thing, only that one solution that you first discover?

Some people would say, "Yes." Others will follow the model of the guy in this story. After filling the need with one solution, in this case, in-person pitching lessons, which we'll talk about, he then begins to think about other solutions, such as creating a facility for training and then providing the actual equipment. So let this be a reminder, you shouldn't hold yourself back. You need to find what works for you. If just doing one thing works for you, then that's great, do that.

But if there's a way you can expand, provide multiple solutions to the same problem or multiple solutions to related problems, it might be possible to just do that as well. All right, that story is coming up in just 30 seconds. Here's a shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

Mike Grady was coaching college baseball while working as a loan officer. A parent asked if he'd be willing to teach his eight-year-old son to pitch.

When he accepted the offer, he saw how the right coaching could improve a young pitcher's skills and how it could put extra money in his pocket. He decided to see if he could coach anyone else. He took an old school approach to finding clients. Mike made up a simple flyer that he posted at the gym on announcement boards at baseball fields and anywhere else the parents of baseball playing kids might be. Even in this always connected world, when it comes to parents making decisions about their kids, they still rely on other parents for recommendations.

That's how Grady's pitching school came to be. It offers private instruction, team sessions, and off-season training programs. But this was only the start of Mike's baseball dynasty. Parents want to find coaches for their kids through referrals, but Mike also understood the power of the internet and in particular search engine optimization, or SEO. He looked for terms like pitching instructor and Ohio pitching coach and made a list of other phrases he thought people would use to find instructors in his area.

He plugged those terms into the SEO settings of the website he'd made and used them several times on each of his pages. Then came phase two. A couple years after starting the pitching academy, the parent of two of the pitching school students approached Mike about opening a training facility. By that time, Mike was working with nearly 100 students, some of whom drove two hours to their lessons. A dedicated training facility in a central location seemed like an obvious next step.

That facility, Velocity Sports, is a separate business from Grady's pitching school. It's allowed Mike to hire additional instructors to help run the programs. People can also buy membership to the facility, which allows them to use the equipment to train on their own. Oh, and that's not all. It can also be rented out for birthday parties.

Why not? Now, just wait. There are still more innings left in his story. For his third baseball-related side hustle, Mike now sells a set of soft shell balls that pitchers use for training. He used to buy them for his students and realized how big the markup was.

So naturally, he found a seller on Alibaba that could make a similar product, which allowed him to have input into the design. Orders for this product are handled through fulfillment by Amazon, which means Mike doesn't have to handle any inventory. It's true passive income. In the past three months, he has sold 600 units. Meanwhile, Grady Pitching School will make about $150,000 in revenue this year, $75,000 of which is profit.

And Velocity Sports will bring in around $125,000 in sales, with $50,000 in profit. By the way, those are pretty specific numbers. They're not just ballpark. Mike clearly has a lot on his home plate. In addition to his three side hustles, he now works as a full-time teacher.

And he also has a wife and two young children. And to make time for work and family, he's learned to automate as many things as possible. He's got an online scheduling system for his pitching clients to book their lessons, and he's even able to automate grading at school. If he had to grade by hand, he says he simply wouldn't have time. He's come a long way from the days of leaving his phone number on those flyers.

Now, instead of calling him to ask questions, parents can just go to his website and get all the information they need. The businesses continue to grow, and he loves teaching high school. So he's going to keep pitching double headers for as long as he can. [Music]

I have so much respect for people like Mike, who are balancing all this stuff, starting new projects because they're excited about them, yet also finding a way to keep things going, also finding a way to take time for himself and his family. This also kind of reminds me of the Pocket Monkey story, which we did long ago, episode 345, a different field.

That was called software engineer designs wallet tool, earns $50,000 in his first year. And that story, which is also in the "100 Sadducels" book, that guy wanted to control his entire supply chain. So he starts by outsourcing this whole process of creating this little tool that goes in your wallet. And by the end, he's actually purchased all the equipment. He has essentially bypassed all the manufacturers that he used to work with, all because he wanted to do it all himself.

And then from there, he began creating different tools, expanded, hired employees, created a big business, et cetera. Now, not everybody's gonna want to do that. I mean, this show is called "Side Hustle School." Our market is people who have day jobs and are really busy. They're just trying to find a way to make extra income. But as I said in the introduction, there are usually multiple solutions to each problem.

And as you explore one avenue, sometimes it can lead to something different, right? So with Mike, he's got these three hustles, pros and cons to each of them. With the coaching business, that's obviously time and labor intensive, but it's something he enjoys doing, and it's kind of the foundation for everything else. Then the training facility, which I believe he operates as a partnership, that's something that is a little bit more hands-off. He was able to bring in other instructors and also just create that facility where people could rent and do their own thing.

And then finally, with the equipment, and he's selling through fulfillment by Amazon, that is true passive income. So you might say, "Well, why doesn't he just do that last thing?" Well, I think they all kind of work together. They all work together. They do diversify his income and not just his income, but the whole seasonality thing, all that kind of stuff. So fantastic success.

Congratulations, Mike. Thank you for being a stellar example to our community and listeners, community, friends, awesome people out there. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1005. Thank you so much for listening today.

I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.