Medical Emergency Inspires $90,000/Month Consulting Business

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

[Music]

Hey there friends, listeners, community, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I hope you've been enjoying the stories recently. Just wanna say that I enjoy the process of working on this program for you. Whenever I work on the stories, I think about the people out there who are in different parts of life or different stages of life, but all have a similar desire to do something for themselves, whatever that is, to achieve something for themselves, to become something, to open up some more doors, explore possibilities, whatever it is.

So I just want you to know that I'm thinking of you as I make these episodes, and I'm so glad to know that you're out there. Okay, today's story. We're gonna look at a startup employee and part-time college poker player. This guy is pretty ambitious. He does a lot of different stuff.

We'll look at how he pays for his parents' medical care through student consultations. He has a bit of a crisis and needs to make some money. This is a $20 startup that turns into a $90,000 a month business in student consultations and college speaking fees. It's also a pretty cool story with a reminder about the importance of designing systems. So definitely some things you can learn here.

Story to appreciate and something you can take away from it. That's always our goal with Hadasil School, and I'm gonna bring this one to you right after this message from our sponsor. [Music]

Davis Nguyen grew up in a poor community in the south side of Atlanta, where one in five people live in poverty. The high school he attended actually lost its national accreditation. Thankfully for Davis, Yale University didn't care and still offered him a scholarship.

The campus in New Haven had a large poker culture with plenty of events and underground games. Eager to earn money, Davis learned to play, and it turned out he had an aptitude for poker. On a good month, he would play about two full days, spending around eight to 10 hours a day at the table. He split the money he made with his parents. But this story isn't about playing poker for money.

After graduation, Davis moved to San Francisco, where he first did a stint in management consulting and then took a job as VP of operations for an educational startup. Busy with extracurricular projects ever since those college poker days, he produced a series of workshops on the side, so he would never have to rely on one source of income. It wasn't a bad life until a call from his parents changed everything. One of them needed emergency surgery, with medical costs estimated to top out at $20,000. Plus, they needed the money soon.

Davis sat down and tried to think about how he could make that much money fast. His workshops were focused on helping Silicon Valley executives to improve their public speaking, so they could better pitch their ideas. But that wouldn't be a fast source for cash. So going deeper, Davis recalled conversations he had again and again when he first moved to California to take that management consultant job at a prestigious firm. Everyone wanted to know how he did it.

So with the urgent medical bills in mind, he decided his new hustle was to offer coaching for job interviews in consulting. The idea was promising, at least he thought so, but he didn't even have a website or email list. Instead, he jumped on a consulting subreddit and offered his advice in a free AMA, or Ask Me Anything thread, for people who were trying to do what he had done. That first thread was titled Recruiting for Consulting, post here for recruitment advice, resume reviews, questions about offers or firms, or general insecurity. The goal was not to sell services directly.

He poured his experience and knowledge into the replies. If people wanted one-on-one off-thread conversations, that's when he invited them to set up a consultation with him on the Zoom web conferencing app. And his startup costs were just 20 bucks, $20, for that Zoom membership. He worked 12 hours straight over the first weekend hunting for clients and hosting calls, having no idea if it would pay off. Ultimately though, he gained his first 13 clients off that Reddit thread.

The next weekend, he did much the same thing, and then the next as well. It was stressful working long days during the week for his day job, and then pouring weekend hours into his side hustle. The thought of his family kept him motivated, and the money that was coming in now was rewarding. But the greater problem was that Davis was burning out. His business model was based on his work and output.

He was the executive branch, sales department, consultant, and administrative worker. While he would occasionally outsource small projects, he needed to save money for his family's expenses. So he began making some bigger changes, and started thinking structurally. He switched to more of an agency model, where clients are asked to pay a bid upfront, but it's not until they actually get the job that they have to pay the rest. The sum is less than 5% of what they earned in their first year at those high paying jobs.

But of course, that's still a substantial amount. He tediously went through his entire coaching process, and documented every single step. All the questions, resources, prompts, and homework assignments for clients, and then created an online module system that other career coaches he hired could replicate. It was his process for helping clients, but he wasn't the one working with each new person anymore. Davis could focus on building more relationships in the industry, and his background in public speaking got him in front of bigger audiences of potential clients.

He began cold emailing consulting clubs, and college alumni offices, offering free talks. After just one year, his business, which he called My Consulting Offer, had grown to $10,000 a month. That's when he quit his full-time job, as it was obvious he was onto something. He was invited to speak and coach management consultant students in person at places like Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. This and his new agency model increased monthly revenue even further, from about $10,000 to $40,000.

He was able to step away once again, this time from all the sales and marketing, as he hired an operations manager and team to oversee those tasks. Of course, this was after he had gone through his entire process again, documented every last step for someone else to replicate exactly as he had done. And these days, Davis does no coaching at all. Instead, he works directly with top tier schools and events and refers all the new business back to his agency's sales group. From there, the team handles the entire process from initial inquiry straight through to the celebrations when that person lands their dream job.

The average success rate of getting a job in management consulting is less than 2%, but for those who go through Davis's process, the rate is more like 80%, which, you know, I didn't go through management consulting, but I think 80 is more than two, so that sounds good. In 2019, just over two years after that 12-hour weekend sprint of desperately trying to hustle coaching calls on Reddit, Davis's revenue reached $90,000 a month. In a short period of time, he's come a long way from his poker days as a student at Yale. [Music]

So I thought that was a pretty incredible story. Congratulations to Davis.

Well done on being so systematic and intentional, taking the right kinds of risks, but also realizing one's weaknesses in trying to do everything themselves. And so by focusing on documenting those systems, that's how he was really able to grow the business. I mean, it's great to grow it to $10,000 a month, you know, doing everything yourself, but then, you know, to grow from $10,000 to $90,000, he really had to take a different approach. And so if you have the book side hustle, by the way, from idea to income in 27 days, day 26 is all about this documenting systems approach that he used. And I mean, he did it on his own.

He wasn't using my book, but if you're looking for a reference point, it's called Get It Out of Your Head, that little chapter, and talks about how you can systematically identify like what are all the tasks associated with this particular project or sales process or product development process or whatever it is. Because if you want to just have a side hustle to make extra money, totally fine, totally cool, but if you really want to grow this kind of business, then that's what you're going to have to do one way or another. All right, so inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Hope you like this story as much as I enjoyed working on it. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1033.

Also known as 1033. We're coming up on a new month soon, a final two months of the year, in fact, and I've got a lot of stuff to share with you during that time. So I look forward to bringing you more. I hope you have a wonderful day wherever you are. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

from The Onward Project.