Walmart Manager Cleans Aquariums for Fun and Profit

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

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What's up? Welcome to a brand new week. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Really excited to bring you an all new set of stories this week. And speaking of stories, when we first started Side Hustle School, way back in January 1, 2017, episode number one was an introduction, kind of explaining where we were going.

And then our first story was episode number two, British man earns $700 a month blogging about fish tanks. Now that story continues to be referenced by new listeners. I still hear about it a couple of times a week. And today, 1040 days later, I've got another story about fish tanks for you. This one features a Walmart manager who leaves his job to clean aquariums at doctor's offices.

This is a thing. He's actually doing really, really well through slow and steady growth and a strategy of personal interactions, which we'll talk about 'cause it relates to a lot of service businesses. This guy is now making $70,000 in annual income while working just 15 hours a week. He says he sometimes earns a better hourly rate cleaning the aquarium at the doctor's office than the doctor does. And in fact, since he started, he's earned over a million dollars.

So all kinds of stuff out there. Here we are a thousand days later and we're returning to fish tanks, but with a different approach. Never talked about this before because there's just so many options, so many possibilities. We're gonna call this Walmart Manager Cleans Aquariums for Fun and Profit. I'll tell you how he stumbles on this fishy side hustle and how he turned it into a very profitable business right after this shout out to our sponsor.

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When Larry McGee bought his first fish tank, he never imagined that one day his whole career would be focused on them. As a manager at Walmart, he was busy. When a friend with a service business asked if he wanted to make a little extra cash helping to maintain commercial aquariums, he agreed. Most of his friends' clients had aquariums in medical offices, waiting rooms, restaurants, and the occasional residence. Larry would spend his lunch breaks assisting with tank maintenance, learning on the job.

A year later, Larry's friend had to move. So Larry and his wife scraped together $2,500 to take over the business, which they renamed Aquatic Designs. At the time, Larry thought this would allow him to generate a small extra income. He'd always been good with his hands, having grown up around woodworking, and by now he had some experience with aquariums. This arrangement would continue for the next several years.

Larry serviced a few accounts he had acquired when he bought the business. It wasn't a lot, but those accounts were dependable and loyal. He tried advertising to gain new clients, but his efforts floundered. That's right, I did say that, floundered. When those new clients didn't come running, Larry assumed there was no interest and decided not to pursue aquarium maintenance as his core business, at least for the time being.

Instead, he turned his attention elsewhere, leaving his full-time job at Walmart and starting a tropical fish store, something he'd been working towards for a while. However, it didn't go swimmingly. I guess you could say it floundered too. After a while, he realized that retail was no different whether you were working for the man or if you own the business yourself. While there was real demand for tropical fish, rising rents was eating into profits and the stress of living an hour away from his family was taking a toll.

So when the opportunity arose for him to get out of the lease, Larry seized it. This left him with the question of what to do next, and that's where his long-standing side hustle came in. He decided he would revisit the quest to bring in more clients and do whatever it took to grow his income. He tried all sorts of methods to market the service, a mixture of direct mail, newspaper ads, something called the yellow pages, you know, this crazy thing that used to exist, and display booths at a state trade show. None of these methods alone yielded great results, but through each of them, he eventually started to grow his clientele.

Over time, however, he learned from his existing customers that the best way to market to them was through direct mail in an envelope. The office managers he spoke to told him not to send postcards, like a lot of other companies were doing, since those almost always go straight into the trash. With this advice in mind, Larry switched to a more personal approach. He handwrites letters and mails them to potential clients along with a picture of him and his wife. As Larry says, this lets people know who he is and what he's offering.

It allows him to stand out amidst all the advertising noise that's bombarding these office managers. The new strategy worked wonders. It led to a stable recurring clientele, giving him a more predictable source of monthly income. Through slow and steady growth and those personal interactions, Larry is now making $70,000 in annual income while working just 15 hours a week. One of his accounts has worked with him for more than a decade and provided almost $50,000 in business.

And all told, Cleaning Aquariums has brought in more than a million dollars for him. Larry says that the best part of the business is the freedom. Working in retail, there was no way he could take time off to attend his kids' award assemblies, track and field days, and church camps. But now he can arrange his work around his life instead of the other way around. Moving forward, Larry's looking to share the skills and knowledge he's gained and hopefully make some more passive income.

He started a blog and put together his first course on how to maintain an aquarium, something he says anyone can learn. He shared the course in the Facebook group in exchange for constructive feedback and reviews and recently launched it to the world. The new course will allow others to glean insight into the art of fish tank maintenance, almost with the same clarity as he leaves his clients' aquariums. [Music]

Awesome, congratulations to Larry on reinventing his life, going from Walmart retail management into full-time aquarium maintenance. But again, doing it on his own terms, 15 hours a week, $70,000 a year, that's fantastic.

Now, he would be the one to tell you about the first steps to aquarium cleaning. That's why he's got a blog and a course, so we're gonna link that up in the show notes. My observation, you know, when I think about myself, I'm like, personally, I don't want to go and clean aquariums, but I like to look at them. And ultimately, this is a service business, right? So the steps to success in a service business are the same, at least a lot of service businesses.

And the goal here is to build a repeat client base. You do this by providing a quality, reliable service. You know, that's the cleaning part. That's what you have to study and learn, whether it's aquarium maintenance or something totally different. But just as importantly, by personal contact.

That's where those handwritten letters come in. We've got such a smart strategy because office managers in medical offices are, you know, making all kinds of purchasing decisions. They are the influencers in that situation. But, you know, lots of service businesses are trying to reach them and sending lots of direct mail, making phone calls, et cetera. So Larry's handwritten letters with his photo of his wife, who really helped him stand out in that.

So if you're working on a service business, you could either use that same tactic exactly, or you could ask yourself, you know, how can I reach out to the people making the decisions in a personal, authentic, relatable way? So I will leave you with that today as we begin a new week. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. This is episode number 1038. Just come to sidehustleschool.com/10381038 for today's show notes.

I'll be back tomorrow with another story and I hope you'll be there to hear it. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.