Account Manager Draws Income From Adult Coloring Books

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

[Music]

Well, yesterday we kicked off the program with some advice from the featured side hustler. I was looking at the notes for today's episode and I found some more good advice. What can I say? All kinds of helpful advice coming from these amazing people that I have the wonderful privilege to feature and tell you their stories every single day. Which by the way, my name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. And here is what today's featured hustler has to say. She says, spend some time alone with a journal to really spell out what you want, why you want it, and then break down exactly what you need to do to get there. Then say no to everything else. Running a side business is full of so many possible distractions.

Should I start a podcast, a YouTube channel, an email newsletter? Choose a small step that feels right to you and then focus on that to the exclusion of everything else. Wise words. And by the way, remember, you don't have to do it all. You just have to do one thing right.

In this story, a Cleveland-based account manager turns her search for a craft night activity into a bustling business with multiple products. That story's coming up after this message from our sponsor. I appreciate them and I appreciate you. Stay tuned. [Music]

Cleveland-based Laura DeFranco is a creative person who enjoys spending time in nature.

She also considers herself obsessed with self-improvement and goal setting. Sometimes she admits perhaps too obsessed. As you might imagine, these competing focus areas can sometimes create problems. And Laura isn't alone. Working as an account manager for a branding and marketing studio, she's surrounded by people just like her.

Free spirits who somehow found themselves spending a lot of time staring at screens or working to cross everything off their to-do list. Laura wanted and needed reminders to slow down. When she searched for tools and couldn't find exactly what she was looking for, she got to work making it. Free period press, her side hustle, creates products to help customers unplug and focus on what's important to them. The first product was an adult coloring book.

Why a coloring book? Well, you see, looking to make friends post-college, a sometimes daunting task, Laura started a monthly craft night at her house. While the turnout was good, the result wasn't what she'd hoped for. Many of her friends would say that they didn't have a craft and instead brought their laptops. Staring at their screens was no way to build offline connection, so Laura quickly searched for a solution.

She wanted something anybody can do, something that wasn't too intense, but still helps you unwind. Coloring books were that solution. So when it came time to launch free period press, these nostalgia-inducing pages would be her first product. She found a designer and did some research determining that startup costs would be about $5,500. $500 for the design plus $5,000 to print the first run.

Laura had been fully self-funding her new venture with her weekly paycheck, but that only went so far, so she decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign. That campaign was successful, raising all the money she needed. A few months later, she was shipping out the first coloring books and, emboldened by the positive customer response, she immediately started thinking about the next product. Now, this all started in 2013. Laura has now launched a new project or projects nearly every year, many of them via Kickstarter.

In 2015, she released five more coloring books. Then in 2016, she launched what's become her biggest success, the habit calendar. In this calendar, you write the habits you want to track in the left column and check off the habits you've completed at the end of every day. The easy to use tool was a hit with customers. Now, when it comes to pricing, that can be challenging for many side hustlers, but Laura kept it simple.

After researching and looking at comparable projects in the marketplace, she decided the retail price for each product would be at least four times the manufacturing cost. This would allow her a healthy margin, even when she was selling it at half price to wholesalers. Now, all of this hard work has paid off. After earning $6,000 in her first year, annual profits were steadily around $10,000 to $15,000 for several years before increasing further. In total, free period press has earned well over $100,000 in profits with part-time effort.

Now, after several years of methodically building it on the side, Laura is leaving her day job and making the project her full-time focus beginning in early 2020. She's achieved this by working through many of the challenges that product-based businesses face, not just pricing, but also marketing post-Kickstarter, Laura was determined to learn from the experiences of others. After the product launch, she focused her marketing efforts on Amazon and on wholesale. While it was intimidating to learn the ins and outs of another platform, the unbeatable organic traffic the site provides made it worth the effort. She also reached out to all of her Kickstarter backers to ask them to provide honest Amazon reviews, which are important to gaining traction.

On the wholesale side, Laura uses a service called Wholesale in a Box that provides 20 leads per month from retailers that might be a good fit with her brand. When she receives her monthly batch, she reaches out to all of them and uses a wholesale platform called FAIR to process those orders. Speaking of that, Laura decided to focus on wholesale orders over building a direct-to-consumer brand because she found it was more effective and efficient with the limited time she had. Not only is the minimum wholesale order $100, but she also found that they became repeat buyers. Going forward, she plans to focus on increasing her social media presence and working more on that direct-to-consumer site, which she'll now have time to do.

[Music]

Awesome, congrats to Laura. Let's take a look at a lesson learned. This is something we've talked about a couple of times in the program, but it always bears repeating. So Laura said it hasn't always been smooth sailing. She actually spent the first four years putting all the money she earned back into her business without paying herself.

So even though it was profitable, she was taking all those profits and putting them back. And she now believes investing in her business is important, of course, but she also learned that not seeing the fruits of her labor was a recipe for burnout. So she credits the book "Profit First" with helping her create more of a balanced approach that has allowed her business to grow without draining her. I've actually given a shout out to that book multiple times. It is by Mike Michalowicz, "Profit First." Good book, good lesson.

His whole principle is pay yourself first. That's it for today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1075, episode 1,075. Thanks so much, my friends.

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