Google Employee Becomes Career Coach for “Analytically-Minded People”

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

Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. In today's story, while working at Google, a technical support employee gives unofficial career advice until her colleagues encourage her to start coaching more formally. That is correct. We have a coaching story that actually succeeds.

You might wonder-- sometimes people ask me-- why don't I feature more coaches? It's because, to be very honest, most of them aren't really earning a lot of money. It's a crowded field, especially when it just comes to, I'm going to improve your life, I'm a life coach, et cetera. So in these situations, you should always ask, OK, it's not working for most people. Who is it working for?

Who are the exceptions? Who is doing life coaching, business coaching, career coaching, whatever it's called, and actually doing well with it? How are they standing out? And in most cases, they're doing so by creating more of a systematic process and catering to a specific audience. Now, that's what today's story has done.

She focuses on engineers and other analytically-minded people. So it's a Google employee who becomes a career coach for these analytically-minded people. And it's doing really well, again, because she's created that process and been specific. So let's talk about it. The story is coming up after this shout-out to our sponsor.

In 2014, Lindsay Gordon had no idea what a career coach was, but people kept telling her that she should be one. She was working in tech support at Google at the time, and one of her duties was onboarding and training the new hires. She acted as a mentor and noticed that many of them were incredibly stressed about their careers. Over and over again, Lindsay was asked how they should talk to their managers and what they could do to make sure they didn't get trapped in the clutches of the company forever. You see, Google gives and Google takes.

As the months went by, she kept hearing that she was good at helping people navigate these issues. She still wasn't sure how formal coaching worked, but with some quick searching, she found out that career coaches helped clients decide what next steps they should take in their jobs, both in the short term and to build a better future. Then she stumbled upon an 18-month program offered at the Extension School from San Francisco State University. This program would allow her to see if it was actually something she was interested in doing. One weekend in the middle of the program, a friend of her husband's came to visit.

This friend was interested in what she was studying and immediately asked if she would do a career exercise with him. It was great practice, but Lindsay didn't think much of it until a week later when she got an email from him asking, will you be my coach? Part of her wanted to say no, but she ended up agreeing. And due to her lack of experience, Lindsay decided to charge about half as much for her services as most coaches that she found online were charging, still a good rate at $85 an hour. Time went on and more and more people began asking if she was taking clients.

It led to what she calls an accidental side hustle. As someone with an engineering degree, Lindsay couldn't help but find it ironic that she was doing something like career coaching. Contrary to the stereotypes, she loved customer service. For the first six months, she would lead with this unique combination and talk to people about how weird it was. As time went on, she began to discover this was actually one of her strengths.

The combination of skills allowed her to approach career coaching from a structured, practical perspective. She began to call herself a career coach for analytically minded people. And that phrase connected with them, at least the right ones. Her clients love specific step-by-step procedures. And the focus has allowed her to stand out from other coaches.

After doing it on the side for a few years, Lindsay decided it was time to take her own next step. She'd considered quitting Google before, but hadn't felt ready. Now she was getting way more fulfillment out of her side hustle than in her full-time job. She stumbled upon this new career by listening to others, paying attention to the value she was providing to the people around her. This guided her to a career path that fit a skill she didn't even know she had.

By investing her time and energy into that skill, Lindsay was able to quickly find clients who trusted her. Since going full-time in 2016, she's grown her business to around $8,000 a month. Her project for this year is to bring her program to companies. Lindsay helps to train managers in HR departments to have clear, confident, and effective communication. She's also been taking professional baking courses, no doubt cooking up another set of skills.

Awesome. Congratulations, Lindsay. Now, as I said, most career coaches don't have success stories, at least not sustainable success stories, whether earning a good income, have plenty of clients, et cetera. And I was interested specifically in Lindsay's process. She has this collection of exercises that she has curated from lots of different places, exercises she's designed herself, ones that she learned at Google, et cetera, to create a systematic way of looking at the past and present to learn about who you are, what you want, and how you want to build your career going forward.

So again, it's structured. And she says it's designed to help someone escape complacency and finally be able to answer that question, well, what do you want to do? If you think about that, you might realize how valuable it could be, especially with that targeted market in mind. And analytically-minded people, she wanted to note, is not just engineers. It's also accountants.

It's also people in other professions. But the focus is on people who have that way of thinking, who have that way of seeing the world. Because that's the background she comes from. So it makes sense when you consider those factors. All right, inspiration is good.

But inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1179. 1-1-7-9. If you've got a comment or question for the show, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so much for listening.

I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.