This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome to Throwback Thursday slash Where Are They Now, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. I'm excited about today's episode. It's got some very practical advice, as well as some very personal advice that I'm gonna comment on as well at the end. Now first, here at the top of the show, I wanna give a shout out to a friend of mine, Ramit Sethi. Ramit is somebody I've known for about a decade now.
He writes the blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and well, I guess it used to be a blog now. It's a big company. He's got a number of information products and courses that he sells, and I know that he does really good work. So he's got a new course out called Earnable. I'm not an affiliate for this course.
I don't benefit in any way. I'm just giving him a shout out because he does good work. The Earnable course is open this week. If you wanna check it out, go to iwt.com/earn. That is iwt.com/earn.
And if you look at it later, there will probably be a wait list or something. So anyway, shout out to Ramit, keep up the good work. And for our program today and our latest feature, Throwback Thursday, we'll hear from a university administrator who creates a sustainable full-time income from teaching guitar. I remember when I first heard about Jake's story, I was a little skeptical because so many people play guitar. Like let's be real, there's a lot of guitar teachers out there in the world.
And in some ways, guitar lessons or music lessons in general are kind of a commodity. However, he approached it systematically by applying some basic marketing principles, including good copywriting, messaging, and just being reliable and solid, and ended up far surpassing the vast majority of other teachers. So as I said, some practical lessons here. Naturally, it's been a while. He's got some updates, including a personal one about the stress and anxiety of starting a small business that I really appreciated hearing about.
So as I said, I'm gonna say a couple of things about that at the end as well. But first, let's hear directly from Jake. [Music]
My name is Jake Posco. I'm from Annapolis, Maryland, and I own Severn River Music and severnriverguitar.com. I was in episode 23.
After failing up a lot of other side hustle ideas, things like eBooks or online services, I kind of fell into guitar lessons. I wasn't really that great of a guitar player to begin with, but I've been playing guitar since I was maybe 14 or 15 years old, and I just needed to be good enough to teach beginners how to play. So if I had a seven-year-old student with no experience, I could handle teaching them. I was a good teacher, just not a great guitar player. So I put an ad on Craigslist and maybe a few Google ads, and after a few weeks, I got my first student and just kept growing since then.
Since I was last featured on the show, I've tried to remove myself from the actual teaching of lessons as much as possible. So now the focus is on passive income strategies. I try to contract out my music lessons. I do affiliate sales on my website, that sort of thing. So I theoretically have more time to focus on other projects like my writing and my music.
The biggest challenge is managing anxiety. When you run a business alone, it is tough and it is isolating. I don't think enough current entrepreneurs or people with side hustles talk about the downsides of running your own business. It is not glamorous. It can be depressing and stressful, even more so for people starting a business because they're typically doing it on their own.
They don't have colleagues or a staff that they can work with or bounce ideas off of. So it ends up being really isolating. It's not a fun thing to talk about, but I think it's an extremely important thing to talk about. And addressing this is absolutely not meant to discourage you from starting your own side hustle. It's meant to prepare you for it.
So when you hit a wall of anxiety or depression and you will hit one of those walls, probably multiple times, you're better prepared to deal with it and move on. So you will be successful. As far as advice for anyone who is interested in starting a side hustle like mine, specifically anything that is a service-based side hustle, it is super easy to get started. Here's what you do. I'll give you three steps.
Step one, figure out what your service is. For me, it was teaching music. For you, it could be walking dogs, it could be personal training, it could also be teaching music. Step two, give yourself 30 days. That'll be your timeframe.
Step three, just advertise as much as your budget allows. Start with free stuff like Craigslist ads, Facebook groups or messaging. Email or call all of your family and friends, tell them what you're doing. Reach out to businesses that cater to your clientele. For me, it was schools.
I would reach out to music teachers and tell them that I was available to teach private lessons if they had students who were interested. You could do low-cost options as well like flyers or Facebook ads or Google ads. The important thing is that you do it a little each day. Day one, post your Craigslist ad. Day two, put flyers up around the office.
Day three, open your Google ad account. You don't even have to make an ad, just open the account. Just little steps every day and don't stop for 30 days. After 30 days, you will have your first client. If you don't, then your side hustle idea probably won't work, which is okay.
Now you know that you can move on to another idea. Just rinse and repeat the process until you find something that works. The whole point of the exercise is to validate whether or not your side hustle can work. If you find that after 30 days you're coming up totally dry with no clients, you gotta stop and think whether or not your business idea is viable. Again, totally okay if it's not.
It could mean the market just isn't there. It's not your fault, just move on to something else. - All right, I'm back. Now, isn't it interesting that Jake says, first of all, let's start from the top, he says I wasn't really that great of a guitar player to begin with. For me, it just goes to show that technical mastery isn't the main qualification of a successful music teacher.
And really what allowed him to grow his business and charge more and see his schedule fill up to the point where he could do it full time and make a good income was first of all, by learning more about being a good teacher. So being a good teacher, let's say, is more important than being an excellent musician. And then by marketing his business creatively. I wrote about that a lot more in the side hustle book when I told his story. He was just really good at thinking outside the box and just kind of created this grandiose copywriting style.
He called his guitar lessons the best guitar lessons in the universe, which of course is just catchy and memorable. And then he was solid and reliable and kept raising his rights as he went along. Now he had some great practical advice in that three-step plan, but I wanted to focus a bit on what he said about anxiety and depression and feeling isolated. So first of all, thank you, Jake, for sharing that. I try to talk about it once in a while as well.
And if you're out there experiencing something like this, understand from Jake's story, from my story, other people, it is somewhat common. When I say common, it's not to make light of it. It's just to kind of show you that you're not the only one. And I think it's especially common or especially maybe not common or universal, but like it's not unusual when you're making a transition from the world of structured employment. And then also if you add some responsibilities on top of that, like Jake has a family, for example, when you're responsible for more than just yourself, then this can be isolating.
And you can have this sense of the weight of the world is on my shoulders and I'm feeling stuck and there's nobody I can talk to and such. And so I think the first thing is acknowledge when this happens, right? Just acknowledge it, don't try to pretend it's not there and then try to understand, maybe just ask yourself, like why do I feel this way? Is it situational or is it general? If it's situational, that means there is a specific instance you can point to or a circumstance where you're like, oh, this is what I'm anxious about.
If this resolves itself, then I won't be anxious anymore. This client owes me a lot of money and they haven't paid up and I'm worried that they're not going to pay or it's gonna be a hassle to try to get the money, that situational anxiety. If it's general, you're just, as I said, feeling the weight of the world, you might have a sense of sadness or loneliness or something else, however you describe it, however it feels. And when that occurs, it's not usually a practical problem. It's not necessarily like a side hustle question necessarily, even though it's obviously connected to your work.
I would encourage you first of all to understand, like everyone you know is fighting a hard battle. And in the past three years of my life in particular, therapy has made a big difference for me. That person might not be a business professional but can still have a maybe even bigger picture, maybe even a more of an impact on whatever you're going through. And I try not to bring my therapeutic process and stories into side hustle school too much. But I just know that some people have these kinds of struggles and they can be a much bigger deal than like, how do I set up my email list?
Or what is the best copywriting phrase to use and so on. So if the shoe fits where it, if not, more stuff is coming up. I think tomorrow's episode is about buying items for resell at flea markets. Got a big community out there doing all kinds of different stuff. Thank you again, Jake.
2020 is our year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your hustle, if you'd like a free guitar lesson, perhaps, if you'd like a free save the date invitation to my upcoming book tour, at least I've got that. Go to moneytreebook.com and come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Today's show notes, including links to Jake's project, anything else I mentioned, are at sidehustleschool.com/1181. 1-1-8-1.
All right, thanks so much. Be strong out there. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
