Volunteer Turns Good Deeds Into Paid Consulting

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

[Music]

When a sales professional begins offering free advice on Quora, he learns he has a valuable skill that he can get paid for. Welcome to Sidus Will School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I haven't talked about Quora for a while. This would be a social network focused on asking and answering questions, quora.com.

I haven't talked about it for a while, so I was glad to see this story come through because I think Quora has, well, first of all, has seen tremendous growth over the past year or two. That is factual. And my opinion is that posting helpful answers there on the topic that you're trying to grow a reputation in can be a very helpful strategy as you'll hear about in this story. So if you're thinking about doing some kind of consulting or really a service of any kind, or even just building your authority, even if you want to be a blogger and write about a specific topic, you might wanna look into this. And at the end of the episode, I'm gonna give you a few specific tips to make sure you're being effective with this approach because there are some things you can do to be more effective than just going out there and trying to randomly answer questions.

So I'm gonna talk about that in the story. It's called "Volunteer Turns Good Deeds Into Paid Consulting." That story is coming up after this message from our sponsor. [Music]

Karmesh Ghosh was working as the head of sales and business development at a steel company in India. The company contracts and business activities to third-party services, which in this case meant helping to create jobs for hundreds of rural women in India. Although Karmesh was seasoned in the field, every once in a while he had a question.

And naturally he turned to Google for the answer. Through looking for answers on how to get more clients for his employer, he found that countless others were asking the same questions on the website Quora. Again, that's Quora.com, Q-U-O-R-A. So Karmesh began to answer any questions that he knew he could help with. More than anything, he wanted to support others in this specific field.

He never imagined that Quora would turn into a funnel of networking, but soon an outpouring of connection requests flooded his LinkedIn account. Karmesh had provided such helpful advice that people wanted to stay connected. As he continued answering questions, he began to find that some of the questions needed a more detailed explanation than he could give over text. So he decided to set up 30 minute free consulting calls to answer the questions more in depth. After close to two years of answering questions for free and helping around 70 to 80 people, Karmesh began to think about how he could get paid for his service.

It was clear he was providing value and he was ready to bridge this from a strictly volunteer venture to one that brought him a little extra money. So in January, 2017, he made his first move to start getting clients. Karmesh purchased a hundred business cards and attended a breakfast meet and greet. It was there that he introduced himself as the chief sales officer for Karma Works Consulting, his brand new company. At that event, he booked his first two clients and left with a deal for a thousand dollars.

From there, Karmesh decided to focus on three target audiences. Audience number one was introverted tech founders struggling with sales. Audience number two was founders who didn't have sales and marketing systems in place yet. And the third was people who had the money but didn't have the go-to market strategy. Investing time into the needs of those specific markets paid off.

In his first year, Karmesh made $3,100 in revenue and only spent $140 on expenses. And you guessed it, most of those expenses came from designing and printing that first batch of business cards. The next year, 2018, he decided he needed a website. So he set up karmaworks.com. Karmesh planned to write and use his blog to educate potential clients and create more authority.

Unfortunately, he didn't put as much energy into the business as the year before and his sales dipped. And part of this was due to his career. That year, the pressure for his day job increased. He also had a small retainer client for sales coaching that paid him $400 a month for three months. With this recurring client and preoccupation with his day job, he didn't feel a large pressure to expand.

But in 2019, Karmesh decided to amp up his side hustle once again. His job began to stabilize. So he started writing on blogs, putting out more content on Quora and LinkedIn and taking 30 minutes each day to look for new clients. This focus quickly increased his side income and things have continued to grow. Over the past year, he's written an ebook and begun attending more meetups.

KarmaWorks is now bringing in up to $1,200 a month, a very significant second income in India. Although Karmesh is now making good money from his volunteer venture, he hasn't forgotten its philanthropic origins. He still gives free coaching and one-on-one calls. He loves the strategy of giving 90% of his stuff for free and charging premium for the rest. Right now, he feels no immediate need to quit a day job he enjoys.

The money covers his rent and his daughter's schooling, which is a huge help to the family. He's also learned that a side hustle is like a plant. As he says, we need to nurture it every day or else it will die off. So moving forward, he plans to continue creating online courses, working closely with his clients, and providing free resources wherever he can. [Music]

All right, so congratulations to Karmesh, first of all.

Secondly, if you wanna go this route, if you're interested in this strategy of posting the answers on Quora, as I said, I do think it's still relevant, especially with all the growth that Quora has seen. They've done a wonderful job with SEO, so lots of times, you've probably found yourself on Quora if you search for the answer to something. They just have thousands and thousands of pages answering these kinds of questions. So if you wanna go this route, a couple tips. It's really important to be very helpful.

Quora rewards long-form answers that go into lots of detail. Nothing too salesy or nothing too superficial. The more detailed, the better. It's helpful to stay on topic. And for the most part, only answer questions related to your field or that you are highly qualified to answer.

If you just go and search, you're gonna find lots and lots of questions. You'll also wanna post consistently and spread your answers out. That's because people will subscribe over time and they'll get notifications of your answers. So you want them to hear from you on a regular basis, not just once a month or whatever, when all of a sudden there are 20 answers to different questions, so spread them out. And then add a link to your website or your LinkedIn or whatever it is that you have.

If you don't have a website yet, like in this story, Kermesh first just sent people to his LinkedIn profile where they began to connect. And then he realized, oh, there's some interest in this. There's some demand in what I'm offering. So add a link to your website or your social media profile or something at the end. Quora is okay with that.

You can see some examples of how people do it. And then over time, if your questions become popular, you will see once in a great while, I'll post something there. And even though I don't have a lot of following there, I definitely noticed some response. I definitely see some engagement from it. So I do think it is so worthwhile for the right business, for the right kind of topic.

And so go take a look. All right, well, and then of course, don't forget to start working on that consulting offer because eventually you have to offer something for sale. Don't forget that part. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Thank you so much for listening.

Our show notes for today are at sidehustleschool.com/1277. 1277, we are closing in on 1300 episodes. In large part because of you, our community, our listeners, you are amazing. So be sure you keep listening. If you've got a comment or question for the show, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.

I'll be back tomorrow. It's a brand new month coming up and I'm excited to keep rolling along. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.