This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up? Welcome friends, listeners, side hustle school community. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. Decided to bring you another Throwback Thursday segment. I really love looking back on some of the stories we have featured in years past.
I often hear a lot of updates, some lessons learned, sometimes some mistakes, sometimes some new businesses, evolutions, et cetera. We bring you these updates directly from the featured case study, the individual whose story we've covered before. Now, last week we heard from Dion Link who has earned more than $100,000 from Fiverr Consultations. $100,000 on this platform that is known for being pretty low paying since it's called Fiverr. It was originally $5 per service.
So obviously he has done fabulously well. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Lisa Holpe. She is in Seattle. She has a really cool story of starting a home organization business that serves well off clients and then donates many of the discarded items to people in need, including newly settled immigrant families. And I'm actually connected to Lisa a little bit through the starting of her business together with Gretchen Rubin, which is a fun little side note.
I think she mentions it here in her update. And Lisa is also incredibly organized. So we went back to her and said, "Hey, tell us some stuff that's changed." And she said, "Well, since the time I was featured, I've done 1,875 billable hours." I was like, "Man, I have no idea how many hours I spent yesterday doing anything." So I respect the organization. What's happened since? Let's hear directly from her.
She's got some updates about COVID-19, some advice for anyone else interested in the organizing business. And I'll be back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Lisa Holpe. I live in Seattle, Washington, and I was featured on episode 353, "Yoga Teacher Cleans Up." And I'm also in the "100 Side Hustles" book. My side hustle is as a home organizer.
I like to say my superpower is my ability to create beautiful, functional, highly personalized spaces for my clients. I got that idea from my side hustle, kind of like a bolt from the blue, during an interview with Chris Guillebeau. I was at a live taping for Gretchen Rubin and Liz Kraft's podcast, "Happier." And of course I was sitting right in the front row because I'm a super fan. And Gretchen interviewed Chris about his book, "Born for This, How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do." And I had this epiphany. I love decluttering and organizing and making things beautiful.
It's what I do to play. I lose track of time when I do it because I'm so focused. I'm like a dog with a bone. Plus I have 25 years teaching experience. So in that moment, it dawned on me, people might actually pay me for this skill.
I was featured on the show in December, 2017. And since that time, my side hustle of home organizing became my full-time job. And my full-time job of yoga, teaching yoga, decreased down to a little side hustle. So in that time, I worked in 149 homes for a total of 1,875 billable hours. This is pretty much a three year span.
And delivered 352 carloads of my clients' donations to places like the Refugee Women's Alliance, where I volunteer, and to the local food banks, to Goodwill, as well as delivering specialized recycling. So things were going great. I was working five days a week in clients' homes. I was booked out weeks in advance with a wait list. And I love my work.
And then the pandemic hit and everything changed. And I'm recording this on day 90 of Seattle's stay at home order. So I'm right in the middle of a lot of uncertainty and change. I would characterize these past three months at home as a time of service and experimentation. Right away when the pandemic hit, I knew I wanted to serve my clients because this is a super stressful time for everybody.
So right away I started teaching yoga every morning on Zoom. And so I went from teaching my group twice a month to teaching seven classes a week. I knew I wanted to serve my organizing clients. And I have been working with clients virtually on Zoom throughout the stay at home time. I wrote an ebook as a thank you for joining my mail list.
I rewrote my introduction letters. I added online scheduling option. I gave a few talks on Zoom for a couple of different companies. I wrote and sent out three newsletters to my mailing list. I used constant contact.
So all of this, all of it felt like a pretty steep learning curve actually. Advice I'd get to someone who's thinking about becoming a home organizer. This is a really good time to do a lot of reading. I would read books on organizing, on home design, housekeeping, habit change, time management, paper management, digital management. I actually pretty frequently get requests for informational interviews.
So I have a PDF of my favorite resources. I'm happy to email it to anyone who's interested. You can just reach out. I guess the last thing I would say is in this time of such huge transition, you know, I don't know what's gonna happen. All I can do is keep offering excellent service to my clients between home organizing and teaching yoga and getting donations to people who need them and keeping stuff out of the landfill.
I feel like I'm living in integrity with my values and that I'm being of service to people in ways that are easy and enjoyable for me and beneficial for them. So we'll just take it one breath at a time. - Thank you so much, Lisa, for those updates. I have so much respect for her business. When I talk about it sometimes, I tell the story and I say it's just wonderful that she is able to, you know, do well for herself, do well for her clients, and then serve this third population, refugee families and other people that she donates the items to.
So isn't that the trifecta, you know, do well for yourself, make your clients happy, and then there's a whole other group of people who benefit from your work in addition. So I'm grateful to her for helping us out with this segment. Go check out lisaholtb.com. That's L-I-S-A-H-O-L-T-B-Y.com. She has lots of resources on her website for both her yoga business and her home organizing business and some how-to videos, et cetera.
Lots of good stuff there. 2020 is our year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, you need some help decluttering. Well, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We're featuring them throughout the year along with these updates from listeners as they've launched their projects.
In our show notes, the last link of the day, those are at sidehustleschool.com/1293. One, two, nine, three. Thank you so much. Be safe out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
