Land Surveyor Paints a Sign Hustle

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

[Music]

When a land surveyor and father of three can't take his job anymore, he experiments with business ideas until he lands on something that doesn't feel sketchy. In fact, you could say he finds the right sign. Welcome to Minnesota School, my name is Chris Guillebeau, and hey, just in case it's not clear, rare is the story where someone knows exactly what they want to do, and then they go out and do it, and everything goes precisely as they expect. Pretty sure we almost never have stories like that here on the program. And my personal belief in life is if nothing goes wrong, maybe your goals are too small.

You know what I mean? Like if you set such an obtainable goal that there's almost no risk of failure or no risk of anything going wrong, I would say maybe you should consider stepping it up. All right, so the keys to success in this field are persistence, adaptation, and the willingness to try new things. Once again, that is persistence, the right kind of persistence, which is why I also mentioned adaptation, being willing to change it up, mix it up, and the willingness to try new things. That's what you're gonna hear about in this story.

It's called "Land Surveyor Paints a Sign Hustle." Sign hustle. All right, that story is coming up after this message from our sponsor. [Music]

In 2015, Sean Fitzwater was working as a land surveyor, but he hated his job and wanted to find a way out. Now the change was a long time coming. Like many young people, he had left high school with hopes, dreams, and aspirations of achieving something great.

But here he was 20 years later and still doing the same thing he was back then. But what could he do? He'd spent half his life refining a single skill and felt like he couldn't do anything else. So he dabbled. He tried out different stuff.

He thought about moving into IT, thought about going back to college or university, maybe even opening his own pub. But in the end, however, he decided on something totally different. After throwing more ideas around and attending a business workshop in his local area, Sean landed on the idea of a bicycle advertising business. He would create a trailer to pull along behind his bike and then sell the ad space to local businesses. He would charge per hour to cycle around town with the ad in tow for all to see.

He could build the trailer himself and he loved cycling. So it seemed like the perfect idea. In no time at all, Sean achieved some success. In fact, he was soon filling out every spare hour he had outside of his day job and decided it was time to quit, take the plunge and go out on his own, turn his side hustle into a full-time gig. However, after making this decision, he realized this wasn't it either.

He hated knocking on doors, trying to sell the concept of businesses. He also learned that the ads weren't as beneficial to his clients as he initially thought, and that bothered him. Sean had gone from a job he hated to a business he disliked. He was behind on his bills, including the family mortgage payment, and was struggling to keep that family of five afloat. When 2018 rolled around, things had gotten even worse.

Sean had begun driving for Uber with the family car to make ends meet. For him, it was a low point, and he had many hours in between rides to dwell on what he considered a huge failure. Still, he chose to use the time between those rides in a productive way. He started drawing pictures in his notebook, just outlining different ideas, and soon that spark of creativity led to something much different. Sean decided he would paint a mural of TV characters on his oldest son's bedroom wall.

Once he got started, he already knew he loved it. He got lost in the process and felt like maybe, just maybe, this time he'd found an idea that was palatable. Palatable, you get it? Before finishing the mural, he knew this would be his next side hustle, or at least he would try. He would paint children's murals alongside Ubering and figure out a way to connect the dots.

In his excitement, he decided to film a progress video of the half-finished mural and post it to Facebook. He wanted to try and market this new service straight away. Fast forward one week, and Sean was shopping at the local grocery store. There, he bumped into a restaurant owner who'd seen his video. The owner asked Sean to paint a sign for his restaurant.

Just like that, with zero startup costs and minimal marketing, in August 2018, Fitz hand-painted signs and murals was in business. He trotted off to the restaurant and painted the sign, filming the whole process. He posted that video to Facebook, which led to another job. He repeated the video process and, ping, another job. From there, more work kept coming.

Soon, he was painting business signs, murals, and walls all over town. It all happened so fast that Sean was still borrowing the ladder from a friend to complete the work. He filmed and posted every job, which led to more inquiries. He also knocked on doors, cold called, and sent direct messages on social media. Basically, any way he could get a foot in the door, he would.

Sometimes this led to work right away. Other times, it forged new relationships that led to work further down the road. The bottom line is that it led to success. Sean is now making a full-time living from his sign business. He's caught up on all his bills, taken his family on vacation, and even has a healthy savings account.

He's also realized if you just keep trying, eventually you'll find the right fit. I guess that's the mural of this story. [Music]

Well, as I said, these things take time. You gotta try different stuff. You have to be willing to investigate, explore, discover, and then adapt when the first thing doesn't work.

Maybe you will get lucky and the first thing works, but something will probably break along the way, or there's something you need to improve, or some mistake you need to overcome, or, you know, setback, hardship, failure, whatever it is. Okay, so just remember that that's normal. And before I go, I wanted to read some notes from Sean. I was just looking at this in our detailed interview with him. I just want you to pay attention to something here, 'cause we ask him about, you know, tell us more about why you wanted to leave that career.

And he said, "I had thought about wanting to do something with computers or really just anything else different. I would even send out applications for that type of work just with the hopes that I could break in entry level somewhere. And of course that didn't come to light. I had reached such an unfulfilling level at my day job that I was beginning to feel depressed and any single small thing would set me off or just keep me in a bad mood. I clearly hated my job and I had no interest in what I was doing there any longer." So I wanted to share that with you because I know a lot of our folks like their jobs, and that's great.

If you like your job and you're trying to start your hustle on the side, that's great. But for those out there who are dissatisfied, 'cause I know we have a lot of people like that too, I think the key is like Sean felt this way and he did something about it. And he was frustrated. He was even depressed. It didn't work, you know, at first.

And he had to go down all those different roads, but eventually he found the right one. Okay, so my encouragement to you is that you're not alone if you're in that place, Sean was in that place and so many other folks at different times as well. So I hope that is helpful to somebody out there. Whoever you are, thank you for listening. And thank you for listening, all our listeners.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, including everything I mentioned in the episode, will be at sidehustleschool.com/1359. One, three, five, nine. You can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. I hope you'll keep coming back.

We have a different episode every single day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the "Onward Project."