This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Today is October 1st, episode 1370. 1370, 1370. When I say October 1st, of course, that's the date it's coming out.
You could be listening later. But, you know, as the calendar turns, we are now in the final few months of the year. And what a year it's been, of course. I don't need to tell you what 2020 is like. Year 2020 may have been different than mine, but I'm pretty sure you're gonna remember it, right?
It's a memorable year, for better or for worse, or for both, perhaps. Anyway, today is Throwback Thursday. Today's segment is all about looking back at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. Now, last week we featured a fan of old school board games. This guy who's had a tremendous success with multiple six-figure crowdfunding campaigns.
He's actually raised just under a million dollars with his newest game on Kickstarter. That new game is called Bristol 1350, and it's about the plague, fun fact. You know, good timing for that. Anyway, today in our latest feature, we will hear from an accountant who sells spreadsheet templates and other financial resources to creatives. Janet LeBlanc is another one of those go-to case studies that I refer to whenever people say something like, "Well, I don't know how to apply my skills," you know, to the world of side hustles, or, "I'm an engineer," or, "I'm an analyst," or, you know, whatever the particular skill is.
I think, well, here is an accountant, a CPA, who has actually been able to build a pretty significant business. It's actually full-time for her and her husband now, all designed to meet this need of makers, creatives, other people selling art and items like that on Etsy and other sites. So anyway, let's not preempt her story. What's happened since then? The original episode was 6/11, 6/11, in case you want to go back and listen to it, but we have an update from her.
So let's hear directly from Janet, and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Janet LeBlanc, and I recently moved to Greenville, South Carolina, in the U.S. My business is called Paper and Spark, and I was featured on episode 6/11. I am a financial educator for makers and artists. Basically, what I do is create things like spreadsheets, workbooks, and courses to help creative entrepreneurs get confident about the financial side of running their business.
I followed the traditional straight and narrow path into public accounting and then corporate accounting, but my heart wasn't really in it 100%. So I started an Etsy shop on the side back in 2011. It was kind of my creative outlet selling jewelry. And through that, I learned as both an accountant and an Etsy seller, there were a lot of other makers out there that had questions when it came to the financial side of running their business. There's a lot of confusion around things like sales taxes, turning a hobby into a business, how to set profitable prices and actually make money, how to do your books, those kinds of things.
And since I had that accounting and tax background, I decided to start blogging about like answers to these questions. In 2014, after blogging about that for a while, I formally started Paper and Spark, which is my current business. And I wanted it to be a platform for helping the maker community and helping creative business owners get financial confidence. The first thing I did with Paper and Spark was sell a bookkeeping spreadsheet, especially for Etsy shop owners. And that's still my most popular product to this day.
I was reluctant to get into spreadsheets because when I first started selling on Etsy, this was supposed to be my creative outlet. I was kind of looking for an escape from the accounting side of my life, but it was just a struggle for a few years wanting to do something creative and kind of sexy. And spreadsheets are totally the opposite of that. But once I finally gave into that and realized that I really, the way that I was able to teach these topics was creative. Like I'm trying to do it outside the box of any other stereotypical kind of stingy or mean, grumpy accountant.
So I fully embrace that I am a creative now too. I'm just teaching accounting in a creative way. When I was last interviewed, my husband had just quit his full-time job and we just made the decision for Paper and Spark to support our family of four, 100%. And since then we went on a journey to figure out where we wanted to raise our kids. We had been living in Houston, which was great, but with being 100% self-employed, we could live anywhere.
So we tried out different towns and states and cities around the US and we have finally settled in Greenville, South Carolina. My business has grown. The product suite has grown. The spreadsheets and the intro level courses continue to do well. There's never really been a better time than right now for creative people to try their hands at starting a business from home.
So I kind of have those products running on autopilot and it's given me more of an opportunity to follow, I guess what I'd call like passion projects within my business. So I've been able to develop more like high level, intermediate or advanced courses for more established business owners to help them better understand things like their key metrics and other numbers in their business, which has been fun. In my original episode, Chris talks about finding your synergy and like I said at the beginning, I'm a creative person, but I'm also an analytical numbers person. I really wanted to sell handmade, but I wasn't really good at anything in particular. I didn't bring anything super special to the crafty table.
I just started with jewelry because that's what I could figure out. But at one point during my time selling jewelry, I took a branding class and there was a question about what was something special that I brought to the table. And literally the only thing I could think of was that I was an accountant who also made jewelry. And there's likely not many accountants who are making jewelry for sale, right? But how can I use that to sell more jewelry?
And I didn't really know, I had to let that idea percolate for a while. So my other main piece of advice would be, just keep going and stay open. Thinking of myself as the jewelry maker who was also an accountant and pondering what I could do with that is eventually what led me to my spreadsheet idea, which is eventually what led me to be able to create Paper and Spark, which now supports our family. - Awesome, thank you so much, Janet. Really appreciate that detailed update as well as the advice for our listeners.
And by the way, isn't it cool that you can, if you work for yourself or even if you work remotely for a company, like a lot of people are doing now in 2020 with how the world has changed, you can use that time to really answer the question, if I could live anywhere, where would it be? Even if it's just for a year or something. So as you heard in Janet's update, she was from Houston, but they looked at a bunch of different towns and said, we're gonna move to South Carolina. They were able to do that because this business is supporting her whole family. So what skill do you have that can be adapted?
Janet touched on it, the synergy. I ask it all the time. I know it's kind of like, like, oh, wow, Chris is talking about this again, but it's so important. The synergy of taking that skill that you already have, not going back to school to get another degree or something. What are you already good at?
What is your profession, your qualifications, your certifications, your education, or most important of all, your knowledge. How can you take that knowledge and then apply it in some way? So Janet found a way of creating these financial resources for makers, creatives, other people that are not always so good at finances. And I'm gonna include myself in that category, by the way. So if you're a creative who happens to be very analytical, that's great, but a lot of us are not.
So she's been able to serve that market and make a huge difference and also do well for herself. So I am grateful to her for helping us with this segment. We're gonna keep doing them throughout the rest of the year. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. If you have a question, if you have an update for us, if you'd like to learn more about spreadsheet templates, well, for that last one, you're gonna look at Janet's site, not mine, that is paperandspark.com.
I will link it up in the show notes page. And for all the other things, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. All right, much more is coming up. You can listen to this wherever you get your podcast. You can subscribe and Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or as I said, wherever you like to do that.
So thank you so much. You're amazing. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
