This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hello, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. We are now going into week number three. This is episode 15, and if you have just joined us recently, you may wanna go back and listen to the first two weeks of episodes. Now you can listen to any particular episode without feeling like you're missing out, so it's totally okay if you're just jumping in.
But the lessons that you learn through the stories do build on one another. So if you're serious about your hustle, if you're making this your year of creating more freedom for yourself, you may wanna take the time to download each episode and then listen whenever you're able to catch up. Now this is not a one-sided commitment. If you make the commitment, I'm also committed as well. So if you make this part of your routine, I will do everything I can to support you in your hustle this year.
I'll be right back with today's story. It's all about how a graphic designer went from $8 an hour to $250 an hour in her side business. She now earns more than $100,000 a year working part-time, and she has some great advice that applies to a lot of hustles. And now our story. [Music]
San Diego graphic designer, Julia Kelly, wanted to make extra cash.
So after finishing college, she took a part-time summer gig as a caricature artist at a local amusement park. She'd always been good at sketching quickly, and drawing people sounded fun. Well, despite her skills, Julia's summer job started with a terrifying experience. The park had a strict rule that artists couldn't sketch in pencil before committing to the finished product. So right from the start, she had to use permanent markers.
In other words, there was no undo button, no way to back up from a mistake or erase and start over. Drawing faces can be intimidating, especially when you have to commit to each stroke from the beginning. The trial by fire was intense, but it worked. After a few weeks, Julia no longer felt terrified. Instead, she felt confident.
She'd mastered a new skill. She was rewarded with the smiles of happy children, as well as their parents, who went away with a fun drawing to place in their refrigerator, or maybe even frame on the wall. There was just one problem. The job paid only minimum wage, so most of her rewards consisted of those smiles. Happy faces are nice, but you can't deposit them in your checking account.
Once the summer ended, Julia wanted to keep drawing portraits, but naturally, she also wanted to make more money. That's when it hit her. Maybe she could sell her services on her own somehow. She wrote to every school in the area, asking if they'd consider hiring her for their next event. After her fourth pitch, someone replied to say they had something coming up the same week.
Could she bring her stash of markers and work for a few hours? Indeed, she could. That event led to another, then another. And before long, she was charging $100 an hour for corporate events, a rate far higher than what she'd earned at the amusement park. That was a tremendous success on its own, but Julia wasn't finished.
She had one more big idea that would catapult her earnings even higher. With more experience, she had learned how to draw digital caricatures, a new form of media that hadn't been widely seen before. Instead of using markers, Julia used a tablet computer. When she finished the drawing, she could print it out and email the image to the person who often posted it on Facebook for all their friends to see. This gave her work a wow factor that no other freelance artist in her area had, and the perceived value of her services skyrocketed.
She began charging $250 an hour, focusing on corporate events that had larger budgets for the right kind of experiences. Now, this higher rate was too much for some event planners, but plenty of others gladly accepted. So she was now making two and a half times as much while working the same hours. [Music]
So what can we learn from Julia's story? Well, first, a big part of the success came from putting a new twist on an old media.
Caricature art has been around for a while, but this shift to digital was new and fresh. Nobody else was doing it in her area. And as I mentioned, this allowed her to stand out and charge a much higher price than everyone else. Next, Julia chose to price based on value, based on the value that she was bringing to those event planners, to those corporations who brought her in. And Julia said that when she first raised her rate to $250 an hour, she said she would tell people the rate over the phone, then she would wince and hold her breath for their reaction, but nothing terrible ever happened.
And remember, she wasn't selling directly to people who paid for portraits, she was selling to corporations and event planners. I actually think it would have been a mistake to charge less than that $100 an hour rate she started with, 'cause that's what other people in the area were charging. So underpricing can sometimes be a good initial strategy, but it's usually better to focus on value, just like Julia did. If she had priced much less, those event planners might have wondered if she was any good. And the last words of wisdom come directly from Julia herself.
Remember how she was terrified to start? She talks about how she got used to being uncomfortable. As she stepped out into a new venture, she was uncomfortable before her skills improved. She was uncomfortable when she had to learn to pitch and make sales, and then to charge higher rates, to learn that new medium, to invest in different courses where she'd learn more. People sometimes think that all this stuff comes naturally.
And if it comes naturally to you, fantastic. But a lot of the rest of us are like Julia. It's not necessarily natural or intuitive. And sometimes you have to go through this period of discomfort to get to something that works as well as you'd like it to. But if you can embrace the uncomfortable and keep moving forward, then it's kind of like learning a language or learning to cook or any other skill.
You're pretty bad at it at first, but then with repetition, you do improve. Well, it may not happen exactly like that for you, but if you listen to these stories, you begin applying them to your own hustle, you will see results over time. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. And by the way, if you'd like to say hi, just go over to sidehustleschool.com. Every day there's an original post with show notes about the lesson.
You can also get a free five step hustle course and nothing's for sale. I just want you to be well supported as we go through the year and work on your hustle. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. I'll see you tomorrow with another action-packed episode.
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