Emergency Room PA Creates Medical Spanish Course

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

[Music]

Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome, friends, listeners, and community. You are listening to "Side Hustle School." The only podcast bringing you real-time examples, real world, real-time examples, every single day of how people are navigating the new economy, finding a way to succeed, finding a way to create security for themselves in the midst of a busy world, in the midst of a busy life, in fact. Every one of our case studies is someone who has a day job, but yet is able to, as mentioned, create this money-making project. Now, in today's story, I'll tell you about an online course that teaches Spanish terms to medical providers, and this course brings in more than $50,000 a year.

The guy who runs it chooses to pursue accreditation, which we're gonna talk about a bit in this episode, basically means that physicians and PAs who are taking his course can earn continuing education credits, and getting the accreditation takes a good amount of work, but by doing so, the course becomes even more in demand, and it also insulates the course designer from competition. Oh, and not only that, this guy succeeds without having an audience of his own. Sometimes people are like, oh, this is a great story, but he had so much platform. Well, this guy didn't have any platform at all. So I'll say more about that in the wrap-up.

The story is called "Emergency Room PA Creates Medical Spanish Course," and that story is coming right up. [Music]

Ben Tanner attended Podiatric Medical School. Before deciding that he wanted to become a physician assistant instead. These years of schooling resulted in his entry to an in-demand profession, but also a heavy burden of student loan debt. And that's what prompted him to start some sort of side business to pay it down.

He brainstormed different ideas before it dawned on him. He works as a PA in an emergency room and speaks fluent Spanish. Why not combine his two areas of expertise and create a Spanish course for medical professionals? It seemed like a logical match. He started by outlining what the course would include and thinking about how to best approach it.

Ben ultimately decided that the course would teach Spanish phrases that medical providers would need to know to learn a patient's medical history and conduct a physical on them in the emergency room. Setting up materials required him to create a combination of audio and video modules with accompanying text to go through each step of the lesson. He also reached out to different companies that accredit continuing medical education courses. This process took two years, that's right, two whole years, but instead of throwing in the towel, Ben kicked his patients into high gear. While he could have sold his course without it being accredited, it likely wouldn't sell as well or at a high price point.

More on that in a moment. That's because most medical providers must enroll in continuing education each year. Their employer often reimburses them for at least some of these costs, so they're not expecting them to be cheap. In the end, only one accreditation company got back to Ben. It required him to be a slightly squeaky wheel, those were his words, in order to move the process along, but the patients and follow-up paid off.

The course is called Essential Emergency Medicine Spanish. His startup costs of $5,000 included creating a mobile-friendly website, hiring a native Spanish speaker as the voice talent, and purchasing audio equipment, like a high-quality microphone. There was also an application fee of about $1,800 for the accreditation, but instead of paying for it upfront, the accreditation company agreed to subtract it from Ben's future earnings. Now, speaking of which, Ben doesn't sell the course directly, but through that accrediting organization, the Center for Emergency Medical Education. This is the result of a negotiation between the two, since the company wanted to advertise the course on their own website, attracting attention to other courses as well.

Essential Emergency Medicine Spanish debuted in 2018. Leading up to launch day, the employee Ben was working with had low expectations of how well the course would sell. But then on the first day of being publicly available, the company sent out a promotional email, and lo and behold, 41 people registered for the course that day, more than the employee had seen before with the company's own home study courses. But Ben had a feeling this would happen all along. He sensed there would be a demand, and he followed up on that since.

So let's talk about the pricing. Ben offers different prices for physicians, PAs, and students. The physician price is $695. The PA price is $495. And the student price, 295.

So basically 700, 500, and 300. Again, many physicians and PAs are able to get this expense either fully or partially reimbursed. And they're earning those critical CE credits that they need to have every year. Since launching the course mainly sells through periodic email promotions. Ben has also sold a few spots through Google ads, Facebook ads, and flyers at medical conferences.

Total earnings from Essential Emergency Medicine Spanish so far are around $150,000. After expenses, that's a profit of about $55,000 per year. For Ben, one of the best benefits is that the additional income has allowed him to switch to part-time at his hospital job. He sees himself becoming financially independent and free from student loan debt in the next couple of years. Going forward, he plans to create more content on his own site, learn medical Spanish, and attract more followers to his email list.

He also hopes to start a YouTube channel and update the course later this year when the initial accreditation expires. [Music]

So it's a very relevant topic. Ben is clearly the authority in this topic. He's merging his two points of expertise. He goes to school, becomes a physician assistant.

He speaks fluent Spanish, recognizes how important this is in a medical context, especially an emergency room context. And so you've got a really great product, but Ben doesn't have an audience. Yet he's able to launch this, and in the course of two years, make $150,000 in revenue, in what sounds like more than $110,000 or so in profit. So how was he able to do that without an audience? Well, it was in partnering with that CE provider, essentially, which allowed him to also charge a higher price, have even more authority, the reimbursement factor of people who take the course, but probably most of all, that company's access to other professionals who were taking their courses.

So that was a smart partnership. And I would say as well, Ben is also smart to think about growing his own audience, because maybe in the future, he can sell the course through other CE providers. Maybe more people will find it directly instead of from the CE provider, which of course further increases his income. I'm not sure if he makes more money on sales that he refers himself, but often that would be the arrangement. So if he doesn't have that, maybe that's something you could negotiate in the future.

And maybe for the next course, he just goes direct entirely. But the point is, like having his own audience wasn't a prerequisite for that first success, but it's good to focus on it from here on out. So hope you enjoyed this story. Congratulations to Ben. Listener's inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

Today's show notes, including links to the course, anything else I mentioned in the episode will be at sidehustleschool.com/1578. Remember, there is something out there that you can do too. If you haven't figured it out yet, well, just keep listening. Just keep thinking. Practice your power of observation and just be willing to try different stuff because sometimes it takes a while.

More on that later. I'm signing off for now. Hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.