This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up? Chris Guillebeau here. Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome as well to Failure Friday, our weekly segment that features short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. These stories tend to vary, but they often start with an idea or an assumption, something that the person thought would happen and then what really happened.
And of course, what they learned. It's been really fun to work on this segment this year. I applaud the courage of everybody who has been sharing stories. Thank you so much for your honesty and transparency. It helps all of our listeners, our amazing community all over the world.
Today's short story features Davis Wynn, who owns a consulting training business called My Consulting Offer. We told a successful story of his project on episode 1033. This project has done very, very well. It was something like 70 to $80,000 a month that was coming in when we first featured him. But as Davis was ramping up, naturally, he had some struggles.
So let's hear from him about one of these struggles, specifically related to hiring a virtual assistant. You know how you always hear that hiring a virtual assistant is the best thing you can do and it's gonna change your life and make things so much easier. Well, it doesn't always turn out that way. It's not always so simple. So let's hear from Davis.
I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
- My name is Davis Wynn and I'm the founder of My Consulting Offer. At My Consulting Offer, we help aspiring consultants become management consultants at firms like McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group. My Consulting Offer started as a side hustle for me back in 2017 when I got my first client off of Reddit to pay off a medical debt before I went full-time a year later in 2018. When I went full-time, this is where my inexperience as a new business owner would show up, especially when it came to hiring people.
Back in year one of going full-time, I had a lot on my plate, including potential client emails, taking introductory calls, managing the marketing, managing the website, and so much more that I was just working about 16 hours a day and some weeks I would work seven days a week. And I was just getting tired and getting weighed along the way. I knew I needed help. So after much consideration, I decided that it was time to hire someone to help me. And after doing much research by looking at, for example, past WDS speakers and training videos, I decided to hire a virtual assistant from the Philippines.
Since I read that remote workers from the Philippines had a strong culture of being virtual assistants, English was their first language, and I could hire someone for as little as $3 an hour. So I made a list of traits that I wanted to hire for. I found the most popular job board, which at the time was onlinejobs@ph, and I posted a job posting in November, and within a week I had over 200 applicants. And I started screening them and interviewing some of them, but after 60 or so, I couldn't find someone who fit exactly what I needed, and the holidays were coming up. So I wanted to find someone soon so I could spend the holidays with my family.
So despite having a checklist for the traits I wanted, I was so desperate to offload so many of my tasks. I was doing like managing our Facebook page or our LinkedIn page. I just wanted to get anyone who was decent, had a wifi connection. So I ended up hiring someone who wanted $3 an hour, could start the next day, and on her resume said that she had done social media, copywriting, and customer service, which was exactly what I wanted. But during our interviews, I didn't feel like the two of us clicked, and I had this feeling in my stomach that I shouldn't hire her.
I did anyways, because I just needed someone to take the load off of me so I can actually get some sleep. And after training her and having her do the role for about two weeks, she started to show up late for our meetings. Someday she didn't even show up at all, and some of the work didn't get done. But at this point, I'd spent so much time hiring and training her that I wanted it to work so badly. I kept going after the holidays, but I lost so much sleep that I couldn't keep her.
So eventually I made a decision to fire her and restart the process and hire the assistant that I have today. The lesson I learned from this is that a bad hire will set you back at least six months, not counting the income that you paid them. So if someone doesn't meet your criteria for what you're looking for, or you feel like there's something in your stomach that tells you that this person will be a bad fit, don't hire them, even if it means that you have to shoulder the work temporarily for a bit longer. So this is what I remind my team today, as we're now a team of nine amazing people who are full-time and 40 part-time people. - Thank you so much, Davis.
I appreciate you sharing that story. Congratulations again on the huge success of your business, but I very much appreciate the transparency in sharing something that went wrong. The theme of Failure Friday is never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. If you have been struggling out there, if you are going through something difficult, or if you've been frustrated, if an idea hasn't worked out, whatever it is, you are not alone. If you'd like to check out Davis's website, myconsultingoffer.org, myconsultingoffer.org.
If you have a question or an update for us about your side hustle, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you for tuning in today. I hope you'll subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts and come back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
[Music]
- From the Onward Project.
