Accountant Trades Active Clients for Passive Course Sales

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

[Music]

Trading time for money. How do you feel about it? This is one of those topics people talk about a lot in the world of small business or entrepreneurship or let's build some passive income, you know, that whole kind of thing. I tend to think that even if you do want to operate a service business where you're providing some hands-on coaching or consulting, in other words, you are trading time for money, hopefully a good amount of money, but even so, you can still benefit from creating a passive income component to your business. And in my experience, I often see someone move from, you know, one side of that to the other in the sense of they are providing a service and then they start creating that passive income component.

I think it's a smart thing to do. Okay, so this story today is a great example of that. An American accountant living in South Africa creates a financial wellbeing course for small business owners. She's got lots of experience in that topic, so she thinks I'm gonna create a course, I'm gonna market it on Instagram, I'll talk about that. And by doing so, she's able to scale her income and her lifestyle.

She currently works about 20 hours a week and earns a pretty good income from this course. I'll tell you exactly how much that is, of course, we like to do details here and how she made it happen in this story. Accountant trades active clients for passive course sales. [Music]

When Morgan de Klerk graduated with degrees in accounting and international business, she immediately went into the corporate accounting world, thinking it was the logical next step. But the long hours behind a desk felt like a waste and Morgan knew there had to be more to life.

After traveling with her husband, she settled down, at least for a while, in Cape Town, South Africa. There, she offered bookkeeping services to clients, which snowballed into a global accounting practice called MDK services. Morgan had a team of 14 contractors and says it was a great learning experience. Well, one of the things she learned is that many small business owners don't want a bookkeeper. They want to learn how to do the books themselves, at least in the beginning.

And in 2020, that realization inspired Morgan to start Master Your Finances, a bookkeeping money and tax course that teaches contractors, freelancers, digital nomads and small business owners how to manage their own money. The course cost about $3,000 to build. Most of that went to a web developer who helped out with the online course platform and building a proper e-commerce website. The benefit there is that the content is all hers. She has full control over how it's presented.

The challenge is that she needs her developer to make updates. But fortunately, she's kept him on retainer. Morgan also hired someone to run Facebook ads to help promote the course for the first three months. Unfortunately, those didn't pay off. But organic marketing on Instagram, particularly with Reels, did.

She says it shows your fun personality while showcasing yourself as an expert in the industry. The course now brings in profits of around $6,000 a month. And she's hoping to hit six figures in 2022. Morgan's ultimate goal is to eventually stop offering accounting services altogether and just focus on the course. She still has one large client that she enjoys getting hands on with, but the rest of her time is spent leading the course and helping students.

So what's not to love? Well, Morgan admits that sometimes she misses working for an organization where she can shout across the room to her colleague or go to her boss for help when she has questions. When you're the boss, you don't know how to do something, it can take hours of Googling, watching YouTube videos, or calling friends to figure out what might be a very simple task. But hey, when you do figure it out, it feels awesome. All things considered, Morgan loves the freedom of running her own business.

She works around 20 hours a week and spends the rest of the time with her husband and kids. They have a one-year-old and another baby on the way. She also helps to run a nonprofit called Rural Reach. It aims to help rural communities in Southern Africa with health, education, and job creation. Going forward, she hopes to keep doing more of that, all while growing the bookkeeping course and bringing in more students.

[Music]

Awesome, congratulations to Morgan. She has done a great job in particular with Instagram marketing, especially Reels, so those short little videos. If you are interested in growing your business with Instagram, you might wanna check out her account just to get some ideas, see what she's been able to do. It is Master Your Finances Today, I believe, on Instagram. If I'm mistaken, we're gonna have that linked up in the show notes page, along with anything else I mentioned.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. I hope you will take some inspiration and perhaps some action from this story. Those show notes are @citalsllschool.com/17931793. Thank you for joining me today. If you've got a comment or question, you can leave it there on the site as well.

I hope you will subscribe or follow and come back tomorrow. New episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]

- From the Onward Project.