$10,000 Side Hustle Helps Musician Land Full-Time Job

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

[Music]

Hey there, what's up? Welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau Four Side Hustle School. I hope you're having a wonderful day wherever you are in the world. Now from time to time, in fact, as we have heard already this week, sometimes a side hustle leads to a full-time entrepreneurial venture.

But what if your side hustle leads to a full-time job? Well, most people listening to the show work some kind of job, and not everyone's trying to escape the world of employment. But today is in fact opposite day on Side Hustle School. It's about a musician who creates a $10,000 side hustle. It starts kind of small.

It's just something she does for fun, but then does ramp up a bit, but eventually leads to that full-time job at a university, which also allows her to continue the side hustle. It is in fact a virtuous side hustling cycle. And I'll bring you that story right after this brief message. [Music]

Today's story is about a musician and assistant professor, Megan Paletti-Kuhar in Ohio. Megan first launched her media side hustle, Hey Paletti, with an exclamation point while doing a recording arts and technology school project.

The assignment was to envision her own recording studio business. Since Megan had a background as a classical musician, she knew that she could work with other classically trained musicians and really understand their perspective. She got so excited by the assignment, she decided to turn it into an actual project and see if she could make any real money from it. Now at this point, she wasn't an assistant professor. She was still in her early twenties and in school.

And in her words, she was pretty broke. So she had to keep her equipment cheap. She used a $200 portable multi-track recorder that was given to her as a Christmas present and occasionally borrowed a microphone from work. Megan decided to focus on what she called student-friendly pricing and offered recording packages starting at $150 that included editing, mixing, and CDs. She figured this pricing filled a niche in the market for music students that wanted professional sounding demos of their music, but couldn't afford to shell out a bunch of money.

Now this side hustle was truly a side hustle, especially in school. It brought in about $800, which wasn't a ton, but it paid for some expenses and she had fun in the process. Plus she was using and expanding the skills she had learned. Fast forward a few years and Megan's now husband, Nick Kuhar, who is a high school film teacher, joined the side hustle and added video editing to their offerings. This meant they were able to take on new clients and really gave their income a boost.

They also realized it would make sense to hire other artists with specific skill sets for the project instead of trying to do everything themselves. At this point Megan was offering consultation services for artists that wanted some help in branding their projects and Megan said that being able to hire friends and family members who are photographers, artists, graphic designers, and musicians is one of the best parts of the project. She feels like she's helping artists in both directions, both her clients and the people she hires for small jobs. And in fact, after doing this for a while, Megan and Nick realized there was another service they could offer, a one-stop shop for all media needs. So they created what they called a collaborative media group to offer affordable services in video production, photography, design, and music, all in one place.

With this shift last year, they had their biggest side hustle income yet, bringing in more than $10,000 in profit. And Megan accomplished all of this while keeping marketing almost non-existent. She created all the social media profiles, but is mostly active on Facebook. And she tried doing a few ads over the years, but never saw any results. To this day, every client comes from word of mouth.

And she also says it's interesting because on her Facebook page, she doesn't always get a ton of engagement. Sometimes there's just five or six likes on any given post, which feels discouraging. But then out of the blue, she gets an email saying so-and-so recommended you. And she never knew that person was even paying attention or realized she was out there. Now, here's another fun thing.

More recently, Hey, Pauletti actually helped Megan get her current full-time job as an assistant professor of music technology at Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music. She was first hired as an adjunct music technology professor, but the job grew because of the skill set she had acquired with the side hustle. She's now the first full-time music technology professor there. She teaches courses in both music technology and entrepreneurship, and is also the conservatory videographer. With this new promotion, Hey, Pauletti lives on as a side hustle that provides an additional source of income for Megan and Nick.

Since they both have full-time jobs, now they can turn down work if they're too busy. But when they want, they can devote a weekend to a project and make an extra $1,000 to $1,500 that month. And this added income has gone toward bigger purchases like new windows and furniture without requiring them to dip into their savings. [Music]

Well, as I said, sometimes your side hustle leads to full-time hustling. In some cases, like you heard today, it might lead to a different full-time job.

So Megan is doing what's best for her. She feels like she's pioneering in a new field. She has the security of that day job as a professor, but she's also cultivated these skills, built that asset to where she and Nick can make extra money doing something they enjoy. And as she pointed out, being able to hire friends and family for specific gigs as well. Now, by the way, Megan did all of this with a very simple website she built on WordPress.

And from time to time, I talk about that. I don't think I've mentioned it recently, but I've been building websites on WordPress for more than 10 years. I love the simplicity and ease of it. You can do some really custom stuff with it. And for that, I have much smarter people that I work with, but just being able to kind of manage content and do something easy is in fact easy.

So if you wanna check out a special web host offer that we have for Side Hustle School listeners, that is at sidehustleschool.com/website. And there you can pay something like $4 a month to host your website, install WordPress, and it can grow with you as you need as well, if you eventually decide to ramp up. So that's sidehustleschool.com/website. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/180. That's 180.

As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I hope you enjoyed Megan's story. Megan, congratulations. And everyone else out there, I hope you do one thing today to get closer to the freedom you want to create for yourself. There are so many different expressions of Side Hustles.

That's why there's a different story every day. I will now leave you to the rest of your day. Hope to see you tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]