This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome friends, welcome listeners. Welcome to Throwback Thursday. This is our weekly segment on Side Hustle School where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Now let's see what have we had recently. Recent features included a Florida enthusiast who becomes America's leading ambassador of kick bikes.
Kick bikes are kind of like bicycles and scooters combined, basically a European mode of transport and adventure. We've also heard from a CEO of a lead generation company in Utah. Now today in our latest feature, we're gonna go to Los Angeles, California. We're gonna hear from an LA film editor who sets out to create a business serving other industry professionals. He now earns as much as his previous salary with just three hours of coaching per day.
Let's hear a bit about that as well as what else has happened. Since we last talked with Zach, that is indeed his name, Zach Arnold. Gonna hand the microphone over to him. [Music]
My name is Zach Arnold. I am located in Los Angeles, California.
I am the creator of the Optimize Yourself program and podcasts. And I was originally on episode number 501, which was Hollywood film editor optimizes life through self-care side hustle. What I do is I help creative professionals and solopreneurs better manage their time, their energy and their attention so that they can focus on the most important work that's gonna help them achieve both their professional and their personal goals. But the most important part is that they have to be able to do it without sacrificing their health or their sanity in the process. So my side hustle actually began about six years ago as a hiking group in my industry and I called it Fitness in Post 'cause I work in an industry called post-production, which are all the editors that are sitting in their small dark rooms with no windows editing everything.
And I wanted to get us outside. I wanted us to become healthier and start taking care of ourselves. So I started this online group where we were doing these online competitions with Fitbits. And I started a podcast and we talked about this experience that we're all going through, trying to find better health, working in a very unhealthy industry. And that podcast started to take off, even though it was only for me and my friends and people that wanted to listen, it started to grow and expand and it went viral in my industry and it became a thing.
And people started to ask me, is this a business? Like, what are you doing with that? Are you monetizing it? And I said, I don't know. I have no idea what I'm doing with this.
But then I started to think about it and I realized a lot of people were coming to me for advice and that advice had value. So since I was originally featured on the show, I would say that not a whole lot has changed, but things have certainly expanded significantly. When I first started the business, the first way to monetize it was doing self-guided online courses. And I was able to earn a fair amount of revenue doing that, but then I realized that my real passion and also the main source of income that I wanted to pursue was doing coaching. So I don't remember exactly when I spoke to you guys last, but I think it was a couple of years ago.
And I was just at the point where I started to build a private coaching program and I was dabbling with it with maybe two, three clients here, learning the ropes. And I'm at the point now where I'm filling five days a week with upwards of 30 plus clients, some of them in groups, some of them private. And from a financial perspective, I'm now able to essentially match what my salary was as a film and television editor. When I was working 60 to 80 hours a week, commuting two hours a day to film studios dealing with LA traffic, I've now matched that amount of income working from 7.30 to 10.30 Monday through Friday. So 15 hours a week of me actively serving others is earning almost the same amount of income.
Now that doesn't mean that I'm not still working all day long, I may self-foreclaim to work aholic. So I love building the business, growing the business, learning more, adding new tools. But as far as bare bones, sustenance and survival, I have been able to all but match my old salary just coaching people in the mornings for three hours a day. The number one piece of advice that I would give to somebody that wants to start their own online business. And this is not a sexy piece of advice, it's not exciting, but it's the truth.
You have to be willing to invest insane amounts of time in talking to people that you want to serve. So if you think that you're just gonna be able to create this amazing online course or this amazing coaching program or this amazing funnel where you're gonna do Facebook and Google AdWords and write all these emails, if you don't understand who the people are that you're serving and you don't understand what it is that they truly need, you're gonna spin yourself in circles and you're gonna say this online business stuff just doesn't work. So I've invested years of time just getting to know people better, talking to them, sending out email surveys, getting on one-to-one video conference calls for free and just asking them about their lives and understanding where are you now, where is it that you ultimately want to be in life and what is standing in the way. If you can have somebody talk about those three questions in one phone call, you're gonna learn more than any research, reading books, looking at other people's email funnels, just talk to people. And being able to do that drastically will increase your success rate but you're not gonna make money doing it overnight.
But that to me is the secret sauce to why I am able to have the conversion rates that I am and the success rate that I've had thus far is because I know my audience sometimes better than they do. [Music]
- Zach, thank you so much. Well done. Congratulations on building such an incredible business. I hear you on the work.
I like to work pretty hard too but it doesn't always feel like work because I'm doing something that's exciting to me, something that I believe in. And that's what I hope for all of our listeners as well. Listeners, check out Zach's website, optimizeyourself.me. It's really about you, not me, but that's just the name of the website. Okay, M-E, optimizeyourself.me or subscribe to the podcast, optimize yourself wherever you like to listen.
That's it for today. Of course you can subscribe or follow Side Hustle School wherever you like to listen. And if you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com. Two more weeks left of the year. I hope you'll continue to join me.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
