This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hello, greetings. Welcome back. This is Side Hustle School, and I'm Chris Guillebeau. And for those who are listening and following along in real time, today's episode number 255 happens to fall on the 12th of September. It is the publication date, not of my book that's coming next week, seven days to go, but of Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies book.
I've talked about Gretchen many times on the show. She is a dear friend. She's also a colleague, a fellow author, and founder of The Onward Project, which Side Hustle School is part of. I've been fortunate to have her as a speaker at the World Domination Summit. We've hung out and done Facebook Lives and other fun stuff in New York and Toronto years ago and Anaheim just recently. Anyway, Gretchen is someone I really respect and I'm excited
about her new book. I got a chance to read an advanced version, but of course I also pre-ordered a copy which should arrive at my house today. The Four Tendencies is a model that she's constructed and researched for many years. It's all about understanding yourself. She believes that each of us have one of these four personality types and these types affect our thought process, how we make decisions, how we resist or conform to various expectations, inner, outer, etc. And if you read this short little book, first of all, you're going to
understand what tendency you are. I am a rebel, not shocking, but you'll also gain some insight on why you do the things you do and it might even help you make better decisions. So you probably get by now that I'm a big fan of Gretchen. That's all I'll say for the moment, but I think you should check out this book. And also, I have a really great story for you today. It's about a Washington DC attorney who creates an online course for mothers returning
to work. I thought this was such a meaningful project and also profitable. I think you'll like the details and a couple of things to pay attention to. First of all, no one had ever made anything like this before, despite the fact that there is a huge need for it. And second, Lori, the attorney who creates the course, she found a creative way to get employers to pay for it, which I actually think is a big next level piece to this whole story. So I'm going to cycle back around at the end of it and talk about that a bit more.
And I might even have a suggestion for Lori, not that she needs my help. So this will be a bonus suggestion. That whole story with all the details is coming up right after this. Lori Mihalik Levin lives in Washington, DC, where she's a partner in a major law firm focusing on Medicare reimbursement counseling. She represents academic medical centers, hospitals, and health systems, as well as a broad array of other healthcare organizations. She's also
the mother of two boys, ages three and a half and six. It was after the birth of her second child that she started her first side hustle, Mindful Return. Mindful Return is a four-week online course that helps new working mothers return to work after maternity leave. And Lori has an authentic origin story about this project. After returning to work full-time after her own maternity leave, she had heard other people say that when you have a child and you have another child, it's really not that much different or more difficult. But
that wasn't her experience. She found that one child plus one child felt like 85 children. And this high powered attorney who represents huge organizations and companies says she was in tears on the kitchen floor more often than she'd like to admit. And no one seemed to be talking about how hard it was to transition back after the typical three to four month American maternity leave. She also noticed that while there was a curriculum out there for pretty much everything baby related from how to massage your baby to how to puree baby food and how to make a birth plan, there was almost nothing on how to go back to work after maternity leave without losing your mind. Does that sound like a big need to you? I
think it's a tremendous need. The last I checked, I'm not a mother, but it makes perfect sense. Okay, so how did she create the course? The first step was to map out the curriculum. She had four themes she wanted to convey to new moms about self-care, logistics, leadership, and community. So she decided on a four week format. She then broke each week up into five
lessons and mapped out what topics she believed needed to be covered. After she had the topics, she got to work both writing the lessons and recruiting experts in areas she wasn't an expert in. So for a lesson on anxiety and new motherhood, she recruited a clinical psychologist. For the lesson on transitioning your baby to childcare, she recruited one of her son's daycare teachers. Once she had all the curriculum written, she turned to the question of what platform to use for the course. She decided on Rizuku because she had taken an online course
with that platform before and liked the experience. She tried it out from the perspective of being a teacher or leader of a course, and found it to be equally user friendly. You don't need any special computer skills to make it work. It interfaces with billing software easily. You can run as many courses as you want, and it's not expensive. She set up the
mindful return course, priced it at $99, and provided an option for employers to cover the cost. I have a couple of observations about both those points, the price and the option for employers to pay for it. So stay tuned for that. But back to the story. After she had launched the course, she was sitting in a meeting for her day job, she checked her personal email during a break, and she discovered that the first person had signed up. She says
she did a happy dance and called her husband shortly thereafter to share her joy. That was three years ago. Lori has now run the course for 400 women, was recently featured in the Washington Post, and she's now averaging $2,000 a month in net income from it. For her next step, she's collaborating with a dad who's currently out on his second paternity leave to create another course, a four-week online course specifically for working dads. She says there are related but different issues on the dad front, so she looks forward to launching this new course in the first quarter of 2018 while continuing to run the original course for moms.
Okay, I have some comments and observations. First observation, this is awesome. Congratulations to Lori. It really is such a meaningful and needed resource. I'll be curious to see how it goes when she expands to working dads next year. And second, as I briefly mentioned,
I really think this concept of getting employers to pay for it is critical. And I was curious about how she did it. Like how do you market such a thing? So I went to her website, which of course will link up in the show notes. And there's an actual section for employers.
Like it's really obvious. You click that link, you can tell who it's targeted to. And the headline says employers offer mindful return as a maternity leave benefit and help retain your top talent. Great headline makes the benefit really clear. If you're in the HR department, or you're an executive or whoever makes that decision on what to pay for, here is a maternity leave benefit you should be paying for. And here's what you're going to
get out of it. You're going to help retain your top talent. Right below that, there's a testimonial from a mom who's taken the course. That testimonial says this course is the best investment you can make to ensure a smooth return to work for a woman who's been on maternity leave. Great testimonial. Now, I was still curious about this. So I talked to Lori a
bit more. I asked her about the percentage of employer signups versus individual signups. And she says it's evolved over time. In the early days, it was mostly individuals signing up only a handful paid for by employers. But for her most recent session, it was almost 50/50. In fact, 52% were employer signups. So obviously, it's been trending in that direction.
I wouldn't be surprised if going forward, it was more like 70 to 80% of employers that were paying for this, especially if she's able to get in the benefits package for some larger companies that might potentially have a lot of employees going on maternity leave. So obviously, this is a very valuable benefit, regardless of who's paying for it. And that leads to my last observation. $99 a person, in my opinion, that's way underpriced. I think it could easily cost four to five times that, especially if you think about the market.
The market is professional women, for the most part, most of those people are going to make more than $99 the first day they're back at work. So isn't the course worth more than that? And also, like Lori noticed, when she started the project, babies are expensive. If you think about everything that a family pays for a new baby, the pregnancy, the birth process, the first three months, there are so many costs associated with that. There are all kinds of resources that new parents for the most part gladly pay for. I mean,
they're not glad to pay for all of it. But it's generally understood that having kids is expensive. And so here's a resource that's going to help someone be a more productive worker, better manage their life work balanced, do a better job for their employer and for themselves. To go back to that testimonial, the course is the best investment you can make. I just wonder if that investment should be a bit more. Anyway, that was just my thought.
Lori clearly doesn't need my advice because she's doing great. And for you over there, I hope you enjoyed this story. What kind of course can you create? What are you looking for that doesn't exist? What kind of problems have you run into? What kind of frustrations
do you have? Maybe make some notes about that sometime as you're going about the rest of your day. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/255. I'll be back tomorrow. I'm Chris Guillebeau for sideussleschool.
