This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, let's get back to it. This is Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. We are going into a new week on the show. Now this week, we're gonna focus on your existing skills.
A key theme of side hustling is using the skills you already have, not going out to learn something new. I've mentioned this before, but sometimes people don't know what skills of theirs are valuable in the world apart from traditional employment, which is only natural if all they've done is work for a company or organization. But in today's story, you'll hear about a hospital employee who takes a skill he originally learned for his work and then transferred it to a hustle that pays him up to $125 an hour. And my goal for this week is that you'll learn to recognize your skills that can be transferred into something that makes money for you. Now I also have a personal goal, and that personal goal is to share one crazy story every week.
Now this was not intentional when I first designed the show. It's just kind of happening as we go along. So I'm gonna make sure that every week, you hear something that you're like, wow, like WTF, I had no idea that someone could make $1,500 a month on chicken saddles. Didn't even know that chicken saddles existed. Didn't know that someone could make $250 an hour as a caricature artist, or six figures making personalized candy hearts.
So this week's crazy story, or what I think is a crazy story, but also an awesome one, will appear on Wednesday. I'm not gonna preview it for you just yet. You have to trust the process, because if you've been listening to status school, you know it's legit. You know you can look forward to it. And if you work any kind of administrative job, or a programming job, or something similar, I think you'll like today's story too.
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Dan Cadum works as a database programmer for a Colorado hospital. By sifting through complex information day in and day out, he's become really good at organizing that data in different ways. One of his most frequently used tools is Microsoft Access, a software program used widely in the healthcare world. Access is a bit different than Microsoft Word or Excel, which are both designed to be user-friendly and don't require any specialized training. Anyone can pick up Access and get started, but to truly become proficient in it requires a lot of time and active study.
And without some instruction, you'll likely feel overwhelmed. For Dan, database programming came naturally. He had an engineering degree and had spent hundreds of hours mastering the Access software. He had also adapted well to the world of side hustles. Since leaving high school, Dan had been financially responsible for himself.
He wanted to pay off some student loans and begin saving for retirement. So he began pursuing a number of different hustles. He looked into the world of rental properties and eventually inquired two of them. He completed paid surveys and participated in research that paid a fee, taking advantage of that convenient work site at the hospital where a lot of those studies took place. Dan knew that a lot of people used Microsoft Access every day, particularly in the healthcare world, but also in the energy sector, the environmental industry, and elsewhere.
He signed up on a tutoring site where anyone with the right qualifications can offer tutoring services to students worldwide. Since his expertise was so specific, it didn't take long to get his first client. He decided to charge $55 an hour for online sessions and $65 an hour if meeting in person. Now, this was great. He did it a few hours a week and made more than $500 a month on average, sometimes as much as $1,000 a month, but he also noticed that some of the students who came to him had other database needs that weren't solved merely through his tutoring.
These students needed more help or even a complete service. For example, some of them worked for employers in search of a custom database, and others required some more detailed form of consulting. Over time, the tutoring business became an entry point for this higher level work, for which he charges somewhere in the range of $80 to $125 an hour, depending on the project's complexity. As with any side hustle, the money is great, but Dan also notes that the work has brought him additional benefits. He's also been able to diversify his income, getting paid by multiple sources for different kinds of work.
Now there's no doubt that Dan is a talented engineer and good with databases, but he also has an even more valuable skill, this ability to imagine and implement side hustle ideas. By working at that hospital, he has the perfect setting to earn $200 to $300 a month, taking part in research studies. Not every computer engineer would think about tutoring students in database skills, but Dan very wisely recognized that a lot of professionals have to navigate large amounts of information, and they'd gladly pay to learn how to work faster and smarter. In the same way, not every online tutor would think that his students might lead him to bigger opportunities with the companies they worked for. But Dan had figured out how to think that way, and because of it, he was well on his way to achieving his goals of paying off his student loans and beginning to save for retirement.
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So Dan began by signing up at a tutoring site called wizant.com, and I'll include a link to that in the show notes. And right from the beginning, he understood that specific tutoring is better than generic. He didn't wanna be a tutor for all kinds of math and science or programming needs. He really focused on this skill of Microsoft access. And at first, he worried that it was too much of a niche, but this worry proved to be false.
And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense because lots of people in these fields use this software professionally, and it's very powerful, but it's not easy to master. So in accounting, engineering, user experience, design, all of these fields, there are specialized tools and specialized software. And the professionals that use these tools understand their value. If they can get a little bit better at them, then they can save a lot of time in the long run. And it was great to make a nice hourly wage for tutoring, $55 an hour or 65 if he was meeting in person.
But Dan went one step further by more fully understanding the needs that his students had. Not everyone was a good fit for consulting or that customized database work. So for everyone who wasn't, he could just do the tutoring, $55 an hour, but some were a good fit. And by focusing on them, he was able to increase his average hourly rate even higher. So as you listen this week, you think about your own skills.
Do you have a skill like Dan's, something that you've learned that other people could benefit from? Maybe it's something that you've spent a lot of time mastering, hundreds of hours, or maybe it's something that comes naturally to you, but it's hard for other people to do. So this could be a technical skill that you've learned for your job or something you learned in college. It could be a hobby you've developed expertise in, just something you know how to do pretty well. And wherever there's something that's potentially valuable, but yet complicated to figure out, that area is ripe for hustling.
And as I was recording this episode, I just jotted down some notes, was thinking about some different skills, hobbies, industries. I thought about travel hacking, which is something that I've been involved in for, I don't know, more than a decade now. And travel hacking is the art of seeing the world on a budget and having experiences that would otherwise be cost prohibitive or nearly impossible. Using frequent flyer miles, using round the world plane tickets, mistake fares, all kinds of stuff. So this is a whole industry.
And it's something that anyone can learn a little bit about, but there are also a lot of opportunities for expertise and for people to kind of come in and help other people take advantage of these things. And I thought about calligraphy. If you look on Instagram now, there's this huge craze of people doing some really, really nice hand lettering. And some of the people doing it there have built very large followings. And they're teaching people how to do it.
They have courses, sometimes they have products, sometimes they're just doing it for fun, but it's a great example of a potential hustle. So travel hacking, calligraphy, database programming, plenty of other stuff. These are all very different things, yet they all represent learned skills or acquired knowledge that can then be turned into a hustle. And it may not happen exactly like that for you, but if you listen to these stories, you begin applying them to your own hustle. You will see results over time.
Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. If you'd like to find the show notes for today's episode, including links to those tutoring sites I talked about, go to sidehustleschool.com/29. And in just over a week from now, I'm actually gonna do the first Side Hustle School workshops in four different cities. If you're in one of those cities, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, or Phoenix, I'd love to see you. And if you're not in one of those cities, you can tell me where you are and sign up to be notified whenever I plan something in your city or town.
You can do that on the website as well. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School, and I'll see you tomorrow.
