This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, Side Hustlers, friends, and listeners. Welcome back to Side Hustle School, episode 307. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau, and today's story is about a construction company owner who creates a gig platform for contractors. He's actually a former construction company owner, but we'll get into that in the story. And in the world of contracting and blue collar professions, there's often a big problem of being either really busy or not busy at all.
In other words, you have more work than you can handle, or there's absolutely no work. And this is a big problem because a lot of blue collar professionals can actually make a good living. They have valuable skills. They do things that none of the rest of us know how to do. But of course, if they go two weeks without a job, or even just a few days, it can be a major problem.
So at least in the area of Baltimore, Maryland, and potentially elsewhere, the guy that you'll hear about today is trying to solve that problem with a unique platform. I'm gonna say a quick thank you to our sponsor, and then I'll be right back with that story. [Music]
Like many of us, Terris Pantazzi's career path has been a bit circuitous. He originally earned a master's degree in real estate, but for over 10 years he owned and operated his own construction company in Baltimore, Maryland. Between jobs, he would try to find any kind of work he could for his guys so that he could still pay them something.
Nevertheless, some days he would have to send them home once the trucks were clean and the warehouse was spotless. Just not much to do. Sometimes he would even post an ad on Craigslist to try to get his workers some gigs, but that was pretty hit or miss. In 2015, Terris decided he wanted to get back into real estate, and while he was working his way into that industry, he turned to the platform Upwork.com to earn some money. We've talked briefly about Upwork.com before.
It's an online platform where services are exchanged, you can post a listing, and someone will bid for it. They have a lot of categories, but they focus more on technical skills and technical projects. Around that time, he was hanging a TV in his house, and he couldn't lift the final six inches by himself. He lived less than two miles away from a major university, and he knew if he could somehow contact students, he'd have a line of helpers looking for some extra cash. And that's when something clicked.
Why not create a platform similar to Upwork, but for contractors and handymen? This wasn't a simple idea, but he thought it had real potential, so he decided to explore it further. He started with a bunch of research to make sure there wasn't anything similar out there. He did find a few sites, but they charged upwards of 40% per job, which didn't sit right with Terris. Since he was doing some handyman gigs in addition to Upwork and had owned his own construction company for 10 years, he knew from personal experience how hard it would be to hand over 40% of his earnings, especially on a small job that didn't net very much in the first place.
So from the beginning, he set a goal to keep his fees really low for the contractors and completely free for the homeowners so that they would be incentivized to use that platform. Still, as much as the idea appealed to him, Terris knew he couldn't bootstrap something like this, at least not completely. He was gonna need that website and probably an app where contractors and homeowners could securely communicate and exchange money. To truly build a secure, robust framework for this, he was gonna have to do something we rarely recommend on SIDUSL School, which was to raise some money. Terris kept this process close to home, his in-laws were the first official investors, and from there, a few more family members jumped on board.
Terris also ran into a small office space with one of the top incubators in Baltimore called Betamour. The rates to run a desk there are competitive, and when you're a member, you have access to an entire entrepreneurial and side hustling community. As Terris explained, you're getting much more than just a desk, you're getting access to that network. By mid 2016, Terris was deep in the design and building of the platform. He hired a local company to create the backend framework for the website while he focused on the user design and eventually made sure that the front end and the backend linked up.
When it was time to launch, he opted to use both Braintree and PayPal to process credit card payments. He called his new platform Efinch, and in July 2016, Efinch had its soft launch, not making a big deal out of it just to kind of get the bugs out, make sure things were working, and then in October 2016, they launched to the public. Within the first six months of launching, over 1,000 homeowners and contractors downloaded the app and created accounts. Efinch continues to grow each month, anywhere from 15% on a slow month to 30% on a good month. Terris says the home improvement industry is pretty cyclical, so those variances are to be expected, but at their one-year anniversary, they had over 3,000 users.
And from those users' point of view, the app is set up very much like Upwork. Homeowners can take a picture of the job and also describe what needs to be done through a simple questionnaire. From there, contractors can bid on the jobs and the homeowner decides on who they want. The homeowner then pays for the job through the app with a credit card, and the money is released to the contractor only when the work is done. In that first year, Efinch helped homeowners and contractors connect and facilitate over 1,000 jobs, and Terris' contractors on the platform are earning anywhere from $500 to $5,000 a month, depending on how much time they commit to it and how many jobs they take on, as well as their expertise, of course.
Efinch takes a 2% fee on each transaction so that their customers get more money in their pocket, but of course, once you start billing a lot of money, 2% does add up. For the time being, Terris is operating this project as a side hustle, so he's putting his profits back into development to add new features for a better experience. For him, this project is an opportunity to help his fellow contractors in a way that's not only much needed in this economy, it's also sustainable. His goal is to expand Efinch beyond the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. area, and he's also continued to improve the app by adding project organization software for contractors, home improvement deals for homeowners, and a chat feature where homeowners can get free advice on household projects.
In this day and age, technology is sometimes taking over in areas where blue-collar workers are falling behind, but people like Terris are building something that ensures they still have an important place in our economy and society. [Music]
This project reminds me of another episode we had, episode 123, about these guys who are creating Uber for lawn care, essentially trying to solve a similar problem in terms of connecting homeowners to lawn care specialists, or people to come and cut your lawn, do landscaping, all that kind of stuff. And both these projects have the potential to totally revolutionize how people hire contractors. It increases people's knowledge. It shows them how to connect to skillful and reliable professionals.
There's an accountability feature built in, which is a common concern among homeowners or anybody hiring a contractor. And it also is really great for contractors because it's bringing them business they didn't have otherwise and can lend some predictability to that problem of, well, I'm either really busy or I'm not busy at all. And when I'm busy, I can make a good living, but there's always that fear that I'm gonna be out of work. So I think that's interesting and valuable. Terris did have to raise money for this project, which I very rarely talk about inside of social school.
We are episode 307 right now. There have probably been fewer than 10 episodes where the person had to go out and borrow money. I try to focus very much on using the resources you already have and not spending a lot of money on your project when you're getting started. But once in a while, there's a project where the vision is so great and it requires such an investment that it is difficult to do as a hundred dollar startup or a similar small amount of money. And if you're trying to decide, well, do I fit into that category?
Like, do I need to go out and raise money? I would say you only do something like that if you have a very clear vision and you have this mission and you know exactly what you want to do. You believe that you have a solution to a problem and you know that there's some significant costs associated with it. And there's probably some other things on a checklist to consider when you go down that road. But I would say that first thing is a big filter for a lot of people.
If you don't have this huge vision that you know is for sure gonna require some significant costs, why not choose something else? 'Cause there's all kinds of things that you could do. Anyway, whatever you end up doing, I hope you do something today to take at least a small step toward creating more freedom for yourself. That is ultimately what a side hustle is about. I think it can also make the world a better place at the same time, which is exactly what you hear about in this story.
But even just creating options for yourself, making extra money, giving you something that you have ownership over, well, that's pretty good on its own. So if you're working on that, good for you, keep it up, don't stop. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/307. Thank you for listening.
I'll be back tomorrow with another story. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
