This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello, hello, what's up? Welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School," the only show bringing you a daily story of someone who creates a new source of income without quitting their job. Now, as I've been out on the road for the mega "Side Hustle" book tour, I've been getting a ton of questions, and I noticed that these questions fit a number of themes.
Gotta say that probably the most frequently asked theme I get, or at least in the top three, are questions about failure. Like, what do you do about the fear of failure? How many times have you failed? How do you come back from a failure? How do you limit the costs or the consequences of a failure?
And so on. And earlier in the year, we did a little series about "Side Hustle" failures, disaster, and recovery. I might bring that back at some point because people just keep asking about it. So I know this is on your mind, or at least the minds of a lot of our listeners. Today's story is a guy who failed a lot.
And in that way, at least, it's a pretty average story because pretty much everyone who does this, over time, you're gonna do lots of different projects, and some of them are not gonna work out. But that's okay because if you keep trying, and not just trying, but keep learning along the way, so that as you try, you have more experience, you have a better idea of what will work and what won't, eventually you'll arrive at that success, the thing that you're looking for, whatever your "Side Hustle" goal is. And today's story in particular is about a telecom manager who gets paid to write resumes for LinkedIn connections. We can also call this a case study on how to use LinkedIn to discover a service you can offer to people who are already following you. The other day, I think it was actually the beginning of this week, we talked about someone who was using Pinterest, almost exclusively for her marketing.
Well, LinkedIn, as you probably know, is all about careers, employment, professional connections. And this guy overcame his failures, found his "Side Hustle" success, or at least is finding it, it's a work in progress, by paying attention to the people who connected with him on LinkedIn, and then crafting his business coaching and consulting services around those observations. I'll bring you that whole story, and then we'll talk a bit more about LinkedIn right after this. [Music]
Mike McRitchie has devoted much of his working life to helping businesses and business people grow. Since his first job at a medical company, through to the 20 years he spent with a small telecom construction firm taking them to millions of dollars in revenue, he's been fascinated with what it takes to make it in business, how to thrive and not just survive.
But after many years in the corporate world, Mike decided it was time to try a project that he had more ownership over. He felt like he'd taken everything he could from his day job, he began to ask himself, what would happen if he applied some of this accrued knowledge to his own business efforts? Now Mike had tried this before and it hadn't gone very well. He had a number of failed attempts at "Side Hustles," from wedding and sports videography, all the way to betting on horses, which seemed like a good idea at the time. But like Taylor Swift, Mike decided to shake it off and follow his wildest dreams of small business consulting.
It was his way of giving back to a world he devoted a lot of time to. Of course, he also hoped to get paid for it, but once again, no matter how hard he tried, he felt like he couldn't get traction. Nobody wanted what he was selling, at least at first. Still, instead of giving up on the side hustle world, Mike decided to ask himself a smart question. That question was why?
Why would people care about something I'm offering? What's in it for them? I guess that's why and what, two questions. And the next step was to log into his LinkedIn account and look through all of his network, including 1,500 connections he'd made over the years. And as he did this, he saw a pattern.
Almost all of his connections were employees and not business owners, which clued him in that providing small business consulting, at least at this point, was gonna be a hard sell. But in realizing that all those connections were employees, he found a problem he truly knew how to solve and one that other people valued enough to pay for. Mike began to offer services to help employees increase their income, find better jobs, and just become more attractive job candidates. He broke his ideas down to a few specific services, mostly focusing on resume writing, LinkedIn profile creation, and general career improvement coaching. He already had a blog in place, using his own name as the website domain.
He decided to revamp that site to focus more on people who'd be looking for these services. He then put himself to work blogging more on his own site and guest blogging on other sites. All of this meant that his startup costs were virtually zero, 'cause he already had that blog in place and his marketing was done for free. I just realized this is kind of a theme this week, the $0 startup. I think we've had at least two or three stories where people spent a maximum of $15 to get going.
It was over on LinkedIn where Mike began to see his first real results. He offered to help some of those 1,500 LinkedIn connections by writing their resumes and redesigning their profiles, and he offered to do it free in exchange for good faith, word of mouth referrals. Mike prides himself on helping people uncover skill sets and talents they never knew they had. Because his business is highly dependent on referrals, it's important he gets this formula right every time. But he must be doing something right because he's now generating anywhere from $400 to $3,000 a month through his new side hustle.
And let's say his new successful side hustle. Mike has managed to increase his profits by 40% over the past year, and going forward, he wants to increase that even further by adding more services to his business. More specifically, he hopes to expand to that small business consulting concept he originally wanted to start. And he thinks now that he has a larger network and more contacts in that area, it might be more feasible. Throughout his years of employment and working on the side, Mike can now say, not only does he have a number of ideas behind him that didn't quite work out, but he also has this confidence-boosting side hustle success.
[Music]
Well, first of all, are we connected on LinkedIn? Because if we're not, I would love to connect with you. You can just send me a little request using my name. It's Chris Guillebeau. That last name is spelled G-U-I-L-L-E-B-E-A-U.
And you should see me come up on LinkedIn. But also while you're there, take a look at your connections. Spend a few minutes kind of looking through everybody who's connected with you or everybody that you've connected with over the years if you use LinkedIn. There are some other career social networks, but LinkedIn is kind of the dominant force there. And maybe like Mike did, see if they have anything in common.
If you've got a hundred connections, for example, see if you notice any kind of trend or anything that kind of stands out when you look at people as a group, not just as individuals. Maybe your little activity could be to use the power of observation, which I often talk about, to come up with one service that you could offer these people. Like whether this is actually gonna be your side hustle or not, it's just an activity. Imagine that you had to offer something to all these people. What would it be?
Now I'm also gonna suggest that you don't choose something generic like business consulting. I totally respect Mike's ambition in this story, but I'm also not surprised that just trying to do business consulting was not successful. Business consulting is like life coaching. Some people will be successful doing that, but you're gonna have a much easier time if you really focus on the actual results you're gonna bring to people. And so you go beyond business consulting or life coaching to like, what is the outcome?
Like how am I actually gonna change somebody's life through this? And here's a specific example for you. I was recently in San Francisco and I met Amy Bao, who's a wonderful photographer. She actually did photos for our event that night. And Amy has a bunch of projects, but one of them is doing photo shoots for people's online dating profiles, which I think is so smart.
And she's not the only person doing this. Like it's a kind of a growing small little industry, but it makes perfect sense with so many people using various online dating platforms and networks. First impressions kind of go a long way. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. Why not have a really great profile photo?
And if you're in San Francisco or the Bay Area and you need this service, you can check out Amy's site at getsetdate.co. That's getsetdate.co. But more to the broader point, as you look at your connections, you ask if there's something they have in common, consider if there just might be something that you could offer these people, 'cause they're already connected to you, they're already following you. It might be a good road to go down or at least to explore a bit. I am a big fan of exploration and discovery.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the show as we're kind of exploring and discovering different parts of the side hustle world, trying to see what we can unlock for you so that you can do this too in your own way. And I hope as you listen over time that something will be helpful to you in that regard. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/320. That's three, two, zero.
Got something else coming up for you tomorrow and every day after that. Thank you for listening. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
