This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What if losing your minimum wage job could become a catalyst for building a $300,000 business doing what you most love? That is exactly what happened to Nev Lapwood when he got laid off from restaurant work that forced him to transform his snowboarding passion into a global teaching empire. This is a fun story. Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome as well to Weekend Workshop.
This segment is all about helping you learn the key steps to a new hustle, one step or concept per week. It includes activities, examples, and more. Of course it's all free. We're using the book "Side Hustle from Idea to Income" in 27 days as our text. I encourage you to get a copy of the book if you don't have it already.
And for the first half of the year, we went through the 27 steps in the book. Now in the second half, we're looking at more detailed case studies so you can understand how people apply the framework. All right, let's jump in. Nev Lapwood was living the classic ski-bomb lifestyle in Whistler, British Columbia, beautiful place. Beautiful place, but it's an expensive place.
So he wasn't making a lot of money. He had this simple routine. He would snowboard during the day. He would work his restaurant shifts at night whenever he could get them, and then he would repeat. It wasn't glamorous, but it allowed him to spend most of his time doing what he enjoyed.
Now that arrangement worked until it didn't. When Nev was unexpectedly laid off from his limited restaurant employment, he faced a harsh reality. As mentioned, Whistler is expensive, work opportunities are scarce, and being a ski-bomb, that's his self-applied description, doesn't pay the bills. Rather than panic or immediately look for another restaurant job though, Nev decided to lean into his snowboarding expertise. He began offering private lessons, leveraging the skills he had developed through years of daily practice.
Now his lessons were immediately popular with students. His teaching was highly valued because he combined technical expertise with genuine passion for the sport, and students could see dramatic improvement in their abilities. However, Nev soon recognized the limitations of in-person instruction. He faced intense competition from other instructors. He could only serve a limited number of clients, and he was restricted to the winter season.
Turns out you can't teach snowboarding in the summer. So he's trading his time for money. It's better than what he was doing at the restaurant, but still it has these real limitations. So his breakthrough came when he realized people all over the world wanted to learn snowboarding, not just the tourists who were visiting Whistler. What if he could teach virtually, reaching global audiences without being limited by geography or season?
So working with a couple of close friends, Nev created Snowboard Addiction, a comprehensive series of tutorials that could be delivered worldwide. And the concept was simple, to take the knowledge that made him an effective in-person instructor and package it for global distribution. The timing was ideal. Online education was taking off, people were hungry for high-quality instruction, that they could access on-demand from anywhere. Nev had stumbled on a massive market opportunity.
So let's take a quick break. When we return, we'll talk about the outcome, some of the lessons he learned along the way, and how you can apply this model to perhaps another idea. [Music]
Nev's business, Snowboard Addiction, was a hit, attracting customers from 20 countries and generating $30,000 in its first year. Now, $30,000 is not a huge amount of money, but Nev had never focused on making money. He had never earned more than minimum wage.
So this was a revelation. And he was like, what if we keep going? Like, what if we become more strategic? So in year two, he did exactly that. He partnered with affiliates who could promote the tutorials to their own audiences.
He expanded the range of products, and he began thinking systematically about marketing and customer acquisition. And those results were dramatic. Income jumped to just under $100,000, more than triple his first year results. He was still spending his days on the slopes, but now he's funding a legitimate business rather than just covering basic expenses. So then he kept going.
His next expansion was to translate Snowboard Addiction into multiple languages, nine languages in fact, and his globalization strategy multiplied Nev's addressable market exponentially. Instead of serving only English-speaking snowboarders, he's now reaching people all over the world, literally, in their native languages. Building this business required Nev to develop skills far beyond snowboarding. He had to learn strategy, accounting, marketing, customer service, vendor management. Every aspect of business operations for him was new territory.
Some lessons came through painful experience, ordered some stickers from China. They arrived months late and in unusable condition. But those setbacks were of course minor to the overall trajectory of explosive growth. Two years after being laid off from restaurant work, Nev's business was on track to generate at least $300,000 annually. More importantly, the recurring nature of digital sales meant that this income was highly predictable and scalable.
The transformation worked because he identified a way to scale his personal expertise infinitely. Instead of being limited to one student at a time, or even one language at a time, he could teach thousands simultaneously through digital distribution. So I think this story demonstrates the power of aligning your business interest with genuine passion, and then just continuing to iterate, scale, go global as he did. The approach can work for any skill-based activity with global interest, so sports instruction of any kind, at least any sport that's popular around the world, any creative technique, any technical skill, any hobby. The same principles apply.
Basically, you package local expertise for worldwide distribution through digital delivery, people have done this in lots of ways, with lots of topics and categories, and they're still doing it. So there's still space for this today. Nev went from laid off restaurant worker to six figure entrepreneur. Many of our listeners have done the same. Well, they weren't always laid off from restaurants, but they took an idea and built a package around it, found a way to transfer their skill, their knowledge to other people.
So the question isn't whether you have valuable skills, it's whether you're willing to package those skills in a way that can serve people beyond your immediate geographic area. Your local expertise might be someone else's big opportunity. I'm gonna leave you with that today. Thanks for tuning in. As always, it's better to have a simple idea.
You can start right away than a brilliant idea that never launches. We'll be back next week with another weekend workshop. Of course, new episodes continue in the meantime every other day, seven days a week. My name's Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
