This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
The accountant who sold spreadsheets to Etsy sellers. Hey friends, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau, your host here. Excited to welcome you to another Throwback Thursday special.
Throwback Thursday. In this segment, we take a look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. We've had all kinds of different evolutions and transformations over the years. Sometimes somebody goes on to start an all new business. Sometimes they just grow their business.
Sometimes they decide to stop doing this business and do something else. But we often look at the lessons and changes, successes, challenges, and so on that occur throughout the Cytosle journey. Today, we're going to Janet LeBlanc. She is, in fact, this accountant who sells spreadsheet templates. She has a really interesting origin story.
She'll touch on it a bit here, but she'll also talk about what's happened since we first covered her origin story and some more details. She has one of these go-to case studies that I find myself referring to again and again whenever people say something like, "Well, I don't know how to apply my skills "to the world of entrepreneurship." And I say, "Well, let me tell you about a few people, "including this person who found a way "to productize their knowledge "to where they're not just selling a service, "which requires their time, "but they also have products in which people can purchase "whenever they want, wherever they are, "and whatever Janet is doing, she's still making money." So, I love that. Let's hear the update from her. I'll come back at the end with a few words of wrap-up. [Music]
My name is Janet LeBlanc, and I recently moved to Greenville, South Carolina, in the US.
My business is called Paper and Spark, and I was featured on episode 611. I am a financial educator for makers and artists. Basically, what I do is create things like spreadsheets, workbooks, and courses to help creative entrepreneurs get confident about the financial side of running their business. I followed the traditional straight and narrow path into public accounting and then corporate accounting, but my heart wasn't really in it 100%. So, I started an Etsy shop on the side.
Back in 2011, it was kind of my creative outlet, selling jewelry, and through that, I learned as both an accountant and an Etsy seller, there were a lot of other makers out there that had questions when it came to the financial side of running their business. There's a lot of confusion around things like sales taxes, turning a hobby into a business, how to set profitable prices and actually make money, how to do your books, those kinds of things. And since I had that accounting and tax background, I decided to start blogging about answers to these questions. In 2014, after blogging about that for a while, I formally started Paper and Spark, which is my current business, and I wanted it to be a platform for helping the maker community and helping creative business owners get financial confidence. The first thing I did with Paper and Spark was sell a bookkeeping spreadsheet, especially for Etsy shop owners, and that's still my most popular product to this day.
I was reluctant to get into spreadsheets because when I first started selling on Etsy, this was supposed to be my creative outlet. I was kind of looking for an escape from the accounting side of my life, but it was just a, I struggled for a few years wanting to do something creative and kind of sexy, and spreadsheets are totally the opposite of that. But once I finally gave into that and realized that I really, the way that I was able to teach these topics was creative. Like I'm trying to do it outside the box of any other stereotypical kind of stingy or mean, grumpy accountant. So I fully embrace that I am a creative now too.
I'm just teaching accounting in a creative way. When I was last interviewed, my husband had just quit his full-time job, and we just made the decision for Paper and Spark to support our family of four, 100%. And since then, we went on a journey to figure out where we wanted to raise our kids. We had been living in Houston, which was great, but with being 100% self-employed, we could look anywhere. So we tried out different towns and states and cities around the U.S., and we have finally settled in Greenville, South Carolina.
My business has grown, the product suite has grown, the spreadsheets and the intro level courses continue to do well. There's never really been a better time than right now for creative people to try their hands at starting a business from home. So I kind of have those products running on autopilot, and it's given me more of an opportunity to follow, I guess what I'd call like passion projects within my business. So I've been able to develop more like high-level, intermediate or advanced courses for more established business owners to help them better understand things like their key metrics and other numbers in their business, which has been fun. In my original episode, Chris talks about finding your synergy.
And like I said at the beginning, I'm a creative person, but I'm also an analytical numbers person. I really wanted to sell handmade, but I wasn't really good at anything in particular. I didn't bring anything super special to the crafty table. I just started with jewelry because that's what I could figure out. But at one point during my time selling jewelry, I took a branding class and there was a question about what was something special that I brought to the table.
And literally the only thing I could think of was that I was an accountant who also made jewelry. And there's likely not many accountants who are making jewelry for sale, right? But how can I use that to sell more jewelry? And I didn't really know. I had to let that idea percolate for a while.
So my other main piece of advice would be just keep going and stay open, thinking of myself as the jewelry maker who was also an accountant and pondering what I could do with that is eventually what led me to my spreadsheet idea, which is eventually what led me to be able to create Paper and Spark, which now supports our family. [Music]
What skill do you have that can be adapted? I know I ask that question all the time, but it is a central side hustle question. If you are trying to figure out how can I make money without quitting my job or by taking a skill I already have, how can I productize my knowledge so that I'm making money when I'm asleep or traveling or just doing something else, watching TV, whatever it is, give that notification on my phone or my computer that somebody has gone to purchase something. It just feels really good.
So I want to encourage you to think about what skill that might be. And of course, I'm grateful to Janet for helping us out with this segment. We've been doing this segment for four years now, lots of good stuff in the archives, and you can go back and listen to that whenever you want, all completely free at the website, sidehustleschool.com. Of course, new episodes come out every day, seven days a week, always free, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for being out there.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
