This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hello, greetings. Welcome back. This is Sadistle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Can't stop, won't stop. We are entering a brand new week. Got some really fun and interesting
stories this week that I think are going to help you along your hustle journey. Now, today's story is about the unique activity of pole dancing. But not to be concerned, the show is still safe for children. And as to whether it's safe for your work or not, I guess that depends on how your work feels about your side hustle. But this episode in particular is about something called fitness pole dancing, which if you're not familiar with, I'll tell you about in a second. And we'll use this story to look at a common question that's
come up a few times. What do you do when your hustle grows to the point that you can quit your job? How do you know when to quit your job? What if you don't want to quit your job? Is it different if it's always been your goal to create a new full-time income? Or if your
hustle just kind of takes off along the way? Well, it's a good problem to have. Not a bad situation to be in at all when you have two full-time incomes, but it does require you to make choices. And people tend to navigate those choices in different ways. So, today we'll look at how someone made that decision for herself in the context of a fun story in just a moment.
Seven years ago, Sarah Jacobi started noticing that a lot of women were taking pole dancing classes as a new fitness regiment. She had taken classes herself, and she liked how empowering it made her feel while at the same time serving as an intense workout. Sarah worked as a mid-level graphic designer, and her career was on the rise. Before long, she would become a creative director, but she also wanted to explore the possibilities of teaching fitness pole dancing and maybe even opening her own studio. For her first experiment, she decided to try teaching a few classes to see what happened. She arranged to rent space in a friend's building who gave
her what she calls a ridiculously cheap deal. After announcing her very first class, she had several RSVPs, and she was excited. Now, most of these RSVPs were from her friends, but that was okay. She knew she needed to gain experience. As these stories sometimes go, however, there was just one problem. Not a single person who RSVPed actually showed
up. It was a huge letdown on the very first day of the hustle. Thankfully, the story doesn't end there because Sarah wouldn't let it end. She announced more classes. People did finally start showing up, and eventually they weren't just her friends. Sarah determined that she
would work on this project for at least a year, and when the calendar rolled around, she wanted to keep going. That first year, and even a bit beyond, the project wasn't making any money at all. This was a side hustle, so she wasn't in a hurry for revenue. She had her day job as a designer. Sarah just kept building the project and holding classes.
Just as fitness pole dancing was starting to gain more mainstream awareness, she was getting a lot better at running her hustle. By then, she'd been able to get a location of her own, and then an additional location, and then hire other instructors. Sarah just kept building. Years two to three continued that early stage experimentation. Then the years four to five were big expansion years, and now we're in year six. It's a very healthy
six-figure hustle. As she approached that mark last year, Sarah decided to make a big change and quit her job to grow the studio full-time. Obviously, this was a huge decision, and I asked her how she made it. She said, "I knew it was time to leave when I couldn't give 100% to my day job anymore, as the studio had grown too much. At the decision-making peak, I was working 60-hour weeks at my day job and still teaching 30 classes per week.
It was time to make a move, and I knew that working for myself was where I wanted to be, not to mention that the long term payoff would be worth it." Remember, this wasn't a fly-by-night operation or an impulsive decision to quit her job. She'd been operating the studio part-time for more than five years at that point, while going from mid-level graphic designer to senior creative director at her day job. Doing both the day job and the hustle was actually sustainable for quite a while, but eventually, it reached the point where she needed to decide. That's when she chose to focus on growing the pole-dancing business. As a side note, I think people tend to underestimate how long these kinds of things can coexist.
If you manage your time well, which you probably already do as a busy, productive person, and as time itself goes by, you probably get more efficient in your work. You may very well be able to defer this kind of decision for a long time, like Sarah did. Eventually, you have to make it, but it may not happen as quickly as you expect. For Sarah, that small studio space and a friend's building where she first started and not a single person showed up, is now four locations large in Upstate New York. Sarah has had the privilege of teaching thousands of women the art of fitness pole-dancing, and even with the multiple locations and the additional instructors who've joined her team, she herself still teaches every day. According to her, the best part of all of it is the ability to teach women
a class that not only helps them build muscle and get a great workout, but also helps them to feel empowered and confident. So congratulations to Sarah, great job. I just want to make a couple of general points that I think are pretty important. The first one is about being profitable. A side hustle needs to be profitable. You can't afford to just break even. If your project is just breaking
even, at least for a long period of time, then it's not a side hustle. It's a hobby or it's something else. And it may very well be something you want to keep doing, but it's not really meeting that goal of being an income generating project. So normally I like to encourage people to start hustles that are going to show a profit a lot sooner than one year or in the second year. But at the same time, one of the benefits of a side hustle is that you started on the side and you aren't dependent on the income, at least not right away. So that can work in your favor as well, especially like we see in the story, because
in this case, Sarah was able to break even during those first couple of years because she still believed in the mission and the project still had real potential. So she was willing to devote more of her valuable time to it. I tend to be a little bit skeptical of stories where people fail over and over only to succeed in the end. Some of those are great stories, but I feel that they also kind of reinforce an incorrect belief that all we have to do is keep trying something. And if something's not working, then we just have to keep trying and eventually it will. And often the much better answer is if something
is not working, why don't you quit so that you can do something else? In other words, I'm a big believer in giving up strategically. But again, this is an excellent exception to that because she was making progress. And as I said, she believed in the mission. When you have a mission that you believe in, that's when you persevere. That's when you keep going.
You might keep going all the way to a six-figure multiple location studio practice that is helping a lot of different people in a really unique way. And of course, it may not happen exactly like that for you. But if you listen to these stories, you apply the lessons to your own hustle, you will see results over time. Inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. If you'd like to learn more about fitness pole dancing, a link to Sarah's studio will be in the show notes. That's at sottosolschool.com/36.
Be sure you're subscribed in iTunes or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you are enjoying the show, give us a shout out on Twitter or Instagram using hashtag sidehustleschool. I greatly appreciate your support and listenership. I'll see you again tomorrow. This is Side Hustle School. I'm Chris Guillebeau.
