This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hello there, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, whatever the case may be for you. It's actually my morning over here as I record this episode for you. My name is Chris Guillebeau, I'm a host of Side Hustle School, and guess what today is? Well, for those listening in real time, today is March 23rd, also known as National Near Mist Day. What does that mean?
Well, it means that on March 23rd, 1989, a mountain size asteroid came within 500,000 miles of colliding with the Earth. 500,000 miles may not seem that close, but apparently, at least according to astronomers, it's actually really close. Collision with this asteroid would have released energy comparable to the explosion of a 600 megaton atomic bomb. In other words, a collision would have had catastrophic effects on our planet, but fortunately, it was just a near miss. And that's why we're celebrating Near Mist Day.
So hey, just remember, if you're having a bad day, or if you're going through a hard time, an asteroid could have collided with the Earth almost 30 years ago, and we might not even be around. But again, fortunately, we are, so let's put this day to good use. That's my suggestion for you, and I got a story for you as well. That story is about an enterprising nonprofit employee who bids for consulting contracts, earning a steady second income each month. She actually begins this work while she's fresh out of school, pretty young, living and working in Kenya, and she improves as she goes along to where now she's actually earning a pretty substantial income from it, and she's gonna be able to use that money to support her grad school later this year.
What's it all about? What does she do? Well, there are some kinds of software that are used by so many people that an entire industry exists around it. In this side of the book, I told the story of Dan, who is a hospital administrator in Colorado who does Microsoft Access consulting. He basically helps companies use this database software, earn something like 80 to $100 an hour extra from it.
That's one example, Salesforce, what we're gonna talk about today is another example. Salesforce is a $60 billion company with more than 150,000 corporate customers. It's easy to learn the basics of Salesforce, but it's also so complex that there's a lot to master. So that's what that project, that side hustle is about today, the project manager who learns the software and then begins offering freelance services to help others use it. No one will also talk briefly about confidence versus overconfidence.
What's the difference? Why does it matter? And why might you actually have everything you need to start your own project? Let's say thank you to today's sponsor. They allow the show to be free to you, and then I'll bring you all the details.
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Stephanie Zimmerman is a technology project manager at a public health nonprofit in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She gets to travel to all sorts of interesting places, including India, Madagascar, and Liberia. When she started her side hustle doing Salesforce consulting, she was living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. Her initial motivation was extra cash. Fresh out of school, she was earning a salary of just $18,000 at the time, which even in East Africa didn't go far.
She liked the work she did, but was feeling stressed about finances and her ability to pay off student loans. She'd been using Salesforce for that job in Kenya, and she knew it offered a lot of opportunities for freelance work. There are thousands of companies worldwide that use the software, and while big corporations might have a whole team devoted to it, small companies needed to outsource at least some of the tasks. A lot of those tasks involved database work, keeping up with contacts, planning a marketing strategy, sending automated emails. Lots of important stuff for businesses, but what could Stephanie do?
Even though she knew the software, she felt that she was young and inexperienced. She worried that no one would hire her. Well, lesson learned. If you don't put yourself out there, you'll never know. Stephanie decided to learn as she went along, and she was willing to start at the bottom of the freelancing ladder.
By the way, that's just a metaphor. There's not really a freelancing ladder out there, just to save you some time there. So what was the first step on this proverbial ladder? Stephanie set up a profile on several freelancing websites, including upwork.com. Then she did some research.
She wanted to learn, first of all, what hourly rates other Salesforce freelancers had on their profiles, and second, how much money clients were paying for past projects. And all this information is public, so a little detective work goes a long way. For instance, whenever she would apply for a job, she would go and look at the client's profile and see what they had paid for past jobs. She would then price herself to be around that client's past average rate. When she was totally new to the freelancing, she priced herself on the lower end, but she always had a personal minimum that she wouldn't go under.
When she started, that minimum was $20 an hour, and as her experience and competence grew, it went up. The kind of work she does varies. Sometimes she has a contract for a defined project or set deliverables and timelines. For example, one of her current projects is for a client who's transitioning to Salesforce and needs their data from the old system imported. That's an engagement for a set number of hours that should last for one or two months.
Other times, the contracts are much more open-ended with a client who's looking for ongoing, as-needed support. For those, she has a set hourly rate and bills them once a month. Some months, there may be a good amount of work, and other months, not so much, so she has to be aware of that fact as she fits in this project with the rest of her life. So let's talk about some money. How much did it cost to start this?
How much money does she make? This was actually a $0 startup. Stephanie did not have any cost at all other than unpaid time. And of course, her time is valuable, but she's investing in herself. So she had the time spent submitting proposals and also the time she spent undercharging when she was first getting started.
Once she got more established, she began earning an average of $1,000 to $2,000 a month, again, part-time on the side. She likes that she can ramp up or slow down as needed. In certain periods of life, she chooses to focus less on the side hustle, but then other times, she picks it back up. Later this fall, she'll be going back to grad school, so she's now actively working to build up more of a client base to be able to support herself through freelancing only. Her goal is to earn $3,000 to $5,000 a month while she's in school, and she says she's on track for that.
As she improved her skills and gained positive reviews, Stephanie raised rates on existing clients. She says it was a little bit nerve-wracking at first, but she went into it with the mindset that the rate she was asking for was fair, and she was also okay with losing the client, if that's what happened. She's only ever lost one client from a rate increase, and she says, to be honest, it was a bad client to begin with. And yes, in fact, there are bad clients out there. That is a fact of the freelance world.
She also says she's had some really great clients who respect her and value her and are just super nice. One of those clients works in arranging destination travel for businesses, and when she was in India, that client helped to arrange a free day trip for her and her sister. She did that completely as a gift. So to be clear, lots of good experiences as well. So from her beginnings of feeling unconfident, yet needing to make extra money to get away from the burden of those loan payments, Stephanie wasn't just inspired.
She went out and did something. And then she went from a low hourly wage to one that is much more rewarding. She can ramp up or slow down as needed. Even as she pursues another career in public health, this work gives her the security she needs. It really is the best of both worlds, and another great example of how you don't have to choose between a career and a side hustle.
All right, what can we learn from this story? Well, I think a lot of things. And I had this thought, it can be dangerous to build your business on one company's platform or software. So in this example, all of the consulting Stephanie's doing is built on the Salesforce platform. So you could look at that and say, why isn't she like diversifying?
Why isn't she working on other platforms or other software or whatever? But my observation, my take on that is, first of all, Salesforce isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Like this is a huge, huge company that so many people use. If it ever does go away, or if there's a competitor that arises, like you'll have plenty of notice. But also, and perhaps more importantly, the skills and experience that Stephanie has gained could be adapted elsewhere if she needed to.
And when I say skills, I'm not just talking about the technical skills of learning how to do something on a computer. These are the skills of bidding for a company's business, making a good impression, negotiating a good rate, completing the task or the project at hand in an efficient manner, and then going from project to project without feeling overwhelmed. So these are the soft skills that matter, I think almost as much as the technical skills, perhaps in some ways more. And the only way to master those kinds of skills is by doing. So that's what I mean when I say that if for some reason this fell apart tomorrow, she'd probably be able to do something else like it.
She'd be able to start something else like it in much less time than it would take for somebody who's never freelance before. That's why what she's learned has been so valuable. And just quickly before we wrap up, back to that confidence versus overconfidence thing. You know, when she started, she didn't feel confident at all. But I think, you know, it's kind of like feeling ready.
Like I would put that word ready in quotes. You might not ever feel ready or you might not feel ready until after you've already started. So again, as we see over and over, the key point is to say, okay, not saying I know everything. I'm willing to work at a relatively low wage at first. And it's okay to have that personal minimum, just like Stephanie did.
But she was willing again to invest in herself to essentially create her own security so that she could pursue this nonprofit career without stressing out, without worrying about those student loans and all the other things associated with that. So good for her. I hope you enjoyed this story. I enjoyed telling it to you. Today's show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/447.
I hope you do something today to get closer to the freedom you're working towards so that you can have a success story like Stephanie's. And I'll be over here cheering you on each day. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
