This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey, hey, what's up? It's Chris Guillebeau here with you on Side Hustle School. Welcome back. So glad you're here. Today is National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day, perhaps a bit of a throwback in terms of terminology.
And these days, it's just as likely that your average mom and pop business owner is more like a side hustler, somebody who has a job or is pursuing a hybrid lifestyle, part traditional job, part business, part new project they're working on, maybe transitioning between different things. And it's interesting that today is National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day because I already planned this episode before I realized that. Today's episode is about corporate training, or specifically about how a side hustler is able to get into the world of corporate training. Now corporate training can be a huge industry. I have a friend who is doing some online courses, and for a long time she was selling her courses to individuals.
And the network that she sold through, I think they priced those courses at something like $140 each. I don't recall the precise split, but she would get some of that money, and then the platform, the network that produced it would get the rest of the money. Then they started selling not just to individuals, but also to corporations because the kind of training she was doing was very applicable to people working in businesses. The interesting thing was they would sell those courses based on a license for a single person. So if you had 50 or 100 people in the company taking the course, they would still be paying almost $140 a person.
Maybe it was discounted a little bit, but I was really surprised that it wasn't discounted that much. So all of a sudden she went from doing these one-off sales, which was still pretty good, to selling 50 courses at a time, or 100 courses at a time. Naturally she kind of shifted focus after that because she was like, "Wow, this is interesting. This is something worth pursuing." And kind of like the story you'll hear today, corporate training is often required for all sorts of reasons. For safety, for liability, to maintain industry standards.
So this story is about a director of operations at a senior center who comes up with a way to improve the training services in his industry while building a sustainable side income for himself. I'll tell you how he gets the idea, how he makes it happen, and what the outcome is right after this quick thank you to today's sponsor. Tad Wiese is the director of operations at Senior Living Community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He's an in the trenches kind of guy, always up to date with the latest in the long-term healthcare industry. He knows the daily and long-term challenges of facilities like his.
His side hustle idea was based around a hugely inconvenient problem for these facilities. There was no simple, consistent, and non-boring way to provide emergency situation training for employees. This was a government requirement. All these facilities have to complete the training and then report that to the government on a regular basis. But the presentations were often dreadfully dull, rarely practical, and the reporting was also cumbersome because it had to be done manually.
There were a few third-party companies providing these trainings in person already, but they were costly. Tad believed that he could create a virtual platform to host thousands of randomized emergency scenarios in an interactive, almost gamified way. Even instead of boring presentations, teams of long-term healthcare facility employees could work on the required training together at a time that was convenient for them and in an engaging way. Here's how he thought his idea could work. The training team would sign into the software on a tablet.
The software would then pull up a random scenario. For example, a breaking and entering is reported at a home down the street, and the suspect is still at large. The police search the facility's grounds and find the suspect hiding behind some bushes. The team must explain how they would react to the threat, how they would keep residents safe, and how they would interact with police. Tad needed help to make this happen, so he turned to Kyle Golding, a business consultant.
At any given time, Kyle is juggling 10 or more businesses that need his skills and expertise. But when Tad came along with a fresh idea, Kyle knew he had to make time for one more. Simply put, it was an idea he didn't want to pass on. Kyle and Tad co-founded what would become a new company, Vortex. And together they put up a total of $30,000 to get started.
Most of that money went towards creating the actual software, which had some challenges. The first programmer produced a decent product, but it was too limited to facilitate growth. The second programmer's result had similar limitations. These two mistakes were very costly, in both time and money. If starting over again, Kyle says he would have waited until he found a programmer with a better understanding of their needs.
Finally, with the third version in beta mode, they were ready to move forward. Since Tad was well connected in the industry, he quickly found several healthcare facilities that volunteered to test the product for free in exchange for providing feedback. They gave input on the user experience, the scenarios themselves, and even the pricing. On that point, the pricing, since there was no direct competitor, Kyle and Tad didn't really have an estimate of what their service should cost. The feedback they received led them to charge per number of employees and offer discounts to multi-facility businesses.
So the rough breakdown was that they would charge $500 a year for a location that had up to 100 employees, they would charge $1,200 per year for a location up to 250 employees, and then $2,000 a year for a location with up to 500 employees. With a strong, innovative product and a pricing structure, it was now time to start marketing. Tad took his tablet computer to local facilities and demonstrated how their product was easy to use and helped make reporting the training to authorities a breeze. One of those first facilities purchased a year-long subscription, finally proving the demand for the service. From there, Kyle took over the marketing side.
With such a specific product, he had to be laser focused. He created ads on LinkedIn, attended some regional trade shows, and even cold-called facilities in his area. Their second sale came from a LinkedIn ad, which proved that the sales process didn't require an in-person demonstration and could be done digitally. In 2018, after nearly two years of business, Vortex has completed over 3,000 training scenarios, and their clients love them. These days, Kyle and Tad expect between 10 and 15 sales a month.
That's about $16,000 a month. Most day-to-day tasks are automated. Targeted ads get Vortex in front of professionals, referrals then bring in long-lasting clients, and the software runs on its own. They're now preparing to launch the 2.0 version of their software, with a third version also in the works. It hasn't always been easy, but it's been worth it.
Long-term healthcare workers now have access to a consistent, empowering training tool. Tad and Kyle have the satisfaction of having helped make it happen, and of course, that consistent five-figure monthly side income is a nice reward as well. Here's a task for you. If you work in a big company or an organization, maybe take a look around and ask yourself what kind of training needs to happen here. Maybe it's the kind of training that already exists.
Maybe it's something that is completely new, and you may or may not be able to be the person that offers that training. Like, I realize some people have restrictions, you can't just go from your job to offering training in the same company and getting paid for it on the side. I mean, you might be able to, but if not, the point is just to get you thinking. To understand, okay, what might the need be here? And by the way, before you write it off and say, "Actually, I couldn't do it," for sure, I was thinking about this episode we had before, episode 299.
That was "Teachers Join Forces to Launch Nerd Summer Camp." I really like that story because it's these teachers who come together and they launch a summer camp for kids who don't want to play sports and go to traditional summer camps. They're teaching math and science and doing lots of fun experiments, and the first year they do this camp, they have to turn the money over to the school system, even though they're the ones who had the idea, even though they're the ones who do all the work and so on. But then the second year, they form a corporation which essentially allows them to get paid themselves. So they are rewarded financially for their idea and the work they put into it. I just mention that because there's often more than one way to accomplish something.
So just in case you do spot an opportunity, before you dismiss it, maybe just ask yourself, like, "Might there be some way I could do this?" And if the answer does turn out to be no, well, that's fine, but at least you've fully explored that possibility. Exploring possibilities is a big part of what this whole process is about, learning the side hustle way, seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work for you. And your experience is going to be different than Tad's and Kyle's in this story. Your experience is going to be different from mine. It's going to be different from other people you hear.
But I do think there's some common threads and that's what I try to focus on. A common thread of creating independence, generating income in different ways so that you have security, you have options, you can do what's important to you. Usually doing that by making something valuable or helpful or interesting for people, like a nerd summer camp, like a virtual healthcare training, like a random acts of kindness kit like we heard about the other day, or a service that connects and refers people that we heard about the day before that. Even if you don't relate to each story, which I certainly don't expect you to, there usually is a through line. There's something you can learn and take with you for your own project, your own process, your focus, whatever it is that you're working on.
That at least is my hope for you. Don't forget inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. The show notes for today's episode are at sidehustleschool.com/453. Thank you for listening. I'll be back tomorrow.
My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
