JP Morgan Employee Starts “Money Therapy” for Millennials

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Hey friends, hey listeners, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, happy to be with you today, telling you another story. Yet again, another story of somebody who starts a side hustle without quitting their day job. Although in this case, the story is a little bit less linear. The story is about a former JP Morgan employee who starts money therapy for millennials.

What's money therapy? Well, hang tight, I'll tell you about that. But in this story, she leaves her job to join a startup, and then she starts a business of her own while she's at the startup, and then she starts a side hustle to fund the startup, the one that she started. Did you get all of that? Well, if not, don't worry, because we're gonna focus on the last part of that, the side hustle to fund another business.

That's right, a side hustle can have all kinds of different benefits, including paying off debt, saving for your future, or perhaps saving for something else you wanna do. In this case, start a different business. This woman I'm gonna tell you about has been able to earn $250 an hour on the side. How does she get the idea and how does she make it happen? All of that in today's story.

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Ellie Thompson had what many would consider a dream job. As an advisor at JP Morgan, you'd be forgiven for thinking she was on top of the world. She needed a change of pace. That's when she joined Hello Wallet, a financial startup with a bold mission to help people make better financial decisions using software. While she was there, Ellie decided to begin her own startup called Venue.

Venue, spelled V-E-N-Y-O-U, is a website that helps match people with great spaces for weddings and functions. She knew it was a big idea and a lofty goal that would take some money to get off the ground, and that was money that Ellie didn't have. Now, it's here that her story gets even more interesting, because Ellie decided to start a side hustle to help fund Venue. She entered a market she knew well and it played to her strengths. What's her project?

It's a financial advisory service for millennials. Specifically, she began offering consulting sessions on how to get out of debt, increase income, and plan for retirement. The name of the side hustle is money therapy, because we all need someone to talk to every now and then, even about our finances. Now, the next part of our story will resonate with some of our listeners who follow their own path. You see, Ellie didn't spend time building a website, printing business cards, or having a logo designed, at least not at first.

Instead, she spent time talking to customers that fit her demographic. Specifically, she talked to millennials working at Fortune 500 companies. Now, that investment, to use some finance jargon, it paid real dividends. Those initial interviews gave Ellie the insight into the pain points and frustrations of those people, and it didn't take long to realize that, even if you have a decent job and a stable income, if you don't have the right financial education, you might overstretch and get yourself into debt. So a consulting service providing information and help around how to avoid that trap, or get out of it if you're in it, was the perfect product.

Now, the next step was to find some customers. Ellie's first few clients were friends and family, which is a great way to start out, get some initial traction, but clearly isn't sustainable in the long term. The real aha moment came after Ellie gave a talk at Startup Week in Washington, D.C., called Personal Finance for Founders. It was after that talk that she knew this could be a viable source of income and possibly a thriving business. Directly after her presentation, Ellie had some interest from audience members in her consulting services.

She used those leads to assess how much she should charge, what people really needed, and how she might be able to offer it. One thing I haven't mentioned so far in this story is startup costs. That's because there were none. It's a $0 startup. She didn't even have a website in the beginning and only decided to treat herself to one after she signed some customers.

Oh, and when she finally did build that website, it cost $100. So from a $0 startup to $800 startup, not bad at all, and perhaps less than a millennial spends on avocado toast and artisanal microbrews in a month. So how much has this $100 investment returned so far? Money Therapy, a little side project conceived to help fund another project, is now generating $2,000 a month with about eight clients per month. Even though I didn't finish high school, I'm pretty sure that works out to about $250 a client.

That $250 further equates to one hour's worth of work. That's right, $250 an hour. So perhaps the next lesson to learn from Ellie is that high ticket items can go a long way, at least in terms of increasing your income. So for example, if she were consulting at $50 an hour, she'd need five times as many clients to make the same amount. Again, you probably better double check my math there if it's important to you.

But I think the greater point is $250 an hour is definitely a high ticket price, and it's making a substantial difference in her income. Now what's even better is that this number is almost all profit. Ellie keeps costs down by not having to have an office space or pretty much any other fixed cost. She consults with them using Skype or Zoom, a popular video conferencing program. All of her business comes through referrals, so there's no search engine optimization, no social media, and no paid marketing.

In fact, what started as a way to generate side income to fund this other project has now turned into a fully fledged business in its own right. It's been so successful that she's thinking of doubling down. So Money Therapy now has a blog, and Ellie's goal is to start collecting emails to build a subscriber base. At some point, she may launch a series of online courses, which is also great because it shows even more forward thinking. Consulting can be lucrative, but it's also dependent on your time.

You need to be there for every hour you charge, which then leaves you with less time to do other things. But moving into creating products will allow Ellie to sell her knowledge many times over, but only having to create that product once. It sounds like she doesn't need Money Therapy for herself. [Music]

So in this day and age, a lot of people are living what you might call a hybrid lifestyle or a blend of life and work throughout their careers, where people have different jobs, they have different businesses, they have side hustles, they have gigs. And if you can excel in the skills that are needed for this kind of lifestyle, no matter what you end up choosing in the long term.

The skill to start this kind of side project, to know how to do it, what makes for a critical need, how to reach the people who have that need, how to provide a valuable service to them so that they will refer you to others, these skills are so, so valuable. Ellie may not be doing Money Therapy for the rest of her life, she may not even be doing it for the next two years or however long. But again, this skill is so valuable because it can be transferred, it can be adapted, it can be applied in different ways. Now also, as we've talked about elsewhere, if you're qualified to help people with personal finance issues, that's definitely a rewarding endeavor. The key is to specialize and be clear on your messaging.

And that's why I think her research, rather than starting with the usual path of, okay, I gotta go get a website, need to have a logo, what else do I need? Think that research, that really thinking clearly about who she wants to serve and what her message is, that was so important in making this a quick success. And finally, last but not least, if you're in this situation or you want to start a project like this, but you're wondering how much should you charge, we don't have time to get into it today, but there is a whole extended episode all on that topic. If you take a peek at sidehustleschool.com/extended and scroll down, you should see this whole downloadable episode about setting your pricing. That episode, along with all the other extended cuts, is of course free to you.

So go check that out, I'll be back with you tomorrow. Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. And while you're looking at your browser, by the way, today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/486. Thank you for listening. This is Chris Guillebeau for "Saddestle School." [Music]