Healthcare Advisor Transitions to Full-Time Advocacy Consultant

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

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Throughout your life, you're going to connect with people, build skills, and gain experience. All of these assets, connections, skills, and life experience are highly valuable and can be applied to a new career or side hustle. In today's story, a healthcare advisor's passion for social justice helps nonprofits create grassroots advocacy programs. Inspired by the 2016 election and how it had the potential to affect her community, this woman transitions to full-time consulting work and is now earning five figures a month doing something she very much believes in. She also has an interesting theory on engaging with supporters.

Whether those supporters are members or donors, perhaps followers, we often talk about building an audience. A lot of people see this goal as amplifying your message. But this person, the one I'm gonna tell you about today has a different take. So I'll tell you about her theory at the end of the story. She's also got some advice on delegation.

Lots of good stuff here, stay tuned. Here's a quick message from our sponsor. [Music]

Bethany Snyder is the owner of Snyder Strategies, a consulting side hustle turned full-time business. She helps nonprofit organizations create grassroots advocacy programs. As a self-described optimist, she believes in the power of bringing people together or as Bethany puts it, she wants to help you unlock your people power.

To create this business, she drew on the skills and experience she'd gained in over 15 years as an advocacy director, lobbyist, consultant and US Senate staffer. She's now leveraging that experience to help other groups and she's getting paid well for it. How did she make this transition? Well, back in 2016, Bethany was working full-time as the director of communications and outreach for a Sacramento based consulting firm. She advised healthcare clients on outreach strategies and led a team of communications professionals.

While that job was paying the bills, Bethany felt unfulfilled. Her working environment didn't provide her with the opportunities she craved, growth, expansion and experimentation. So she started thinking about ways she could make a bigger impact outside her day job. With the changing political climate and a growing concern for her LGBTQ community, Bethany decided to take action. She reached out to people in her community and looked for ways she could help.

And she started by leading advocacy workshops for free at first. Gradually, she found her way into helping small organizations with their communications and realized how much she loved training others. It was while working with community organizations that she spotted an opportunity. She noticed that there just weren't a lot of people offering training workshops or providing this kind of expertise. At least not many people with the kind of experience she had.

Up to this point, the workshops she was leading were mostly pro bono with only a sprinkle of smaller paid projects throughout. But now Bethany decided it was time for a new chapter. So she started putting the word out, she was becoming a free agent. Since her career had mostly been in healthcare advocacy, Bethany leveraged those contacts in pursuit of lending new clients. And it didn't take long.

In just two months, she landed two large clients with six month retainers. Since then, just over two years, her consulting business has gone on to earn $14,000 a month. Bethany attributes this growth to the vast network of relationships that she's built and cultivated over her 15 year career. This includes strategic planners, fundraising experts, policy experts and lawmakers. Leveraging those contacts to attract clients has played an integral role in growing her business.

She typically takes on just three clients a month to maintain her sanity, she says, with some clients on retainer while others paying by the project. Now let's talk about that. Her project pricing has two tiers. The base advocacy audit package is priced at $2,000. For that, she'll provide a holistic view of your program, including database analyzation, looking at specific messaging, even drilling into click through rates for your newsletter.

The second tier is her enhanced package. This includes everything in the base package, plus focus groups or interviews with members, donors, legislative staff and external stakeholders. Bethany said this package is more negotiable and varies from client to client. Startup costs were simple. She spent about $5,000 building a website, getting some software.

And once she had those clients on retainer, she also hired a couple of virtual assistants to help shoulder her administrative workload. Speaking of that, she's got some great advice about knowing what to prioritize for yourself and what to delegate to others. A valuable lesson, one that I'm still trying to learn myself. She says, be clear in what you want to do and can do. You can't be all things to all people.

Also try to do what you love and delegate or hire off the rest. For example, I don't have time to manage my firm social accounts. So I hired a VA to do that for me. I also suck at editing my own writing and seeing typos. So I make sure I have at least two people, read any client facing material before I send it off for final review.

Smart advice there. Somebody needs to follow that advice, perhaps even your podcast host. Let's defer that conversation for later. What's next for Snyder strategies? Bethany is steeped in doing great work for her clients with a focus on the 2020 election.

She refers to it as the super bowl for her industry. She's also considering whether to partner with other firms, target specific organizations or just extend existing client contracts. She's got options, the future is bright. She's doing what she believes in but her hand has made it sustainable. [Music]

All right, couple of thoughts here.

And I wanna share this theory of Bethany's with you. First of all, my thought, I really love a basic package price for a consultant. The fact that she has this $2,000 package that you can purchase, do a bit of an audit of your organization's process, strategy and messaging. I think that's so great. I think that actually as a business owner myself, that makes me more likely to hire someone.

A lot of consultants, you don't really know what you're getting into necessarily until you've had these long conversations. You might feel stuck, you might feel like you're already committed. So the fact that she has this basic package price that anyone can go and purchase, I think is really smart 'cause of course it can always lead to something more and it seems like it does based on the retainers and other contracts she's got. All right, now here I wanna share her specific comments about her approach to engaging nonprofit members and volunteers. She says, "I think a misnomer in our industry is about amplifying your message, which focuses on getting your message out to your target audience.

But I really see advocacy and communications about bringing your members and donors closer to your organization, drawing them in and engaging them so they feel like they're part of the work and excitement. So I always advise my clients to identify their target audiences and build upon them." She also refers to this by the way as the circles of engagement. It starts with asking the right kinds of questions and then focusing on those closest to your mission. So a little bit of a different take than people often have. And I don't think this applies only to nonprofit advocacy groups.

I mean, Sato School, we're all about helping people empower themselves, create additional sources of income, and then do whatever is most meaningful to them. So I think this actually applies when you're trying to build a brand for yourself, doing whatever you can to bring your followers, your subscribers, your viewers, listeners, whatever it is, closer to your brand, drawing them in and engaging them, making them feel like part of their work and excitement. A lot like what I just talked about the other day in the weekly recap in terms of returning every handshake and building these deep personal relationships with those who care about your work. So take that with you today. I hope it's helpful to somebody.

As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. If you wanna see the show notes for today's episode, learn more about Bethany's work, come and check out sidehustleschool.com/865. That's for episode 865. I will also link up all the different resources she used, different software programs she purchased when she was getting going. We try to always have practical stuff for you to take away every day and much more is coming up.

So do come back tomorrow. Thanks so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Sydosol School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.