Loan Officer Charts New Course With Nautically Inspired Jewelry

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

[Music]

Welcome to Side Hustle School, the only program in the world bringing you a daily story of someone who is creating personal freedom for themselves through the form of an income generating project. This person is doing it without quitting their day job. That's right, it's not all about becoming a full on entrepreneur, quitting your day job, at least not walking away right away. It's about building security for yourself so that you have options to do what matters to you. Today's story is all about a mortgage loan officer from Portland, Maine, who combines her nautical roots with a love of design to create geographically personalized jewelry.

It's a methodical approach, a bit different than my style of just try a bunch of stuff and see what happens. The person in this story spends two years preparing to launch her business, learning all about pricing, marketing, building websites and so on, all while working her job. Then she spends another year working two jobs, her day job and the business as the business grows and begins bringing in more than $100,000 a year, and then a lot more after that. So it's quite the journey. We're gonna call this story, Loan Officer charts new course with nautically inspired jewelry.

And that story is coming right up in just 30 seconds. [Music]

For years before the official launch of her side hustle, Charlotte Guptill had enjoyed making and sharing jewelry with family and friends. Typically working with pearls, semi-precious stones and oxidized silver, it was after a friend encouraged her that it was something she was meant to do that the wheel started turning. She then took a course to come up with a business plan to design and sell jewelry with those materials. It felt like she was ready to launch, but as many listeners know, it's not quite that easy, at least not always.

When she presented her idea to a jeweler at a seminar, they told her it would be best to go in a different direction. They said her designs would be too common. And while advice is often wrong or misplaced, in this case, at least, the advice wasn't wrong. Charlotte locked herself away in her studio to brainstorm a new plan. As a lover of sailing and resident of Maine, she was a longtime nautical enthusiast.

She looked around that studio and found herself surrounded by nautical charts and maps. How could she combine these two passions? Well, that was where chart metal works was born, as she found an idea that was far from being common. While there were customizable jewelry options available on the market, there was nothing like this, at least not at the time. She realized she could highlight and cut out parts of a map that she knew were popular destinations, or locations that had some personal significance to someone.

When a friend asked if she could capture the location of the beach she got married on and put it on a pendant, Charlotte knew she had struck gold. She had created a product that would capture a place in someone's memory, and each one could be personal. Each one could be unique. She then set out to work on the project for two years before launching. During this time, with a day job as a mortgage loan officer, she learned about pricing, marketing, how to make a website, all kinds of stuff, taking Fridays away from the office to focus on the preparation.

Because her job was flexible, she was able to work 10 to 12 hour days on Monday through Thursday, and keep that Friday for herself. As she learned more about marketing, she also improved her jewelry making. She would cut the charts and place each specific spot into a bezel, like a pendant, and then top it off with resin, another boater's tool. She soon began creating both jewelry and non-jewelry items like key rings. Once she had enough interest in individual sales to prove the concept, she took out a business loan of $15,000 to purchase equipment like a high-end laser printer.

She then threw herself into the world of business at full force, signing on 10 accounts after a small trade show. After doing everything herself for the first eight months after officially launching, her husband joined in to help. They were able to pay off the loan in just a year and a half. Big things were happening at Chart Metalworks, and they were about to get bigger when Coastal Living Magazine featured them in a full page article. It took the company from three orders a week to over 90 orders a week, and from there, Charlotte never looked back.

All this time, she was still working as a loan officer, but she knew she would have to let go of one of her roles in order for the other to flourish. A year after starting, she made the decision to take the plunge and go all in with the business. It was then that Chart Metalworks also brought on their first employee to help with making the actual jewelry. Although Charlotte and her husband were able to do it with just the two of them, they got to a point where it was hard to keep up. There were just too many orders, which was a good thing, of course, and no sign of slowing down.

This customized jewelry was highly personal to many buyers, proving to Charlotte again and again that she was doing the right thing. She remembers one piece in particular ordered by a woman who wanted a necklace featuring the burial location of her son at sea, calling it the most important piece of jewelry she would ever own. Kept afloat by stories like that and by more smart marketing decisions, by year eight, the business had hit over $1 million in sales annually. It wasn't all smooth sailing, however, and it came with its fair share of challenges. Looking back now, Charlotte was able to pinpoint the change in the business that impacted her the most.

She and her husband decided to bring on partners in order to take more time for themselves. She wanted to slow down, keep running the business, just not at such a frantic rate. But in June of 2019, she sold the company after her company partners presented her with an offer from a buyer. She was happy to see the brand would continue to live on as she knew the impact it had on others. And though her time with Chart Metalworks came to an end, she was also excited for what lay ahead.

Never one to stay idle, she began immediately looking for new projects. Charlotte and her husband now live in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a place they'd always loved visiting and imagined living one day. She now says, "If you wait for the perfect time, it may never come." It's there that she's been staying busy, living in a city she once called a vacation spot and now gets to call home. [Music]

Well, if you wanna see a stellar example of a small e-commerce business, a pretty simple website that's just well done and bringing in a million dollars a year in sales, go and take a look at ChartMetalworks.com, which of course we'll link up in the show notes as well, along with some other resources. Now, a couple of things here.

Be careful about bringing on partners. If you're starting to become overwhelmed, if you're like, "Wow, this is a business that is a really small family business, but now instead of just bringing in a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in sales, it's bringing in a million dollars," we don't know what to do. Bringing on partners is one way to handle it, but there are other ways as well. You can't deliberately choose to slow down. You can say like, "Actually, we have a waiting list of 12 weeks," you know, or whatever.

You could raise your prices. You could just take orders seasonally. That might sound like a counterintuitive thing to do. Like, why would you turn away a lot of money? But if you really do have that much demand, then limiting the orders is only going to increase that demand further, essentially, while also making it more sustainable for you.

Now, I also love this phrase, "If you wait for the perfect time, it may never come." In Charlotte's case, it had to do with moving to Puerto Verde to Mexico. What are you waiting for? What perfect time are you waiting for? Are you waiting to start your side hustle? If you're in that phase of preparing for two years, that's great, I respect that.

But if you're in the phase of analysis paralysis, or if you're in the phase of indecisiveness, or if you're in the phase of, "I know what to do, I just can't bring myself to do it," I would encourage you to remember that someday is not one of the days of the week, right? If you wait for the perfect time, it may never come. Here we are, almost 1,000 episodes into "Side Hustle School," and that is a lesson that I think is consistent throughout the entire archives. The best time to start was yesterday, most likely, but since you can't go back in time, why not today? All right, today's show notes are www.sidehustleschool.com/993.

Go and check them out. Much more is coming up soon as we count down to 1,000 and beyond. Thanks so much for listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau "This Is Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.