The Side Hustle Show

Starting a service business on the side is one of the fastest ways to build extra income. It's flexible, low-overhead, and you can probably start with skills you already have.

“I had a lot of drive underneath me," Abbey Ashley told me, about starting her service business back in 2013. "I was super pregnant and I hated my job so much,”

Abbey started offering her services as a virtual assistant, and connected with her first clients at local networking events in Washington, DC. My the time her maternity leave was up--just a few short months--Abbey had booked enough work to not have to go back to that job she hated.

On top of that, she only had to work 20 hours a week to do it, and could work from home.

There are almost no barriers to entry to starting a freelance service business, and the startup costs are minimal. (All Abbey did was make business cards for networking.)

In fact, it was a service business, a house painting business in my case, that was one of my first entrepreneurial adventures.

Over time, Abbey scaled her virtual assistant business from just herself at $20-30 an hour, to her own little virtual agency, to $75 an hour and up for some specialized work. Before long, the questions started coming in:

In response, she built up a complete training program for would-be virtual assistants. She's helped thousands of people start their own service businesses and has built a thriving free community of virtual assistants. 

If you want to dive in deeper, check out her free training called Become a Booked Out Virtual Assistant. (That's an affiliate link; if you buy her full program, I'll receive a commission.)

Full Show Notes: How to Start a Service Business to Replace Your Income, Step-by-Step

Todd Tresidder took his own personal net worth from less than zero at 23, to self-made millionaire and retired at 35.

When it comes to building wealth, he's the smartest guy in the room.

His latest book is The Leverage Equation: How to Work Less, Make More, and Cut 30 Years Off Your Retirement Plan.

We met through the FinCon community several years ago and I've learned a ton from our conversations. Todd has a unique perspective on business and investing, and our conversations over the years always get me thinking a little differently. He blogs at FinancialMentor.com.

Tune in to hear Todd talk me through his 6 types of leverage and how you can apply those as needed in your business:

Enjoy!

Full Show Notes: How to Get Unstuck: 6 Levers to Pull to Level Up Your Business

Jessica Larrew and her husband Cliff have been reselling on Amazon for years. And though it started as a part-time side hustle, it turned into a serious business--they've sold more than $1 million worth of stuff on Amazon!

What's surprising – and I think exciting – is that they’ve done this is by finding profitable products to resell primarily in nearby retail stores.

How Reselling on Amazon Works

Jessica takes advantage of Amazon’s FBA program, or Fulfillment by Amazon. This is Amazon's way of crowdsourcing its inventory, and letting regular people like us tap into its world-class logistics network.

That means this Selling Family doesn't have to ship anything to the end customer, handle returns, or write up product descriptions.

How the business works is like any other retail business: you profit on the spread between the cost of your product and what it sells for. Now you have to account for Amazon's fees and shipping costs, but it's basically buy low, sell high.

And the best part of this side hustle is that you can get started today with whatever initial inventory investment you're comfortable with.

Full Show Notes: Reselling on Amazon with a $1 Million Seller: Let’s Go Pick Up Profit!

Marc Andre made over $1.1 million dollars from his photography hobby.

But what’s interesting is that he never:

So, what did he do instead?

He built and subsequently sold 3 websites related to photography – that sold digital products to other photographers.

His journey started in 2012. Marc wanted to upgrade from a point-and-shoot camera to a nice DSLR and some lenses but couldn’t justify the $5k price tag for the equipment.

Instead of settling for something else, Marc set himself a challenge to see if he could raise the $5k starting a photography-related side hustle.

Things escalated quickly, from starting a site to creating digital products, he made that $5k in a few months.

Marc carried on scaling his business, creating more products, starting two more photography-related sites, and over the next 6 years pulled in more than a million dollars in revenue.

Tune in to hear Marc’s unique process for starting and growing sites, why he decided to create products before having an audience to sell to, how he used sites that already had traffic to drive sales, and how he scaled up his business to more than a million dollars in revenue in such a short space of time.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The Million Dollar Hobby: How to Monetize What You’re Already Interested In

Stacy Caprio was desperate to leave her day job.

She ended up doing just that after acquiring – and improving – a portfolio of mini online businesses. In her case, these were websites that make money from advertising.

Now, this asset class can be risky, and Stacy is open about her early failures.

But if you have some online skills, (or management skills to bring people in if you don’t want to run the site yourself) this can be a fast-track to the cash flow you need to fund your lifestyle.

Since websites often sell for 20x monthly earnings, they're perhaps 10-15x "cheaper" than if you were to rely solely on traditional investments and a 4% withdrawal rate.

Sound like the kind of investment that suits your lifestyle?

Tune in to hear where Stacy finds these businesses to buy, her unique filtering criteria, and a few quick ways she’s been able to accelerate the cash flow of her portfolio for even better returns.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Financial Independence Fast-Track: How to Replace Your Salary by Buying Mini Businesses

"We are simultaneously gods and worms.”—Abraham Maslow

Power plus humility, right? It's a great combination and something to keep in mind as we try and build our businesses.

We can accomplish amazing things, and yet, we're gone in a flash. Mere blips on the historical radar.

But let's be the gods of our side hustle universe today, and focus on shaping that business in a way that best serves ourselves and others.

In this special solo edition of The Side Hustle Show, I'm breaking down my Top 5 books from last year, and the actions I took (or am taking) as a result of reading them.

Hopefully there are a few nuggets you can borrow!

Full Show Notes: My 5 Favorite Books of the Year and My Top Takeaways from Each

Can you make money hosting trivia nights at local restaurants and bars?

I’m a bit of a trivia nerd, so this week’s show was especially interesting to put together!

To help walk me through how this business works, is probably the best-qualified guy in the country to do so.

Adam Johnston is the co-founder of LastCallTrivia.com, a business that started with just $300 and now powers trivia nights all around the country and provides tools for side hustlers to do the same.

Over the last 10 years, Adam has managed to help turn "useless knowledge" into a 7-figure operation.

Tune in to hear how this business works, how to pitch and price a trivia night, how to get a new venue off the ground, and most importantly, what makes for a great game.

Adam and I even fire some trivia questions at each other, so have your score sheets ready!

Full Show Notes: Hosting Trivia Nights for Fun and Profit: Turn Useless Knowledge into Cash

It’s time to dive into the ol’ listener mailbag and answer a few questions in this week’s edition of The Side Hustle Show.

I’ve had quite a few interesting questions come in since the last Q&A episode, and picked 20 to talk through in today’s show, including:

Full Show Notes: Multiplying Money, Morning Routines, and $100k Side Hustles: 20 Questions with Nick

“What I want is immortality," Jack told me. "But I don’t want it in my name, I want it in actions of others.”

With the size of his audience today and the number of people he’s helped along the way, there is a very real chance of this happening.

Jack Spirko of is a little bit of a legend in the podcasting space, and he’s built a really cool and unique business on the back of his show--which of course started as a side hustle.

Actually, it started with him recording the first year and a half of episodes in his car on his commute to work!

For the last 10 years and 2300+ episodes, The Survival Podcast has covered topics related to “modern survival.” That is, things like growing your own food, generating your own power, and of course starting your own business.

Tune in to hear how Jack built an incredibly loyal and active listener base, how he started leveraging his audience to help grow his podcast, how he built his no-extra-content-required membership site model that drives 90% of his revenue, and his tips for starting and growing your own podcast and audience today.

Full Show Notes: Master, Multiply, and Monetize your Message: From Ranting in His Car to "Immortality"

With 250 million active users, Pinterest is a content discovery platform nearly every blogger and business owner should be spending some time on.

The Pinterest tactics shared on this podcast in late 2015 by Rosemarie Groner were extremely effective ... for a while.

But I began to see declines in traffic, and today Pinterest brings in perhaps a quarter of the visitors it used to.

Still, I’m convinced I could be doing better on the platform to reach more people and help more people with my content.

Just like Google, a top-ranking pin can bring in consistent qualified traffic month after month after month.

But also like Google, there’s a certain science to the Pinterest algorithm.

To help me breathe new life into my account — and walk through how you can do the same even if you’ve never used Pinterest before, I invited Kate Ahl from SimplePinMedia.com to join me on the show.

She’s an expert on all things Pinterest marketing, and in this episode, she breaks down everything I’m doing wrong and what you and I should be doing instead to start reaching more people and driving more traffic.

Tune in to hear the right way to set up your profile, how to set up and optimize your pins and boards to increase your reach, and how to rank you content in Pinterest's search results to drive more traffic to your site.

Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Pinterest Marketing for 2019 and Beyond: How to Get More Traffic