Working Moms Side Hustle

In Episode 7 of the podcast, we talk to Stephanie Liu, a family doctor in Edmonton, Canada. Stephanie built her blog in the hours while her 2-year old daughter, Madi, napped.

Initially, Stephanie started her blog as a means to provide a resource for her patients. In a few short months, however, her blog was discovered by major media news outlets in Canada, and now the goal for her blog has changed—she now wants her blog to be a global resource for families!

Stephanie has been featured on Global News TV (the equivalent to NBC in the United States) and in Folio.ca, an online news magazine (whose equivalent is the BBC in the United Kingdom) and has grown her Instagram account to over 5,600 followers!

Her blog features a mix of articles that she's written, articles written by guest contributors, and posts co-authored by her and other guest medical experts. And if that weren't enough, Stephanie is a published author! Her book, "Madi Monkey Learns The Body" was written for, and inspired by her daughter.

If you're listening to this podcast, it probably means you have an inkling that you want to start your own business on the side. Congrats! You're probably super excited thinking about the prospect of starting your own thing and making money from doing something you love and you want to get started right away. But there's a couple of things you should do, five that we're going to talk about here on the show today, before embarking on your side hustle journey.

These are not external things, like buying equipment or downloading software. It's five of the most important internal things you need to do to prep yourself for building and growing your side hustle. Remember—it's a journey because things aren't just going to happen overnight.

Here are the five things:

1. Know your powerful why;
2. Understand and accept your limitations and don't compare yourself to others;
3. Get a handle on your time by tracking your time and using the information to plan your week ahead with intentionality;
4. Get stakeholders on board by being clear about your needs and setting boundaries around your side hustle; and
5. Believe in yourself!

Get off on the right foot before starting on your side hustle journey by working on these five things!

Natasha is a 27-year Corporate veteran who built a 6-figure Event Planning business from scratch 20+ years ago while raising three children and working a traditional 9-5. Her children are grown now, but instead of relishing the free time that not having school-age children can bring, she started two additional side hustles, in addition to her Events Planning Biz and her 9-5.

Natasha's personal goal is to build six 6-figure streams of income, and she's well on her way!

Listen to the show to find out how Natasha built her business, the challenges she faced along the way, her time management system, how solving a problem in her business led her to start another side hustle, and she dishes about an event "gone bad".

Contrary to popular wisdom, Natasha didn't quit her 9-5, and has no plans to quit in the future. She "loves her day job"! Listen to how she thinks about her day job….this might be the mindset shift you need to get your side hustle off the ground!

This is an amazing interview with an amazing mompreneur side hustler!

At some point in this journey of life (and side hustling), you will suffer from self-doubt. Some people call it imposter syndrome—you don't feel like you're good enough and you wonder to yourself "who am I to be doing this"?

On this episode of the podcast, Maria Halcumb of Literally Simple joins us to talk about overcoming her own self-doubt in order to launch her local tutoring side business.

Maria got her current full-time job from an online instruction company that she had been side hustling for while teaching at a middle school. She now has a full-time job teaching classes online and designing curriculum remotely from home.

But after a few years, Maria began to miss the classroom and the face to face interactions she previously had with her students. At around the same time, she found out about a Community Leadership Class and decided she wanted to take it. The class cost $3,000.00.

Although Maria has a Master's Degree in Reading Instruction as well as teaching experience in the classroom, she still faced self-doubt when she considered starting her tutoring side business. She pushed past it and launched her business in the Spring two years ago. In about a month, she got her first few clients, and it snowballed from there. She made enough money in her first year to pay for the $3,000 class, along with a laptop, her website, and supplies including business cards.

Maria discusses a variety of tactics she uses to manage all of the priorities in her life; batching tutoring sessions on two days per week, working in 20 minute increments, not staying up late, doing her most important and creative work in the morning before her family gets up, and not obsessing over every detail in the lessons for her students.

Maria's advice to other working moms: you're doing great, be the best example for your children and do something that creatively aligns with you.

Besides spending time with her family, her full-time job, and her side hustle, Maria blogs about minimalism at literallysimple.com.

Today's episode is a solo show where we talk about blasting through and moving past these four common mindset blocks (that are holding you back from launching and growing your side hustle business):

1. I'm too old

2. It's too late

3. I can't learn new skills and keep up with all of this techy stuff; and

4. I don't have time

I've struggled with ALL of these and I've been able to move past them to launch several blogs as well as my own podcast. What kind of impact can you have if you finally launched your biz into the world? How many people could you be helping?

I'm going to show how thinking about things differently and changing your mindset will help you to BANISH these objections or at least move past them so that you can get your business off the ground and launched!

On today's episode, we talk to Lesley Krone of Krone Marketing. Lesley is a busy mom to two young girls and works full-time as a contractor for a large corporation doing marketing on their web team. Her position is remote and flexible, but she is still expected to be available during business hours.

Lesley tells us how her path took her from teaching to non-profit work, to the job she has today. She learned "on-the-job" and is a self-taught marketer.

She also gets into how she got her first client and what she did to fill her pipeline with more customers. She talks about how she manages the things on her to-do list, and how she went from growing her business to managing the growth.

On the first episode of the podcast, we talk with Allison Jackson of Allison Jackson Fitness. Allison is a full-time Corporate Communications Consultant with two teenage children. Growing up, fitness was always a passion and a big part of her life—she played field hockey in high school and college, and even considered a career revolving around fitness.

Like many of us, Allison ended up in a career that had nothing to do with her passion. She ended up in Corporate Communications and has been working full-time in this field for the past 11 years.

About seven years ago, she decided to cross off an item from her bucket list by entering a figure competition. Allison describes a figure competition as "bodybuilding meets beauty pageant". Since that time, she's won several competitions, earned her "Pro" card, and will make her pro debut sometime this year!

Her start in the Fitness and Nutrition Coaching arena started about three years ago when someone told her that she should coach others as a business. That was, as she described it, her "light bulb moment". Once she decided to "just do it now" (instead of waiting five years for her kids to go to college), she bartered with a co-worker to get her social media up and website up and running and started coaching people for free.

Once she developed her system, she started taking individual coaching clients. In her first year, she got 1-2 clients. In her second year, she was able to increase her clientele to 12-15 clients. Then, she made a decision to stop "spinning her wheels" and go "all in" with her social media strategy. Since then, she started an 8-week group coaching program called "Blast the Fat" and enrolled 8 clients in her first round!

Want to take a peek at what Allison's typical day looks like? Check out our blog series "A Day In The Life of A Working Mom Side Hustler" and see Allison's schedule here at www.momremix.com/podcast/episode1