Many freelancers in Side Hustle Nation eventually grow their business into an agency that no longer ties their time to their income. What that looks like in practice is often bringing in other team members to deliver the work.
The business ideas and case studies featured in these archives are generally a little “bigger” than a traditional freelance business, even if the actual work offered is the same.
What separates a service business from a freelance business is a matter of scale. No longer are your hours directly tied to your income, and you may not even be directly responsible for doing the work; that’s what your team is for.
Chris is the founder of ThinkMaids.com, a residential house cleaning service in the Washington DC area he started on the side while still a university student.
Less than two years later, the business is doing $60k a month worth of cleaning work, all without Chris ever lifting a mop or dusting a shelf himself.
May Najafabadi of CreativeKidzCrafts.com went from paying for her son to attend afterschool enrichment classes, to holding her own classes and making $12k working 1 hour a day for 8 weeks.
May has an interesting entrepreneurial background that is mostly in e-commerce selling items on eBay and Amazon.
Corey Jeffreys turned an $800 investment into $3k in the first year and has been growing his business and adding more automated processes each year.
His entrepreneurial adventure began by exploring the world of real estate investing, when he happened upon a slightly different rental business model: inflatable bounce houses.
John Wilker of TheSimplestBiz.com has an interesting side hustle that takes up just a few hours a day and earns him anywhere up to several thousand dollars a day.
His business model? Buying industrial byproducts, the kind of stuff that’s used for shipping like pallets, cardboard boxes, crates, and so on, and selling them on for a profit.
Three years ago Design Pickle didn’t exist. It wasn’t even an idea in founder Russ Perry’s head yet.
That’s why it seems crazy to me that today the unlimited graphic design service is doing $400k in monthly recurring revenue!
Back in 2014 Russ was running a creative agency, but he started to hate everything about it. “I felt like I was in a prison of my own creation,” he said.
The ACT is a college entrance exam used by many colleges to rank students applying to their schools. The subject matter covers English grammar, reading comprehension, math, and science.
Millions of students take the test each year and the test prep business rakes in over a billion dollars a year.
As a Side Hustle Nation reader, I want to show you how to get some some of that money!
Carey Green had spent the last 20 years as a pastor, before making the leap into entrepreneurship. As he studied to become a licensed mortgage broker, an idea took hold to put his study notes online.
Today Carey helps other aspiring mortgage brokers pass their certification exam, a test he says was the hardest he ever took. That business, which actually derives most of its traffic from YouTube, generates $1000 a week!
But Carey didn’t stop there.
A couple months ago, Matt Bochnak sent me a note about his motorcycle repair side hustle. As someone who is, shall we say, less-than-savvy when it comes to mechanics, I was impressed.
But Matt shared that the passive income from this service business now actually exceeds his revenue from “turning wrenches.”
As I reached my front door, too tired and uninspired to honour my previous arrangement to meet my friend for dinner, I decided that something had to change.
Sound familiar?
Fast forward six months and I had a service business running profitably, I was getting to the office at 7:30am to have client calls (for the side hustle) and then working at home until 11pm on marketing campaigns.
I’m excited to introduce you to John Rouda, an IT manager near Charlotte, North Carolina. He’s built a variety of non-job income streams on the side, while still working full time.
In fact, we recorded this session from his office at work!
John calls his side businesses for-profit hobbies, which I think is a great attitude to take. He has a handful of books on Amazon, dozens of apps in the app store, is a part-time professor, and runs a local IT/computer maintenance service business.