Episode 18: Making money on the side – with Stacey Ogden of Side Hustle Teachers

Episode 18: Making money on the side - with Stacey Ogden of Side Hustle Teachers

Jeremy Cline
You love your job, but you need something else. Maybe you need extra income or it might just be that the job is just so absorbing that you need something to take you outside of it. It's finding that something that we talk about in this episode. I'm Jeremy Cline and this is Change Work Life.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Change Work Life podcast - the show that's all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. There are some professions which are completely vital to the way that we live but which are all consuming and frankly often they're not even all that well paid. I'm thinking nurses, teachers, careworkers and the like. They're vocations, but they're also professions with high attrition rates, either because people burn out, or because they just aren't earning enough to carry on. This is something that my guest this week is trying to solve. Stacey Ogden is a teacher and also founder of Side Hustle Teachers, in which she teaches the teachers about how they can set up their own side business, even when they don't think they've got the time to do so. Let's hear Stacey tell us why she set up Side Hustle Teachers in the first place, and what it is that she actually teaches. Hi, Stacey, welcome to the podcast.

Stacey Ogden
Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Jeremy Cline
Stacey, to begin with - can you just describe what it is that you do?

Stacey Ogden
How long do you have?

Jeremy Cline
As much time as you need.

Stacey Ogden
I am a woman who wears many hats. I'm a wife, I'm a mom, I'm a teacher of 18 years. And I also have a blog for moms. And I recently started a business - a coaching business - for teachers who are looking to start side hustles.

Jeremy Cline
So you still teach?

Stacey Ogden
I do full time. Yeah.

Jeremy Cline
So how did you get into teaching in the first place? It's one of those professions, which is absolutely vital - but I actually can't understand why anyone wants to do it.

Stacey Ogden
Sometimes I feel that way myself! No, I actually was one of those people that I decided very early on I wanted to be a teacher, and I wanted to specifically be a music teacher. I announced it to my family when I was nine years old. I don't actually know why - other than I really liked my music teacher - but I never really wavered from that. And I was really lucky to have some great mentor teachers along the way, who really let me sort of sink into that role. And I was even able to teach a couple of the basic level high school courses when I was a high schooler myself. So yeah, I think it's just part of my DNA. And going from there, I just, you know, went to college and then got my masters and I'm also a certified administrator - though I don't know that I'll ever want to use that. So I just sort of followed the path that was laid out in front of me from nine years old - but it's been quite a ride.

Jeremy Cline
When you say it's been quite a ride, are there any particular points that stand out as making you think, 'Okay, this has been not quite what I expected'?

Stacey Ogden
Oh boy, yeah. A lot of things are not what you really expect. I remember when I was getting trained to be a mentor teacher to teachers who were just coming into the profession. And they asked us on the very first day, what it was that completely surprised us about teaching in our first year and my first year of teaching in the States. My first actual year teaching was actually in the UK, but when I came back to the States, I taught at a school where it was preschool through grade eight. And I taught band, chorus, orchestra, general music, everything. And the thing that got me the most was with the little preschoolers having to go to the bathroom. I was completely unprepared for that! Okay, this child who can't go to the bathroom by themselves has to go to the bathroom. They were supposed to go before they came to my class - and it completely threw me for a loop. And of course, three and four year olds hear the word bathroom, and now everybody has to go. So that was that was a pretty eye-opening moment of my first year of teaching, of me thinking what did I get myself into?

Jeremy Cline
You mentioned on your website that you did some other things on the side. I think you mentioned sort of network marketing and maybe one or two other things. What led you to start doing other things, as well as teaching? I mean, you know, it's one of those things everyone knows about teaching just how much time teachers have on their hands... I mean, you know, they don't have to get up early to be in school early, they don't have tonnes of homework to mark at the end of the day, they don't have to spend their days doing lesson plans! I read a survey, actually, a day or two ago that said, at least in the UK, 57% of teachers say that their workload is unmanageable.

Stacey Ogden
I'm surprised it's that low! [Laughs]

Jeremy Cline
So talk me through your thought process that led you to think okay, I am actually going to try starting doing some other stuff on the side.

Stacey Ogden
Well, there were a couple of factors that went into it. The first one being after I had my daughter, you know, priorities shift when you have children and I found myself getting really frustrated with the American education system with things that I saw being done at the national or the state or the local or even just within my school building, that I didn't think were good for kids. And as a new mom, I was really starting to take that personally because now we're not talking about just children in general. We're talking about my child who's going to be going through these schools. And I got really frustrated and really disillusioned with teaching for a while. And that was one of the things that I was actually looking for a way out of teaching when I first started. But on the other hand, I'm also a girl who loves the project. My husband actually said after we got married, that he was afraid I was going to fall into a deep depression after the wedding because I didn't have anything to focus on, any project to work on. And well as he learned, I will always find a project to work on! [Laughs] After the wedding, it was house hunting. And then it was, you know, starting a family, and then it was having a family and it was, you know, one project after another. And so I said, 'You know what, I'm going to do something that can maybe lead me to a different career path. And at the same time, give me something else to think about'. And what I found is that even though my first foray into having a side hustle, which was part of a network marketing company, was a complete and utter failure - I was horrible at it! - it led me to my first success, which was my blog. And that was one of the first lessons I had to learn when I was starting a business is that failure is only a failure if you give up. I found that failing forward is a really big part of being a good entrepreneur and being successful at things is taking the failures and learning from them - and moving to the next step. So that's how I got to my blog - Creating My Happiness. It was actually part of a last ditch effort to keep that direct sales sort of venture alive. And then I found that I really love the writing part, and I love people responding to my writing. And I threw up some Google AdSense ads on there and by the end of that year, I had a whopping $2 and 11 cents from Google AdSense - and I was hooked! That was all it took to get me addicted to having a side hustle. So I let go of the direct sales and I focused on the blog and I've tried a couple other network marketing companies here and there, partnering with the blog with varying degrees of success - none of them quite the epic failure that the first one was! They sort of fell by the wayside, but I discovered that I was looking for my next project because the blog, I kind of felt that I had learned as much as I could about it - that I had grown into it as much as I really wanted to. And while the blog is still running, and it's still making money, I don't really have to think about it all that much anymore.

Jeremy Cline
How did you start with the blog in the first place? Because going from network marketing, which I don't know much about to blogging - I mean, what what made you decide, okay, I'm going to try my hand at that?

Stacey Ogden
Well, the idea was that the blog was going to be sort of touting the products that I was selling, and also touting this fabulous new life I had because of this direct sales company, which was complete and utter baloney, because I was not having success with this company. So I found that anything that I wrote that had to do with the products or the company was just sort of falling flat. But if I shared something about something I did with my family, people loved it. I wrote a post about a sandbox I built for my daughter, and people just love - even to this day, seven years later - they still love this post. So it's one of those things that you know, I started it as a way to build up authority for my direct sales business. And I found out that that was sort of false authority, because I didn't actually have any! [Laughs]

Jeremy Cline
I was gonna say - why did you think that was, that the content about the products just wasn't chiming, whereas the content about just sandbox and that sort of thing that was really resonating with your audience?

Stacey Ogden
Authenticity. I really enjoy doing things with my family. I enjoyed building that sandbox. I enjoyed you know, doing a little craft time with my daughter - although I'm far from a crafty person. And those things were true to who I was, whereas the company that I was working with - the network marketing company - I never really 100% believed in what I was selling. And I never really believed in the company itself. And when I look back on it, and I've gone a couple times live in my group to talk about this - there were several red flags that I had along the way about the whole experience of working with that particular company that I sort of shoved aside because, you know, a lot of the network marketing companies will bring out their high earners and they'll like parade them on a stage and they'll say, 'Oh, look, so and so made a million dollars last month, you can too' - and it's very enticing. It's very, you know, - it's a nice dream to have. So it sort of gets you to put aside your doubts that you have about whether it's the product or the company or, you know, all of the above. And, you know, once I kind of found the blog, and I found that I didn't have to work so hard to create content that was about my family, because that was just who I was that I realised I had to stop ignoring my gut. My gut was telling me that this was not the right thing. And honestly, it never led me wrong before. So I needed to stop ignoring it.

Jeremy Cline
You started the blog, and that was doing quite well. And then you decided you needed to do something else. So was this because it just wasn't enough project at the time, it was kind of going on to - not exactly autopilot because you had to still create the content and everything - but was it just not sort of sufficient additional stuff, or what made you want to do something else?

Stacey Ogden
Yeah, I was looking for a couple of things you know. What you mentioned is that it wasn't really a project enough anymore. I had learned pretty much everything I wanted to learn about blogging and ads and SEO and graphics and all those other things. And I wanted to do something that had more of a direct impact, where I could interact with people more and I could see the fruits of my labour a little bit more. So I started a business, coaching business. And originally I was targeting working mothers. As you know, that's who I was. I was a working mom and I was trying to build a business on the side and I wanted to help them avoid some of those pitfalls. And there were two things that sort of drove me to switch over to teachers. And one was - it was about a year and a half ago - I had the idea for Side Hustle Summer Camp, which would be an eight week intensive programme that would help teachers use their summer vacation to get a business up and running, get their website built, get their email list set up and their offers and all those other things. So that when they return to school in the fall, they would have a business that they could, you know, take off and run with. So this idea I had, I just woke up with it one morning, and it just sort of kept sort of pecking at the back of my mind like 'Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be so much fun to work with your teachers, and really just dig in and use your summer break to do so much good for people?' And the other thing is that - or even working moms, if you niche down a little bit - moms are a really tough market because it's very saturated. There's lots of people helping moms. And you know, it's hard to break in as a newbie, because there are so many people already serving that market. So I figured I kept having this idea - every day got a little bit louder in the back of my mind, 'You need to work with teachers, You need to work with teachers!' And I figured the moms were covered. They had someone else I could refer them to, they had someone else they could turn to for advice. I wasn't worried about my moms not getting the help they needed. But the teachers, nobody was talking to teachers. And I had looked for someone who knew what they were talking about when it came to, how do you actually do this with a teacher's workload? Because it's not the same as a nine to five job where you actually show up from nine to five, and then you go home and that's it. Teaching is something that you carry with you 24/7. And you know, so it's one of those things that I didn't find anybody who was talking to me - I always had to take advice that I heard on podcasts or advice that I heard in webinars or on YouTube videos and tweak it so that it would fit the teacher's actual reality. So I figured I'm a teacher! [Laughs] I have this experience that I can share with teachers. And I know that there are people out there who want to build a business on the side, and they just don't know what to do. They either lack the clarity, or they lack the confidence to do it. And I really want to help those people get there.

Jeremy Cline
Can I just ask you on that point, how did you know that there were teachers who wanted to build a business on the side?

Stacey Ogden
I kept getting questions from people I actually teach with who had known about my business and my blog and other things and they'd say 'How do you have time for that? And what did you do?' and 'How did you decide to do that?' And they kept coming to me with all these questions that really sort of raised the question in my mind of how can I actually help teachers who want to do this? Now this is in my building of - we only have like 40 teachers in my building - and I was still getting several questions repeatedly. So I knew that there was interest there. And when I started my Facebook group, all my past experience had told me that it takes a while to build up a Facebook group. And in the first couple weeks, I had several hundred people want to join. And now we're up to 1600 people. And you know that right there was one big piece of proof for me that there are definitely teachers out there who want to start side hustles. And, you know, I want to give them a safe space to explore that idea - whether or not they decide to do it is still their call, but I want to give them you know, the information about what it really looks like. I want to give them the support they need, and I want to help them avoid some of the stupid mistakes that I made along the way.

Jeremy Cline
Do you think that all teachers or at least enough, teachers are actually aware that this is something or are there a lot of teachers out there who are just sort of head down, just can't even focus or think about the idea that they might be able to do something as well?

Stacey Ogden
I think there's a mix. I think that side hustles are so prevalent among teachers now that they say that 25% of teachers actually have a second job. So the fact that 25% of the people that we're working with on a daily basis for a good chunk of our lives, already have a second job and many of those are now starting to start businesses rather than have yet another boss. I think that the knowledge is getting out there that this is something that is realistic for teachers to do. There are certainly people who are still in overwhelm mode with their classroom. People who come to me tend to be those who've had a few years in their classroom so that they're not necessarily working on teaching and still, you know, we're all still honing and practising our craft, but it's not a constant thing. We're not constantly planning new lessons and constantly, you know, updating our PD and all those other things - we're at the point where we have a skilled craft that we've built, and now we can start to explore other things.

Jeremy Cline
And the people who do come to you, what are they looking for? Are they looking for just a bit of pocket money on the side? Are they looking for an escape route? Are they looking for something in between? What's their motivation?

Stacey Ogden
Yes. I get a lot of people who are looking to make some extra money because nobody goes into teaching to be rich, but there are a lot of teachers who are struggling to just pay their bills with their teaching salary. And you know, on the other end of things I do get teachers who are, like I was when I first started - looking for an exit strategy. They don't necessarily want to teach for the remainder of their years. You know, when my grandparents were teaching, it was 20 years. You could get a pension after 20 years. And now where I am in Connecticut, we have to teach for 37 and a half years before we get our pension - our full pension. So you know, that's a long time to be in such a demanding career and I do get people who are saying, I'm not even halfway done yet, and I don't know if I can do this for another 20 years. So that's definitely a reality that is part of being a teacher now - that you have to think about 'What if I don't want to do this for nearly 40 years?' And then there are other people who just are very passionate about something that's not teaching related, but they don't know how to take that first step.

Jeremy Cline
Before we dive into what you actually help people with and how you help them, you said that initially this was about an exit strategy for you - so even when you went back to starting the network marketing - and well, you haven't exited yet - is it because it's a longer strategy? Or has something changed?

Stacey Ogden
Something absolutely changed when I discovered how much I loved my blog and how much I loved writing and sharing. Maybe it's part of my teacher personality, but I really liked sharing my experience and guidance and things that I've learned along the way with other people through the blog. And for me, the fact that it wasn't about teaching was the best gift I could have given myself because teaching is a very all-encompassing profession. It doesn't leave you. Your kids don't go home at the end of the day, and then you stop thinking about them. You take them home with you to your own family. And what I was finding in those years where I was, you know, getting burnt out and I was looking for an exit strategy is that the problem wasn't that teaching had changed all that much - although it really has changed quite a bit since even I've started - but it was more about the fact that it was all I was thinking about. I didn't have another outlet. I didn't have another place to expend my mental energy. So when I was looking for something to do at home, I was looking for lesson plans or I would was looking for bulletin board ideas or I was spending my time searching Pinterest or I was reading a book on pedagogical strategies. And it was just too much - I needed something else for my brain to think about so that I didn't have to focus on teaching all the time. Especially when you find frustrations in a career like teaching - when you're thinking about it all the time, you're always frustrated! And that's not a good way to go through life. So when I found my blog, and I started really focusing on that, I discovered that just having something else in my life - some other thing to focus on - made me enjoy teaching again, because I had an outlet. I had my exit strategy - even if it was for a couple hours a night, I could focus on something else, and then I could go back to school in the morning feeling refreshed because I hadn't spent all night doing more teaching work, if that makes any sense.

Jeremy Cline
That's fascinating. So have you found that with people that you've helped as well, that people have come to you going, 'I need to get out. Just help me get out. I don't know what to do but help me get out'. But then as they've gone on, they've actually thought 'Oh actually no I didn't need a get out, I just needed something else that wasn't teaching'?

Stacey Ogden
Absolutely, yeah. And it's not for everybody. There are definitely some people who either their business gets so big, that they have to leave or they have to sell their business. So they have to make a choice. Or there's other people who just want to leave because they want to leave. And then there's the segment of people like myself who discovered that they were just getting too myopic on teaching and they needed something else to focus on. And when they could do that - when they could let go of teaching for a couple hours - all of a sudden, the classroom became a more interesting place, a more refreshed place. And their students still come home with us - we still think about them - but we weren't thinking about them 24/7. We could at least, you know, tuck them into bed and work on something else for a few hours and come back in the morning having missed them for those couple hours.

Jeremy Cline
So, a teacher comes to you - they're at their wit's end, they're overworked, they're not terribly well paid -and they've heard about this idea of starting a side hustle, but they don't know what they want to do. They don't know how to do it. They can't see how on earth they'd have time to do it. Where do they start?

Stacey Ogden
Well, the first thing I always have people do when they're not sure about what they want to do, is I have them just make three lists. And I just basically just divide a piece of paper, put a couple lines down it and make three different columns. The first one is what do you love to do? How do you love to spend your time? Because I can guarantee you that most teachers who have been teaching for 10 to 15 years do not love to spend their time grading papers. And they don't love to spend their time searching for new lesson plan ideas all the live long day. So what do you love to do? Whether it's gardening or singing or reading or just watching Netflix or whatever it is? What do you love to do? And then in the second column, I have them think about what are they really good at? Like, what do people come to them for advice on. You know, my grandmother has this green thumb that is the envy of everyone in our family. So if there's anything plant related, we're going to Grammy. On myself, people come to me for time management issues because I have a good handle on managing time. How can I help you do that? So what are the things that you're good at - and don't worry about If you think they're sellable, or if they're, you know, marketable - just put them all down there. And the last one is what sort of lifestyle is realistic for you? So, myself being an introvert, I don't want to have a business that makes me go out into the world and interact with a lot of people after I've been teaching all day. I need my evenings to be fairly quiet so I have some time to spend with my family. And then when my daughter goes to bed, I can you know, write a blog post or I can do some social media work, but I can be in a quiet house by myself. There are other people who that sounds like the most boring thing on the planet. So they want to do something that has them out networking with people or you know, you have to think about whether you're an active person or if you like to sit home and read or if you have the ability to leave your house. You know, my husband works nights often and I have an eight year old daughter. So leaving the house at night is not really an option for me. So putting all those, you know, lifestyle issues on the third column really helps you also narrow down what's a possibility for you so that you can be realistic. I've had people say, 'Well, I really love animals, I would love to be a dog walker,' but they don't like cold weather and they live in Colorado and their lifestyle doesn't match up with, you know, that particular thing. So let's see if we can find something else for you to do with animals that doesn't make you want to hate your business that you're building for yourself. So when we start to look at these three columns, we start to get a clearer picture of what this person can do because you want to build a business that is based on something that you love. You want to build a business on something that you're good at because building a business takes enough new learning on its own. You don't want to have to learn what you're actually doing. It's much easier to build a business with a skill you already have. And then your lifestyle piece falls into it too. So there are lots of options within those things. But that's the first thing you need to be clear about - is, what do you actually want? What do you love to do? What are you good at? And what's the lifestyle that you're looking to to work within?

Jeremy Cline
And when do you get to what I would see as being quite an important fourth point, which is, what will people pay me to do?

Stacey Ogden
Ah yes. There are lots of things that people will pay other people to do. Actually I find the easiest thing is that once you know what you're good at and what you love to do and what your day wants to look like, then it's pretty easy to start picking out those things and ways to make money at it. One of the sessions that I offer people is actually going through this process that we can do this one on one and I have a programme coming out in August that's a nine month programme that we go through as a group. But that's actually pretty simple once you narrow down your options. It's one of those things like when you go to a diner, and they have everything on the menu, from breakfast, to lunch to, you know, spaghetti and meatballs to lobster - you have to narrow down what it is you're looking at. You know, do you want breakfast? Do you want a burger? And then you can sort of look at the options within there. But then once you look at the options in there, something jumps out at you pretty quickly as 'Oh, okay, I can do that'. And then the figuring out how to get people to pay seems to come pretty naturally. I don't know if that's just me or if that's something that once you get those three questions answered, just comes naturally to people. But that's one of the things that we definitely work on. Once we get those three questions answered.

Jeremy Cline
Do you ever get people come to you and say, 'Well, I don't really have anything that I'm passionate about,' or 'I don't really have anything that I'm good at,' and how do you answer those?

Stacey Ogden
Usually with more questions, you know, 'So you don't have anything that you're passionate about. Okay. So it's, you know, Thursday night, what are you doing?'

Jeremy Cline
Watching TV.

Stacey Ogden
Yeah. Okay. So what about Saturday at noon? What are you doing? You know, we just start to get into more questions about how people are spending their time anyway. And, you know they may not just be fiery people that feel this burning sense of passion and calling for anything and that's okay. But you want to do something that you at least enjoy. And that you're good at. So, if you don't have anything that you're just like, Oh my gosh, my life is not going to be complete until I do this one thing, then that's okay. A lot of people are like that because many of us - that thing is teaching, you know. We want to be a teacher, that's our calling - and everything else is sort of a secondary. And that's okay. You just have to find out through more questions.

Jeremy Cline
Let's talk about the time aspects. Because clearly that is going to be something that puts people off quite a lot. They just don't feel that they have enough hours in the day. I mean, when do they fit in all of this?

Stacey Ogden
Well, when you can. And the thing is that I find when I talk to people about time, is that time is very much like your home - you will fill it up. With however much time you have, you will fill it up. Just like whatever size house you have, you will fill it up whether you have a 700 square foot flat, or if you have a giant mansion - then you are going to fill up that house with your stuff, you're going to make it your own and fill it. And our time is the same way. So what we have to identify is, what are the things that they're doing with their time that are non negotiable. So you know, going to work is pretty much a non negotiable for most people. You know, family time is a non negotiable for some people, or, you know, whether it's they do an exercise class, and that's a non negotiable - but what are you using to fill the rest of your time? And a lot of times the answer is Netflix, Facebook, Pinterest, you know, Candy Crush, so whatever they're using to fill that time - those are things that you can trade off. You don't actually need to spend three hours a day on Facebook, you can take two of those hours and start building something that's going to pay you as opposed to spending three hours looking at everybody else's fabulous lives. So, you know, it's a matter of finding those things that we're using to fill our time and just replacing them and filling our time a different way. Now, there are definitely teachers who have less filler in their time than others and, and I totally get that. So the other thing that I have to remind people of is this is a side hustle - it is on the side. So you don't have to build a million dollar business in six months. If you have five hours a week to dedicate to your business. Is it going to grow slower? Yes. Will it still grow? Yes, absolutely. So you have to take a look at the reality of your time and go into it with open eyes. You know, are you going to work five hours a week or 10 hours a week or, you know, now it's summertime - so I have a lot more time to dedicate to my business, which is fabulous. And I can do a lot of work that will carry me through a lot of the school year, over the summer. So I can write blog posts in advance, I can record podcasts in advance, I can do lots of advance work. And that's one of the things that I work with the teachers on as well, is how to anticipate those busy seasons and prepare for them ahead of time. When I first started my blog - and nobody do this by the way! - I was blogging five days a week. I put out a post five days a week - that is insanity. And then all of a sudden, parent teacher conference week hit - oh my gosh, I don't know what to do with myself. I was up until two o'clock in the morning every night trying to get next day's blog post ready. So that's one of the things that you can work on is planning ahead for those busy seasons, parent teacher conference week, or grades are due at the end of the year - or you just want to take a couple of weeks off at Christmas and not think about school and not think about your business and you just want to relax. So it can be done. You know, the variations in everybody's schedule just means that they have a different amount of time to devote to their business but slow growth and getting started is still better than standing still right where you are.

Jeremy Cline
Is there a minimum amount of time do you feel, that people need to get going?

Stacey Ogden
I don't know if there's necessarily a minimum. My advice is always to do something for your business every single day, so that you are building it into your daily routine and daily habit. Whether it's you've got an especially busy day and all you can do is check in with your Facebook group and interact with people in there - that's something for your business. If you've got a lighter day or you've got to take your kids to karate and instead of just sitting there watching them go 'hi-ya' you can pull out your laptop and write a blog post while they're doing their thing. So you have to get creative with your time, but I definitely recommend that you do something for your business every single day.

Jeremy Cline
That's great advice. I'm actually in the process of reading Atomic Habits - I can't remember the name of the author, James something or other - but he's talking a lot about, you know, making the habits easy making them habitual. Okay, that sounds kind of obvious! But yeah, okay - so I am at a karate class, rather than automatically staring into the middle distance or going on Facebook or whatever, I will use that time to do xyz. So yeah, that makes perfect sense. So just getting back to our individual, who's just starting out here. And they've been through your three column exercise and identified what they're passionate about, what they're good at, and their own lifestyle and what might fit in with that. So, say they've got something - they've got the start of an idea, they've got the beginnings of, 'Okay, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if that would work' - what's the next stage after that?

Stacey Ogden
Start talking about it. Start telling people what you're doing and what you're thinking about. And start saying 'I'm offering this' and if you know someone that might be interested in your services, offer a couple of freebies in exchange for feedback. You know, 'Would this be valuable to you?' 'How much would you pay for this?' And then you start to get feedback from people right away. Again, a mistake I made in the beginning is that you sort of tend to wait until it's 'done' to share it with the world, when in fact, the better way to build an audience and to build the know, like and trust factor is to share your journey as you're going. 'I'm starting this business', 'I'm selling widgets'. 'Is anybody interested in these widgets because I am offering them for free to the first five people who contact me back?' And you know, you can get a pretty good idea of what people will pay for by the fact that someone will sign up for it for free, and then you can find out from those people. 'Okay, how much would you pay for this?' 'Well, I don't know if I would pay for it.' 'Okay, why not? How can I make it better and worth your hard earned money?' So once you start getting feedback, then you can start improving your product or your services. So I really, really, really strongly advise people to start talking about what they want to do immediately. Start putting it out there, start going to people start asking people to use your services, even if you're doing it for free at first, because that's the hardest part. It's that the first step is a doozy. That's the one that people avoid. And they spend time building a website and building a Facebook page and doing all this other stuff that if they haven't got the right product, they just spent all that time and energy and possibly money, doing something that isn't going to get them somewhere. So just start talking, talking is free. You can do that without having to take out Facebook ads. Just talk to your friends and people who you think might be interested in it.

Jeremy Cline
So what sort of things have people done? What sort of side hustles have people come up with?

Stacey Ogden
We do have a lot of people in the group who are in network marketing. And the reason they come to me is because network marketing will only take you so far. You can only sell - if you're an Avon representative - you can only sell what Avon sells. So one of my pieces of advice to network marketers is to build a personal brand alongside your network marketing business, so that you can build more authority and you can build multiple streams of income. So that's one of a large chunk of group of people who come to me. Teachers love their MLMs. So, there's that! And then we have people who are virtual assistants. They like to work remotely, there's flexible hours, they can work from home with their kids on the floor next to them, so it makes a really good a really good career choice for moms. We have people in the group who run art programmes at local libraries. I have teachers who teach other teachers. So there's a really wide variety of things that we can do. I do actually have a dog walker in the group! So there's such a huge variety. Some of them just blow my mind with the creativity of what they come up with.

Jeremy Cline
Have you had any resistance from teachers or from the profession generally about what you're doing? People who say 'Oh, you're taking teachers away from teaching,' or 'You're trying to sell something that's unattainable' or anything sort of externally like that?

Stacey Ogden
People might be thinking that but nobody's actually came out and said it to my face! [Laughs] No, I understand. Actually that was one of my fears when I first started Side Hustle Teachers is that people would think I was trying to drive people out of teaching, but that's one of the reasons I like to share my story about me wanting to leave and how my side hustle actually caused me to love teaching again. And it's the reason I'm still in the classroom today and not, you know, in school to be a vet tech or something because I think it's important that people know that you can be more than just a teacher. So I haven't gotten any pushback yet. I'm expecting it - there's no there's no shame in people having differing opinions. But then if that's how they feel, then they just don't need to join my group.

Jeremy Cline
And then my second question was, how what you teach and how you help people might extend to other professions. Now obviously, you're a teacher so you understand what teachers go through. But there's got to be other people in similar professions who are thinking, hang on, hang on. I'm not a teacher, but I want to do this too. So nurses or care workers or all those other people who do these amazingly important jobs, but don't get very well paid for it and are working every hour of the day possible. Have you extended this to other people? Or is this something that you might think about doing? Is this something that does transfer to those sorts of people as well?

Stacey Ogden
Yeah, I think what I'm sharing is pretty common sense advice for people who are in professions that don't stop the minute you walk out the door. So you know, anyone in a care profession who who sort of takes their job home with them, or really anybody who has a full time job and is trying to balance that and a family and a side hustle and, you know, is concerned about money or they're thinking of the future - that they might want something different. It's very transferable. At the moment my focus is on the teachers because like I said, nobody's talking to them. And I really want to make sure that they have somewhere they can go that is 100% understanding and supportive of their reality.

Jeremy Cline
If you went back to a point in time, and I'll let you choose which point in time it might be - it might be when you decided that you were going to become a teacher, or when you first started with the network marketing or when you first started the blog - if you could go back to a particular pivotal point in time and have a conversation with yourself, what would you be saying to yourself?

Stacey Ogden
I know exactly when I would go back to. I would go back to a year and a half ago when I first had the idea for Side Hustle Summer Camp. And I would give myself a swift kick in the pants and say 'What are you waiting for? These are your people. They need your help. And you have something that they need. So what are you waiting for?' I would start earlier with my teachers. And, you know, not have spent time or as much time building up my business working with moms.

Jeremy Cline
Great advice. Love it. Do you have any particular resources, books, courses, anything that people who are listening to this podcast might find useful if they're thinking along the lines and what you say has resonated with them?

Stacey Ogden
Yeah, I do. I have a freebie that I give to all my teachers who sign up for my email list. And it's the ultimate list of side hustles for teachers and there's 125 different side hustles on there. And I think that for any working professional, that's a really good place to start because it's things that people have already done. And I'm thinking about expanding it actually because I'm seeing so many great ideas come in through my group. I think I might be adding to it shortly. But yeah, that's an absolute great place to start. If people want to go to side-hustle-teachers.com/teachershustle. That's a fabulous resource for anyone who's thinking about starting a side business.

Jeremy Cline
Brilliant. And if anyone wants to get in touch with you, is your website the best place to start?

Stacey Ogden
Yep, side-hustle-teachers.com or of course the Facebook group. I'm very much engaged in the group and the group is highly engaged as well. So that's a great place for any educators listening to go.

Jeremy Cline
Fantastic. I will put all those links in the show notes. Stacey, thank you so much.

Stacey Ogden
Thank you.

Jeremy Cline
One of the points I found most interesting for the interview was the fact that Stacey was originally looking for a way out of teaching but then realised that that wasn't actually what she needed. It was that she needed something else on the side - something that wasn't teaching middle school kids. Once she had that something she rediscovered her love of teaching. Now that's not to say that what Stacey teaches can't enable people to start their own side gig and ultimately leave their job. But that might not necessarily be what's actually required. I'm also really glad that Stacey made the point that you can do this even if you don't have much time. Even just doing one thing a day will help you get there. Sure, maybe it'll be slower than if you could spend more time on it. But even just that little and often will ultimately get you where you want to go. The show notes with links to Stacey's website and the resources mentioned are all at changeworklife.com/18. That's number 18, one eight. And if you haven't checked out the Facebook group yet go to changeworklife.com/Facebook - that'll take you straight to the group where you can sign up and start asking any questions that you've got about how you can make changes to your own career. I'm really excited about next week's episode where I get to interview an actual celebrity. My guest is going to be a comedy writer and actor and he's got a great story about how he got to where he is now. You're not going to want to miss it. So hit subscribe and I look forward to seeing you then. Cheers. Bye.