The Income Levels of a Side Hustle
You could work 24/7 and bring in $20,000 …
But the thing is: you're going to burn out.
The key to building a successful online business is setting yourself up for sustainability.
This means considering the type of offers you’re creating so you can build an income stream with longevity that's going to align with you for a long time.
Discover how you can accomplish this in the latest podcast episode.
CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!
Show Notes:
Hey, Risers. Welcome to episode 170 of Empathy Rising. We're getting super close to 200. I wonder what we're going to do, have a little party? I just dropped my kids off at school, and I am recording this at seven thirty in the morning.
The whole way back from school I followed my across-the-street neighbour home, and then I texted her and I was like "we should probably be carpooling" and she was like, "yeah, probably", so I think we're going work something out where she drops them off and I pick them up.
That would be lovely because then I would have even more time in the morning. Sometimes it's about creative alternatives, and then she'll have more time in the afternoon. It will be a win for both of us.
Today we're talking money. I think one of the biggest motivators for building our side hustle is money. I know for me, it is. Even though you guys have heard me (in real-time on this show) do my work around money, money motivation, and intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation, and all of that stuff, money continues to be my primary motivator.
We're going to talk about different income possibilities for side hustles today. That's what we're going to dive into. As I mentioned, one of the biggest motivators tends to be money. I think when my students come to me for Side Hustle, I think maybe half are probably money motivated.
There are other motivations such as autonomy. That's a big one, especially in our field where so much of it is regulated and restricted and what we can and can't do. All that stuff. Stepping outside of the therapy room gives us a sense of autonomy.
One of the Space Holder students yesterday—we had our monthly—and she was talking about doing a program for cooking. She was like "I don't want to do anything that has anything to do with therapy. I want to do something totally different". She was like "one of the things that my friends asked me for help with all the time is like meal planning and menu doing menus and recipes and stuff". I'm like "that would be so cool".
That's completely autonomous. She gets to choose it, she gets to design it. There's no one telling her what she can and can't do or how she can and can't practice. Autonomy is definitely a big motivator for a lot of the people that I work with.
Also lifestyle freedom, of course. Spending less time with your butt on a chair and stopping the exchange of time for money. That brings us back to money, but we can focus on the lifestyle and the time freedom that comes from that.
Also the ability to move around and not worry, "is it where I'm located? Is it where the client's located?" When you have that lifestyle freedom, you can be on vacation.
I do this often - in fact in September we're going and getting a beach house for a week because we just couldn't make it work during actual summer vacation. We'll be down on the beach and I'll sneak away for an hour to go do office hours. It's really fun to have that lifestyle freedom.
The other motivator that I see a lot is that creativity piece, like the woman who's going to be doing the cooking programs. The chance to be creative, the chance to be doing something completely different. Those are primary motivators that I see in my students of people who want to step beyond the therapy room.
Money is the one that we are going to focus on today. You guys know there is no shame in being money motivated. I talk a lot about how I want to be mortgage-free very early in life. How I want to have these properties that I pass down to my children, be building generational wealth.
Many of the decisions I made early on in my life in terms of where to go to college, and what to study for undergrad, all of those things came from money scarcity and poor money mindset. A lack mentality about money.
My biggest goal is to hopefully at least take that burden off my kids. I know I'm going to scar them in other ways, and they're going to have other things to complain about me with, but my intention, my pure-hearted intention is to lift that from them, for them to not ever make decisions based on that.
If you are also money motivated, no shame. It's awesome. I think it's great to talk about it, to desire, to crave, and to want money. That is what we're going to focus on today. We have this little wrench going on right now in terms of whether we are going to go into a recession, or not. Inflation was out of control early in the summer. Then certain things are coming down, but certain things are staying high or going back up.
A lot of us just want financial security right now or financial stability right now. Not necessarily that wealth building, but there's this underpinning of just a little insecurity, a little worry right now.
We see that, we see the wealth-building desire. A lot of us are also—me included—working to break some generational cycles around money. The poverty mentality of my parents, who got it from their parents who were born in the middle of the great depression. There's some generational stuff going on.
What I think we can utilize money for, and things that I'm working on toward my business in terms of hiring as well as terms of giving back and donations is fighting marginalization and some advocacy with our money. We can be donating. We can be spending in ways that count as advocacy that use our dollars for good.
We're looking for places where we can find causes that we believe in. Donate to reputable and good organizations and in a sense, have a way to fight back. We know that money can be a tool.
Whatever your money motivation, if you just want more cash to spend, if you're trying to build wealth for your family, if you just want to feel like you've got a nest egg and you feel secure, if you're working on generational patterns, or if you're working on using your money for advocacy.
Any of those are completely valid reasons for being money motivated. I will validate all of those. I think that they're all wonderful. Money is a big deal. We can sweep it under the rug. We can choose not to talk about it and all this stuff that I think is outdated nowadays, and then especially if you're stepping foot in entrepreneurship, you better be able to at least have money conversations.
If not with other people in public, at least with yourself. Maybe if you have any accountants or anything helping you on your team, we've got to be able to have these realistic money conversations. Money is for enjoying ourselves. It is for having a lovely human experience while we are on this earth and chasing desires and it's also for helping shape the world that we want to see. I acknowledge that my angle of this has a place of privilege.
Some of the listeners here don't have that same privilege. Money is a different relationship, and I honour that. That's why it's yes, there's this enjoyment we can have from making more money, but there's also this ability to change one person's experience, change a community's experience, to change the world with more resources. I think that's important to highlight.
What we're going to get into today are the different income levels that you can achieve with your side hustle. That's a little bit arbitrary. You can make as much or as little money as you want to.
I was just going to say: you can work as hard as you want to or not, but I want to separate that. The amount of money you make does not have to be tied to how hard you work. It doesn't. That's part of what I do in Side Hustle is show you guys how to make this simpler, how to make this easier, how to work less but make more per hour, and things like that.
I don't want to say we can make as much money as we want to, or as little by working as much, but here is a sense of effort that comes along with these different income tiers. I'm going to break that down. I'm going to show the pros and cons of the different income tiers.
I'm presenting them today as very compartmentalized, very separate, but they don't have to be. You can easily be in one income category and jump to a second within a couple of months, and then also you can decide, "I'm gonna lean off the gas a little bit", and the revenue shrinks. That's fine.
I often use the faucet analogy on here. If you've been a listener for a while, you've heard me say this: with our practice, we have one income stream that we can imagine as a faucet that we can dial up or dial down if we want to take 20 clients a week, or if we want to drop down to 12, that faucet turns up and down. When we introduce our side hustle or our secondary revenue stream, we've now brought a second faucet online, that again, we can dial up or down any way we choose.
While I'm talking about these income categories or these income tiers, they are in no way a hierarchy. One is no way better than the other. I just want to paint different possibilities for you.
Without thinking of the type of income you want to generate, it's hard to build the right type of offer for you. You've heard me many times before talking about the relationship between price and touch. If you want to earn a lot of money from your side hustle, but you're interested in a low-touch offer, you have to understand that equals a lot of marketing. That equals a lot of volume.
That's fine, it's just that we need to have a conceptualization of the business model that we're building. I've been talking about this for a couple of episodes now. That starts with the money conversation. For some of you, it might start with the lifestyle conversation or the time conversation. For me, It's always going to start with the money conversation.
If you end up not knowing the type of money that you want and you end up building the wrong type of offer, what happens is that you can find yourself in the wrong marketing situation, and by wrong I guess I'm more mean uncomfortable or not suited for your strengths.
I don't think that there's any wrong marketing. Maybe there's some unethical marketing. I want you guys to be building something fun for you, enjoyable for you, and well suited to your personality. Suited to how you already operate in the world, so you can go out and be as authentic as possible and enjoy it as much as possible.
The second we start trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, it stops being fun. It starts being "hard". We want to think about income first; building the right offer, and building a suitable marketing strategy.
If we don't think about money, we also waste a lot of time. We're potentially also wasting a lot of money while we're trying to build money or build wealth because you might hire a VA to help you with the wrong offer or the wrong strategy.
You might end up paying for ads, or you might pay for a graphic designer and end up having the brand that you don't want. We want to always have kind of a holistic approach to this. We want everything to feel like it belongs together.
We need to think of money included in that. Money's not only the byproduct. Money needs to be part of the plan. If you're not projecting out income goals, "by six months, I'd like to be here, by 12 months I'd like to be here" then we're not operating from a place of sustainability.
You can work your ass off for three months straight and bring in $20,000. I think that's super feasible, but you're going to burn out. Are you setting yourself up for sustainability, a long-term income stream that's going to serve you over time?
You definitely want money to be part of the conversation. When you backward plan from your income goal, when you consider money from the very beginning, all of these things flip flop. You're able to build the offer that makes sense for you based on the amount of time you want to commit and the amount of money you want to make, you're able to market it in a way that feels good, and that utilizes your strengths.
You're also able to see success cheaper and faster, and by cheaper and faster, when it's in alignment, it comes so much more naturally it's not forced. This is allowing you to maximize your unique strengths. Your business is going to look different than your best friend's business, is going to look different than your sister-in-law's business.
You have unique strengths here, and that's what we need to bring out. We need to highlight and we need to emphasize. You ultimately end up building a side hustle, this secondary income stream, this alternate faucet that works for you and not against you.
You don't feel like you're banging your head against the wall, and it's also going to serve you for the long term. It's going to be sustainable. It's going to be manageable. It's going to serve you for the long term.
Let's jump into the different income levels. As I said, I compartmentalize these but know that these are fluid, you could move up and down and change all around. Just pointing out how we get to these different tiers and what we need to do in terms of effort and in terms of pricing and that kind of stuff.
Sometimes when students come into Side Hustle, They're just looking for something that's a couple of hundred bucks. They're trying to make maybe $500 extra a month. Their goal is to pay off their student loans faster without taking more clients, or their goal is to pay down debt or make extra, but without having to increase the number of clients that they see to do that.
This couple hundred bucks level is easily achievable with any type of offer. This could be a high-touch offer, or this could be a low-touch offer. This could be what we call a more active income stream, or this could be what we call a more passive income stream.
Keep in mind that nothing is ever actually passive, but it could be more passive. Some examples of these, let's say you have a $500 course. If you were just making one sale a month of that course, boom, there's your $500 extra a month. That would probably be more of an active income stream to sell one course a month.
You could certainly have that on a passive funnel, but you'd be actively working to fill that funnel. You could also have a digital product, an ebook that you've priced at 50 bucks and you sell 10 of those a month, that could also become more of a passive income stream at having that set up on a funnel, or it could be something that you actively go and market on, marketing Mondays in the Facebook groups.
Then boom, you've made your 10 sales for the month and you've got your $500. For this level of income, couple hundred bucks a month, you don't necessarily need to be building an audience and building an email list. I know if you're following me for a while, you're like, "did she just say that?" because of how much of a fan I am of building email lists, but to make a couple of hundred bucks you could just be using social platforms.
You could have your own social media accounts, or as I mentioned earlier, going into existing Facebook groups that have marketing threads. LinkedIn groups could be an option for this too, if you don't love Facebook or if your audience isn't on Facebook.
Utilizing threads that are already set up for you. It's not like you're breaking the rules. It's not like you're being spammy or gross, but you are going into Marketing Monday threads and dropping your link.
Let's say you're in the therapist market like me, there are hundreds of Facebook groups for therapists. Some of them allow promotion, and some of them don't. Some of them have marketing Monday threads, and some of them don't. Let's say you're posting in 20 Marketing Monday groups, and you're posting your link and you're doing it every Monday.
The chance of you making a few sales from that is high. That could be really that could be a really easy way to make these couple hundred bucks without you having to have the undertaking of building the audience.
This is all hunting, no farming. My students know what I mean by that; all hunting, no farming. When you go out and you hunt, you eat for the day. When you farm, you eat for the season, you eat for the year.
When you are thinking, "oh, I'm just going to be making a couple of hundred bucks a month and I'm using these hunting strategies", you're always a little bit wound up. You're always alert. You're always looking for that next sale. You're always looking for the deer, or whatever the food is going to be, that you hunt.
Farming, as we know, happens in cycles and seasons. There are active seasons of farming where you're planting or harvesting, but there's also the summertime where you're just watering and it's not so intensive.
Then you harvest in the fall and then you eat all winter without any work. Farming strategies are more sustainable long-term ones. Those are required for higher income tiers, which I'll get into in a moment. If you want a couple of hundred bucks, it's super doable. You're just always going out there. You're always going after that sale.
The next income tier that is super feasible is when I'm calling 'half income'. I'm using $50,000 for this example, but you can fill in the blank with the amount of money that's appropriate for you. Some of you might be like, "oh yeah, 30K" some of you might be like, "oh, half my income's 80 K or 90 K".
Fill in the blank with your number. But a halftime income, or maybe half of what your practice makes. This is the income level where I feel like people can start cutting a few clients, they're not at the point where they can shrink their caseload down, because they're only making half of what their practice makes, but they could potentially cut their caseload in half so they're able to lighten that client load that time for money load, but they're offsetting it with the income from their side hustle.
The way that I would do it personally, I would create a $5,000 group program and I would enrol 10 people. I'm always going to err on the side of higher touch, meaning that higher price and less marketing. That's always going to be my strategy, but some of you, I get it; You've got an intensive practice and you don't want to be high touch in your side hustle. Then we could flip this.
If you want to do a $500 course, then you need a hundred sales throughout the year. It's not that it's not doable; it's just the dynamic changes. At 5k and 10 people, I'm investing time in the facilitation of the program. I'm working 'in' the business (we had an episode about this; working 'in' my business), but I am not having to work on the business. We do not have to market and attract so many leads all the time.
Versus if you want the lower touch, you've got to do more marketing. That's just the way it works and I'm honest about that for you. Because of the price point at 5k, it would have to be higher touch. You could do this, I think super reasonable would be a six-month program.
You could meet every other week and you could have things like worksheets and lessons and stuff included in that. You'd probably want some sort of community like a Facebook group, or I use Voxer for mine. There are certain audiences where you could charge 5k for three months or four months, depending on who you're serving and what problem you're working with.
I like to give you conservative numbers and realistic pictures. That would be an example of what this would look like. I think this would be easiest to sell because we know higher touch programs sell better than lower touch programs. It would be easier to build an audience because 10 sales per year is manageable.
You can get 10 sales from 500 people. You can get 10 sales from a thousand people. A thousand people for the whole year. But remember if you're going the other way, if you're not interested in high touch, you can run the numbers and see what you need.
That'd be a hundred sales of a $500 course, 10 times the sales, 10 times the audience, but zero facilitation. You don't have to be working 'in' the business at all, you're only working 'on' the business. This is an example.
The next income tier is full-time income. I'm just using the numbers a hundred thousand - the math is easy, but you can fill in the blank on what your full-time income could be. What are you making from your practice? Some of you that might be 60, 75, or 80, and some of you that might be 200,000. Fill in your number that makes sense for you.
This full-time income is where I see people who are either able to really step back from their practice. I think of Jenna Robinson, if you're familiar with her, she's like I see three clients and that's it because she still wants to be a therapist.
She's still proud of that therapist identity, but also does not want a big caseload. You could, at this full-time income mark, then you can really shrink that caseload down substantially, or you can take a sabbatical and then, take some time off of your caseload altogether and then come back and maybe rebuild in a way that feels better. If you're feeling burnt out with therapy, this could give you six months off, right? Not only just shrink it down, but a lot of time off.
When we're in this full-time income category, I think this can either be done as a side hustle, or you might be switching over to your main hustle. Now that's what my students call it. They're like, "I want this to be my main hustle and I want therapy to be what I do on the side". You could certainly keep your caseload where it is, and get your side hustle.
At this point, if you're at a full-time income, I would call it your second business. You can maintain both of those. I think that would be a lot of work for you. At that point, you'd probably be bringing on team members. You'd probably be bringing on people to help you at that point. Your ratio gets to look how you like it.
I know people who like to grind, man. They really like to work. Doing both could be something for you that makes sense to you. If you're like me and a little bit lazy, you might be thinking, "how can I do this with as little work as possible?"
What it's going to boil down to is the type of program you choose and the business model that you want. Low price, just like we mentioned in the 50 K example, low price is going to mean a lot of marketing. At this income level, you might be switching over to paid ads. You might be paying for your marketing.
Then you're not spending the time doing it, which is lovely. When I made that transition, it was certainly a weight off my shoulders, but then you see that bill from Facebook and Instagram or wherever you're running your ads, like Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You see that bill every month and you're like, "Okay. Yeah, I got my time back, but it wasn't free".
It wasn't like I just made all these leads and all these sales without doing anything. You may not be actively doing anything, but your bank account is certainly doing something. High touch or high cost is going to mean more delivery time.
Either way, it's just going to come down to where you prefer to spend that time. Instead of five sales at 10 K, now you enrol 10 people at 10 K. You still could fit 10 people in one zoom room. I like to keep my zoom calls to 12 people.
I will allow 15 people in a zoom room because what I know is not everybody comes every week so we end up having between 10 and 12 per week anyway. It gets to that number that I like it to be at.
If you have five sales at 10 K and you're at that 50 K mark, or if you bump that up to 10 sales at 10 K your time investment in that, your facilitation time, I think can still be the same. I don't think at double the number of people you have to add on extra time.
Now, when you get to 20 people, you might want to. I know coaches who would put 20 people in one zoom room. For me, I still have that therapist mentality where, like, optimal group size is 10 to 12 people. I find that I facilitate better with that amount of people too.
When I hit these certain tiers, I add on more time. When I move from 15 to 20, I add on more time. When I move from 20 to 30, I add on more time. You get to decide where that breakdown happens for you. As I said, it's going to take time regardless and where you want to spend that time is your choice.
Are you more interested in facilitating with people or are you more interested in marketing? It's the same amount of time. It just goes in a different place. Once you're at the hundred thousand dollar mark, you can bring money into the equation. I guess you can bring money into the equation anytime.
This is the income level I wanted to be at before I was paying for ads. At this income level, you can be in the low-price category and then hire out your marketing by doing ads. That's where you start to be like, "okay, I'm making decent cash and I don't have a lot of work to do".
The final income level is where I'm at currently, and I'm going to call this scaling. Where it happened for me personally was about... 2019, I was at 25 and then in 2020, I jumped to 60. 2020 was an insane year and I was scaling in the middle of 2020, I was building the plane as I was flying it.
I've shared a lot about how that was hard for me on the show. You can scale back to some of those. I talk about how I was burnt out at the end of 2020 and all that stuff. You can go back and listen to those episodes.
Scaling, when you hit that 200K mark, that's where it started for me again, fill in your numbers here. This is really where you're at main hustle mode. You might have an employee. This is where I brought on Hailey, who I talk about all the time, but I also brought in Kristin, the copywriter inside of Side Hustle, and Shayna, the designer inside of Side Hustle.
When I started scaling, I brought on help at this point. When you start to scale, call it two hundred, two fifty, whatever that number is for you, you've got a full-blown business here. You're making more than full-time income and you've got employees, even if they're just contractors who are probably helping you carry out some of the tasks, whether those are in your business tasks like Shayna and Kristen are for me or on your business tasks, like Hailey is for me.
I believe that the reaching scale is best through what we call an Ascension model. I have episodes on the Ascension model itself. If you want to go back and listen to those, you can, if you want a deeper explanation of this.
There are many different business models out there, there's a hub and spoke model where you might have one core offer at the hub, and then you have all these off-shoot offers that look like spokes. It looks like a thought bubble or a flowchart bubble is the best way I can think of it.
That's one business model that helps you get to scale. The reason I don't like the hub and spoke business model, as much is it's hard to keep track of the spokes. What am I selling now? How is it leading back to my main offer? It can be convoluted.
I like things very neat and tidy, as you could tell. What I like is the Ascension business model. The way you can think of an Ascension business model is like a ladder leaning up against a wall. You have the floor, you have the bottom rung, you have rungs in the middle and you have rungs at the top.
The bottom floor represents whatever you do for free. For me, my quiz, my master class. Often I'll have training, the open house for Side Hustle is coming up in October. That will be a free event. Those are just for you guys to enjoy for free, and then to learn more about what I do. That would represent the ground.
The next rung up those rungs that are low on the ladder, those would be lower-priced offers. For me, that is Side Hustle Schedule that teaches you how to make time to shuffle your schedule around and make time for a side hustle and space holder. Those would be my bottom-rung programs.
Then we come up to Side Hustle, which is in the middle of my ladder, then after Side Hustle, we have the mastermind. Now, traditionally, as you go up the ladder, you go up in price. But in my case, my mastermind is lower priced than my side hustle program, because the side hustle program is a behemoth.
There's so much in that program because you're building an entire business with me, we go from idea to income inside of Side Hustle. It's my middle program because I do have something off the back of it. My top-tier program is not necessarily my top-price program in the traditional sense.
What this Ascension model allows you to do is you essentially attract people with the stuff that's on the floor, the free content, and then they're able to climb all of the rungs of the ladder with you. As long as you continue to provide great value, as long as you continue to solve problems for them and serve your audience, a great portion of your audience will climb all the way up that ladder for you.
Some of my masterminds right now who finished side hustle last year or the year before, some of them have done my free content, have Space Holder, have Side Hustle of course, and are now in the Mastermind. I can trace my top-tier people all the way through my ladder. What's great about this is I focus on marketing free stuff.
It's like attrition. People naturally come up and just matriculate, they just climb the ladder. It's just a natural process that's designed to serve them all along the way. This is how you get to scale because you're able to get repeat sales from the same customers and you don't have to be always going out and getting a new customer every time. That's still part of the thing, you always need new leads. That's the lifeblood of your business, but you can project that once somebody comes up into the lower rung, there's a chance and you can measure this.
My conversion rate is in the fifties and 60% that they will go to the next offer and then the next offer and the next offer. You can measure that and start to make projections based on it, which is pretty cool. That's how I recommend getting to scale, There are other ways, but I think it's the simplest.
I think it's the cleanest, I think it's the easiest to measure. I really encourage my students to create Ascension models, so I hope that this has helped you understand the different income tiers that you can get to and just some different approaches to making those happen. The biggest question you're always gonna have is touch versus first price or touch versus volume.
Once you decide what that is for you, then we can start mapping all of this stuff out and start getting your marketing strategies down, start getting your sales strategies down. That's when it starts to get fun, but you just get to decide: where do I want to be focusing? Do I want to be focusing on serving the people or marketing the business? Once you know that it all falls into place.
If you are ready to start learning this, if you're ready to figure this out for yourself I want you to head over to marissalawton.com/masterclass and take my free masterclass. It is on demand so you can watch it any time.
You can pause it. You can rewind it. You can fast-forward it. You can look for what you need, but what it helps you do is walk through these three questions. The first one: level of touch, the second one: pricing, and the third one: marketing. So you can start to see where you need to be focusing.
If you decide to come on into Space Holder or any of my other programs, like the ascension model, we'll start building all this stuff out for you. Remember to head on over to marissalawton.com/masterclass, and I will see you guys or talk with you guys next week. Until then, keep on rising.
