Side Hustle Spotlights with Emily King
Emily had a great idea for using her skill set to help even more people…
That’s what landed her in Side Hustle Support Group.
Sure, she could have stayed in traditional therapy and pivoted to building a group practice.
But instead, she started an online business because it…
Offered her a lighter space to help people from.
Meant she didn’t have to manage other people (something she really doesn’t want to do).
Helped her avoid burnout while doing work she loves.
That’s what’s amazing about starting an online business: You don’t have to compromise—you really can have it all.
Tune into the latest podcast episode to learn about Emily’s side hustle journey today.
CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!
Show Notes:
Hey, Risers. Welcome to episode 182 of Empathy Rising. We are continuing our Student Spotlight Series with Emily King today, and she is somebody who is what I call, a ‘slow burn'.
She'd been following me for a long time before she bought Space Holder, and then she was taking advantage of those monthly Space Holder calls for a long time before she came into Side Hustle. She explains that journey and that process and how she made those decisions and was intentional with her choices and her time before she came up to Side Hustle.
If you are somebody who's: "Yep, that sounds like me. I've been listening to this podcast for a long time, and I feel like 2023 is my year"—applications are officially open, definitely take advantage of joining us in January. Head on over to marissalawton.com/side-hustle. That's where you'll find that application.
I always make sure that we have a conversation so that you understand things like the time commitment and what it looks like for you with your unique circumstances to participate in the program so you're making the decision that is best for you.
One thing that we are doing differently this year is we are capping enrollment at 30 students. After running the nine-month version with more than 30, what we've found is we think that 30 is that sweet spot.
It's going to give everybody a diverse group and robust group to not only learn with but also learn from and it's going to keep that intimacy level where I want it to be in that touch level where I want it to be.
Many of these spots are already full, so if you are thinking of joining us for 2023, go ahead and apply now so that you can snag a spot before they are all gone. Again, that is marissalawton.com/side-hustle.
Marissa (M): Hey, Risers. We are here with episode 182, and it is another student spotlight. This week we are talking with Emily King, who is a Space Holder, alum and a Side Hustle alum. She's really—or not alum—just about to finish… just about to graduate Side Hustle.
She is gonna just dive deep into her journey through both programs as well as what she's been able to build on her own because Emily is somebody who came to Side Hustle with a lot of the pieces in place already and was able to streamline that and refine that through Side Hustle.
I can't wait for those of you to hear Emily's story who might already have some stuff in place, and if you don't, this is still really possible for you because Emily's gonna share the whole process and the whole journey.
Emily, if you could just introduce yourself a little bit more formally, where you're at, what you do clinically that kind of stuff, then we'll jump in with how you got started working with me.
Emily (E): Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I have a doctorate in school psychology, and so I first was a school psychologist working in the school system. I love learning, I love figuring out the behavior of kids. I love working with teachers and families.
When my family relocated back to North Carolina after living in Texas, school systems, of course, are different in all different areas and the school system here only did evaluations. The school psychs only did evaluations.
They had other people in the way it was structured that did therapy. I had just at that point, really fallen in love with doing therapy with kids and that's what I did when I worked in Texas. I knew I wanted to be in private practice.
I've predominantly set up my private practice for young kids and up to early high schoolers. I mainly worked with emotional and behavioral concerns, ADHD, autism, anxiety, and with parents along the way, and then just kept getting a little bit more specialized and got known for the hard cases, the complex kids, working with all of those things.
It's really rewarding work but it's really intense work. One thing that I have come to understand, and I've been in private practice for about 12 years on my own is that we do therapy all day long. I can help parents understand their child, but if the teacher doesn't understand how to support the child we have this missing element to the...
It's a huge chunk of a child's day, and so many of my clinical concerns with my clients we're coming from school stress, especially with the kids with high anxiety about performance, young kids that were not regulated enough to even start school but we were having them go because they were six and it's time to go.
All of those issues I've been thinking about for a long time and always wanted to do more and didn't know how to do more because I'm not an employee of the school system anymore. I have always been rolling around those ideas in my brain and trying to figure out where to go next and that's how I landed here.
M: Yeah. Can you maybe articulate or put some more words to 'more'? Was it more money, more creativity, more help? What was the 'more' that you were craving?
E: It started as more helping. I wanted to help these kids more, but I knew that I couldn't do it from my private practice. I knew that I wasn't going to go back and be a school psychologist.
That thought crossed my mind, but I do really love working with families, and I really love the therapeutic work I get to do as frequently as I get to do it. One of the barriers in our schools or clinics or anything that is government related is you don't always have the flexibility to see a kid for the amount of time you wanna see them or the frequency you wanna see them.
I love my private work in my private practice. However I think, COVID made it really intense for sure, but even before that, I was starting to feel like there are limits to this. There are limits to how much I can help kids in my private work.
Even when I was talking on the phone with teachers, I was talking to parents and doing a lot of parent training. There was a disconnect between what I was able to teach them and then, going out into the world and implementing it.
Now, that also was evolving, my love of wanting to help more was evolving with this burnout I was starting to feel as a private clinician with some of these really intense cases where children were very dysregulated, parents were very stressed. I would say that on some days I would come home feeling like I had done therapy with the kid and the parent, and I'm not even trained to do therapy with the parent.
I was having a lot of compassion fatigue and also left with the frustration of "I don't even know if what I did today helped". Some of those frustrations. I started to think about how I have to pull back on the hours I'm spending. I have to somehow find a balance between helping the kids right in front of me, and also empowering the people in their life to stay up to date on these new things that we're learning about.
This is also the other third piece of this is the field of working with kids with autism, teaching them, even with ADHD and anxiety, all these behaviors, there's a shift going on in the field of understanding these kids' nervous systems and not coming at it just from a behavioral approach.
All those things are happening and I kept talking to teachers that had outdated training or were completely stressed and so they weren't having the energy to be able to do their job.
All of that kind of evolved and I'm someone who tries hard and overachieves until something huge happens and hits me upside the head and is, "hey girl, you can't do this anymore". COVID kinda did that for me.
Especially with young kids and kids on the autism spectrum, telehealth was hard for so many of them. I did a lot of parent training via telehealth over the pandemic because kids' attention spans just couldn't… it just wasn't an appropriate modality for therapy.
That kind of started me thinking too, and some of it was really effective. I was able to teach parents how to play with their kids, or I consulted with teachers that were only met their kid on this screen on their Google Classroom call.
I did a lot more collaboration over the pandemic and it started to become really clear that I enjoyed that part of my work. Not only did I enjoy it, but it was less of a burnout for me and also just as high of a reward.
M: Yeah. Okay. Putting you on the spot for just one second, because I haven't, I don't think I've ever asked you this. Why not just build a group practice? Why not just hire more clinicians and help that way?
E: I don't wanna manage people. I've thought about it a lot. Lots of people ask me this question and they're like why don't you just hire more people and train them to do what you do? It stresses me out to have people working under the umbrella of my name or my practice name.
That part of it sounds awful to me.
M: Yeah, no, I love it. Be honest.
E: More stress and work, I would rather collaborate with colleagues and have my trusted circle of colleagues that I refer to, which is what I've always done. It's just gotten more stressful in the pandemic because everyone is full, but that's typically what I do when I get full.
We all have our favorite people that do our things in town, and we refer back and forth or if I'm working with one kid and a sibling needs support, I'll have a colleague that I know will see that kid and collaborate.
But yeah, it mainly comes down to I don't want to manage a business, manage people. I'm good with business management stuff for myself, but there's a certain level of peace of mind I have that I know what I'm doing and when I know this conversation comes up too when we're talking about hiring a virtual assistant at some point.
I think you said one time "you've gotta learn it yourself and know what you're doing and then you can outsource it". I totally understand that because I will definitely trust the process more if, especially if I can hire someone 15 years younger than I am to do social media. You go do your things. I'm never gonna understand Twitter and TikTok.
M: That's how I feel about bringing on the copywriter and graphic designer in the program. I feel really confident in my copy skills, but when I was doing that myself, for all the students, it was a lot. Side Hustle was growing and enrolling more students every round.
With the design, I was always able to say I think it looks great, I'm not trained in that and I don't have the education in, like, graphic design or anything. I could tell you something looks pretty or something looks ugly, but I can't tell you why.
When I made hires in the program, I hired very independent people that we have one monthly meeting and that's it. I don't have to micromanage the support staff because I would hate that.
Very much like you, I hired for things that I... It wasn't like I was hiring to replace myself because I would feel like I'd have to still be very involved in that, are they delivering it the way I would want it done, and that kind of stuff.
Whereas when I hired for other skill sets or auxiliary skill sets I hired experts that I trusted in that, and I got to unload it rather—hired out but still be involved in it. I get what you're saying in terms of not loving having this employee that you're responsible for or that the whole business reputation is responsible for.
E: For me, that would give me more anxiety... it was a deal breaker for me. As my practice grew because it was an obvious next step and many people mentioned it to me but it just does not sound enticing at all.
M: I share this a lot when I talk about...because our profession kind of pigeonholes us in that way because it is the natural next step. Oh, just start a group practice, bring on an intern, or bring on clinicians under you. That's most of the advice on how to grow as a therapist is about.
What you realized organically, which I think is really cool, is, "Hey, there's something else that interests me. There's something else that I'm good at". It's effective and people seem to be really responding to it.
When you were starting to deliver some of these skills training and some of these other things, it seems, as you were talking about it, it was an organic progression.
E: It was, yeah. And a few times, I would present these things just in phone calls to teachers, like a phone consultation, which is also something that's a little bit different than most. I think that most child psychologists do. We will consult with teachers as needed, but I consult with teachers a lot.
I'll check in and like, "how's it going with the strategies?" and they're just so grateful because they have a school psychologist, they have staff that is there, but they're so overwhelmed because the numbers are so high and they're not enough of them.
It was the perfect storm of "while I have you on the phone, try this strategy". This also came out of my training as a school psychologist, was I was trained to consult with teachers through the evaluation process.
I do think a lot of clinical psychologists who are just trained in therapy, and may receive... I think they receive some consultation training... but I was specifically trained to consult with teachers and understand the dynamics of the, like the power dynamics of the classroom. It's not my classroom. I'm coming in with ideas.
We have to collaborate. I get all of that and I'm coming to it with my history of teamwork versus "I'm this expert coming in telling you what to do", which of course never works because I'm not a teacher.
I'm in this unique space, I feel like because I've had this school psychology experience, and then I have been sitting in my private practice listening to all these stories for 12 years and I know what's working and what's not working.
That kept fueling me in terms of emotionally feeling, like, if I could just disseminate this information across the world and help teachers know "this is working". They know what's not working, they need to know what works. Then I started locally doing some speaking. This was pretty much before covid, a little bit more online during COVID.
That's also when I got feedback from teachers of this was really helpful. I remember once… I did an hour presentation one time just about teaching kids with different needs. A teacher came up to me afterward and she was like, "this could have been a whole day of training. I wanted 20 more minutes on every slide". I was like, "ok, noted". My wheels started turning about how I could expand it.
M: At that point, were you monetizing, or were you doing these speaking engagements or...
E: I was getting paid per speaking engagement. Usually, it was the PTA that was paying me, sometimes the school district was paying me.
Funding is a little bit of a unicorn situation. Everything is different in different schools and all those things. Occasionally I would do some pro bono stuff, like for my own kids' schools I would do that.
Generally speaking, I would have just one speaking rate, which was nothing compared to the training I could do and with individual people paying.
M: Yeah. Okay. So you've got all this stuff going on your own. It's grown out of just this organic need and this organic desire to do something different from you. How did you then end up in Space Holder? Because that's where we first connected, was you purchased Space Holder.
E: I'm one of those people that lurked around. Yeah, and listened to your podcast probably before you even knew me. I am very much like a quiet observer, a learn-on-my-own, introverted person. But I talk a lot one-on-one with people, so everyone is like really, you're introverted? I am like, don't put me in a big group, but one on one. I will talk".
I would just listen to your podcasts on walks with my dog. They just became my favorite. I was like okay, Marissa knows what she's talking about. She gets the business stuff and she gets all the questions I had about like ethical dilemmas about this and the boundaries of practice and the dual possible dual relationships and like all of that stuff that we work on and clarify.
I still thought was not ready for a full commitment to doing this really, because I was still completely overwhelmed in my practice. I knew in my mind I eventually wanted to get there, but I was like, "Okay, so I gotta figure out first what I wanna do".
The reason I purchased... I think I took your quiz first and it gave me a 'course'. I'm like duh, that's basically what I'm doing in person with all these people, but I could digitize it and have a website and figure all that out.
I was figuring out the tech stuff on my own and I also just really love creating graphics and doing, I really love Instagram and Facebook. Not so good with the other ones, but I enjoy that kind of stuff and I enjoy interacting.
At that time, my audience was mainly parents of kids raising being parents, raising kids with different neuro-divergent needs and I just started getting a lot of feedback. There's a lot of parent stuff out there, but they're a bunch of different frameworks for it.
I was getting a little feedback from social media, and then I decided just to take Space Holder because I wanted to figure out: is it a course, or is it more? Part of me was like, in Space Holder, you go through all the different things.
I'm also someone that likes to exhaust all my options to make sure I'm right about what I need to do moving forward. So I wanted to hear every single version of something I could offer, and I considered products like guide books or eBooks and things like that.
But the more I got into it, the more I loved the presenting and the asking and answering questions collaboration, but not so much that people can get to me all the time because I sold my practice.
It was finding the balance between what I wanna offer, but doing it on a schedule and a plan of access to me that I was comfortable with. It started with that and that clarified that I wanted to do a course.
M: That was the parenting course and you were able to sell it on your own and go through lots of things. Monetize and make, build an audience and make money. Just from what you learned in Space Holder.
E: I'm definitely having more success now that I'm in the Side Hustle Support Group because I'm doing way more things to help get it out there. I sold about a hundred courses over the last several years. I also didn't really launch it, I just made it and put it out there.
Selling a hundred and I did not - I promoted it a little bit, but none of this. Get excited about it at first, and then I just went back to my practice and it's just there, it's still there. You can buy it at any time.
I'm sure that I will go through the process with that parent course now that I've learned everything in Side Hustle's Support Group, but I made money off of it. That's super cool. And it's, I got this little taste.
M: Yeah. It shows. Your... I don't wanna say quick start because you are methodical about the way that you think about things and you take your time and you make sure it's right for you.
It shows your dr… I can't find the right word. Not drive, but like...
E: Initiative?
M: Yes. That's the one I was like, it starts with an I. It shows your initiative to I can do this, I can figure this out, and I'm just gonna keep moving forward, which I think is so cool, that's how I got here after eight years is just figuring it out and doing the next thing and doing the next thing.
I always say Side Hustle is the program that I needed because I would write a blog post and then three weeks would go by and then it'd be like, "Oh yeah, I need to do another one of those".
There was no systematic process until I figured out: how do I turn this into something that is sustainable for me. Then I started doing what I teach in Side Hustle…it's the program I needed, yeah.
One thing you mentioned was like, I wasn't ready to fully commit or whatever. What was the deciding factor where you're like, "All right, I'm ready to do this", I don't wanna say for real, because you were making money and you were growing an audience, but do this on a bigger level?
E: There were two things. I always knew I wanted to make a Teacher course. I think that I had been through the process of making a Parent course, and it felt a little DIY, I did it on my own. I researched things and as you said, I was really intentional about it and I took the initiative to start and it was, that was good, but I did feel like there was a better way.
I did feel like there was a better way and I didn't know what that was, but I felt okay, if I'm gonna do a Teacher course, I wanted it to be awesome.
I want it to be the best thing I can create. I want to dedicate time to it. More time than I did on the parent course, which I was actually able to make over the summer of 2020 over Covid when like everyone canceled.
The only reason I was able to make that Parent course is because of quarantine. I knew. Fast-forward two years later, I'm still in a full-time practice and an overly full practice. My practice was overly full when I came back from quarantine because I had taken on some new people and then some old people came back and it was really hard to predict.
Since then I've been trying just to get back to a regular client caseload. Finally, though, the second thing is that I finally had this motivation of "Okay, I'm gonna do this, but if I'm going to do it, I have to block out time on my calendar. I have to be held accountable. I can't do this by myself".
I know I was able to do it with the parent course, but that's because I wasn't seeing clients. I knew for sure that I was going to need a live check-in, call program like support group is.
To be able to execute the plan and of course, all the things I learned, but for me, it was the accountability and the community that I needed to just keep the momentum going and I can't tell you how many times since January - I wouldn't have gotten it done without the deadline or without the rhythm that's recommended you have to do weekly, you gotta get this out weekly. You're so right. You get this rhythm going of creating.
Information and content for people who are reading your stuff and they, once they expect it from you, they trust you. It's honestly like consistent parenting. I think of it with my child psych hat on and I'm like, this is what I say to parents, "consistently show up for your kids. They will trust what you are trying to teach them".
It's like that with our audiences that you can't just I think I'll blog about this. That's what I was doing for two whole years is "I'll post this thing on social media. I'll blog about this when I feel like it".
There was some good stuff in there, but the momentum didn't pick up. The excitement didn't pick up with people reaching out to me or getting excited about what I was creating until I was consistently showing up for them, which took some serious commitment on my end of the calendar.
M: Can you talk a little bit about that? You have kids, you have a family. You have a very full practice. You also have just gone through a hurricane and stuff like that.
You have things going on in your life, and so this was adding something in. What was the process of making room, and has it been a challenge to keep up that space on your calendar?
Have you made changes around at home? What have you needed to do to make space for this?
E: I typically have my client days as three days a week. I felt like this was a sign when I talked to you a while ago. It just happened that the days of the week that are not traditionally my client days, which are Wednesday and Friday, is when you do calls for Side Hustle Support.
I could have rearranged things and I do rearrange my calendar with the school year, so because I see kids, and because my boys' calendar can change. I have a ninth grader and a third grader now they're on the same calendar, but they have different bell schedules, so they go to school at different times and their pickups at different times.
We have to figure all that out. I had to block out certain times on Wednesdays and Fridays. Then I block out time on Sundays to do some of the self-study stuff. What I had to do, I knew that I wouldn't be able to, because I think I started thinking about this last fall and I was turning the corner with being able to not have some clients on Wednesdays and Fridays.
When I came back into the office after quarantine, even my Wednesdays and Fridays were full and the goal was always to get back to a more manageable three full client days feels full-time for me because I'm doing a lot of calls with teachers and parents on and emails. Oh, the emails.
When was starting to feel like, "Okay, January I can commit to chunks of time not being client work" and I have loved it. I have loved having those chunks of time not being client work.
I will say that it uses a different part of my brain. I feel creative, I feel excited. I feel like I'm not reacting and solving problems, but I'm generating ideas and solutions on my own so that it is just a different energy and feel, and honestly, as the year has gone on, it has been motivation to keep those sacred Wednesday, Friday chunks of time. It was a commitment at first, but now it's "this feels good, so I'm gonna keep doing it".
M: Yeah. What's cool I've seen previous students do is keep those Wednesdays and Fridays and then they create their own graduate accountability groups and they keep meeting or they keep working on those times.
Once you have it, it's like you built the habit of keeping that space dedicated then when you're not filling it with calls or classwork for me, then you can fill it with the marketing or the doing of the business. You already have set yourself up to run the business when you graduate.
E: Sometimes I feel like this is insane what we are doing. We are starting a business when we have a business. That part at times feels a little wild and wacky.
But then I think to myself, these Wednesdays and Fridays will feel so good after I've launched and after I'm just writing a block post, post it somewhere that will feel so, like, just easy.
M: I'd be like half the work because you have to do the side hustle work and then you have to actually do the work of the business. And then if your side hustle work goes away, it'll be like, "Oh, this is so much easier".
Let's dive into the actual experience of Side Hustle. You got to this point, your caseload was starting to lighten up a little bit. You realized "okay, I do have the time, and if I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it now and I'm gonna actually dedicate to it".
Now you're in Side Hustle. The first phase is Funnel Phase, and this is a piece that you didn't necessarily have for the parenting course.
We built the funnel for the teacher course, but we also had this unique challenge of kind of creating an umbrella brand for you because part of the time you're talking to parents and part of the time you're talking to teachers, and I know your ultimate goal is to bridge that gap so parents and teachers don't feel so separate.
That's something that you'll work on over time, but can you talk a little bit about what Phase One was like for you in terms of the funnel and the branding and all of that?
E: Yeah. For me, coming into it, it felt like I've got all these separate pieces in my head, and you're right, the funnel part of it was trying to figure out how is this at some point gonna be cohesive? I had not yet planned out my Teacher course.
I knew what I wanted it to be, but what I thought I wanted it to, ended up not being what it became. I think part of that funnel process was so helpful because I came into it thinking, "okay, I'm gonna create a course for regular education teachers to learn how to teach the special education students that are in their class".
On the surface, that is what the neuro-diverse classroom sounds like. However, the more I worked on it, I was like, "Wait a minute. That's still like othering the special ed kids", which is not my brand and what I wanna do at all.
Then I started realizing, wait a minute, every classroom is a neuro-diverse classroom, so I need all the teachers. I don't care where you're coming from. I don't care if you're a principal. I don't care if you're a school counselor. All the elementary educators.
I did choose elementary to start with just so I could focus on a developmental range. My brand is very "everybody's in, baby". I don't care where you came from, everybody's in. It started evolving into "this is how you teach a room full of people with different brains" basically.
I was pulling in all my knowledge from like cognitive psychology and testing. I know I spent years testing kids and doing evaluations and all those things. I pulled all that in and then then I started thinking about, "Okay, who is the audience?" and balancing that through the funnel and then narrowing it down.
One of my favorite parts of the funnel section was the validation interviews, where I interviewed a bunch of teachers and what they needed, what they wanted, how does this idea sound? That was the best part, I think because it felt like online behavioral consultation to me.
I was like, "I know how to talk to these teachers. I've done it in person before" but some of the things they told me, of course surprised me and I was like, "Yes, I've got to figure out, figure that out". For instance, some of them just wanted strategies and I would have sometimes an emotional reaction to this.
I was like: I don't wanna just give you strategies because I feel like you can give strategies and that's what everyone's doing, but you're also burned out and you also aren't fully funded and you also have these parents that are stressed and you're having to try to collaborate with a really stressed out parent who's mad at you.
All these other pieces came out of these validation interviews that started with how do I teach this diverse group of kids?
But then I was like, I have to include all of this, like the mental health aspect of all the players involved, so really only two/three of my modules - half my course is on the strategies, what are these different brain styles and cognitive learning styles, all the strategies for that, how to make your classroom a universal learning situation.
Then there's a whole module on collaborating with parents. There's a whole module on teacher mental wellness because those things were so obvious during that Funnel Phase of those are the teachers who I, when I talked with them, I was like, "You're the people I wanna work with. You are who I wanna help". I didn't know that until I heard their stories and talked to them more specifically.
M: Yeah, and we go through lots of ways to do market research and lots of ways to data mine, but I think the biggest value comes from when you have those conversations.
The other thing that I think I just wanna highlight, I want the listeners to key into this, is, I say, "Oh, repurpose and repackage your clinical skills into an online income stream" and it's a catchy tagline or whatever, but that's the epitome of what you're doing, right?
You didn't have to go back and relearn anything. You didn't have to even really I don't wanna say try that hard, that makes it sound bad, but this is just part of what you've been doing for a long time and you're able to take it from one area of your professional career and just plop it into another area of your professional career.
Synthesize it, integrate it, create something that's gonna be really valuable. You didn't need to go back and get another certification for this. You're learning from me certain steps and skills and like a system but the core of your curriculum was always in you and has been stuff that you've been doing for a really long time. I think that's worth highlighting the value of what you've already brought to the table.
E: Yeah. I will also say, I've been guided by that feeling, maybe without even knowing it, but every time I feel like I don't know quite what I'm writing yet, or something's not feeling quite right, I know that I'm out of alignment with what I'm trying to teach.
I just keep going back to, "Okay, what do I know? What do I know that a teacher doesn't know, but would be helpful in a situation?"
It usually has to do with mental health and nervous system regulation. Parent-teacher collaboration, helping teachers understand the baggage, the emotional baggage that parents have sat on my couch for 12 years and told me about, they're scared to talk to the principal because of some situation they were in.
There's all this stuff, there's all this history with barriers families have with collaboration. I know a lot of teachers know this, but they don't necessarily have the time to sit down and really think about it because they're so stressed.
It is like that when I have that moment of I'm trying to force a square peg in a round hole and I'm like, "What's off with this?"
It's probably because like I'm not just teaching what I know and if I always get back to like just finishing that blog post or whatever that social media post is just sharing what I know usually that's what I'm trying to say anyway.
M: Wow, that's cool and that's really helpful for me too. Honestly, before we started I was journaling and I was like "what do I know for sure?" and that was like the journal prompt that I was answering, so that's really cool for me to even hear that like that too.
Okay, so after you figured out what this brand was, we built this lead acquisition machine with this funnel. We're funneling leads, and the next stage is the marketing phase.
You've been talking to parents for a while. How did you transition to talking to teachers? I know you already had some connections that you had built.
That's one thing too is like you have a network that you've been able to tap into. I know you're doing content marketing, you're doing some visibility marketing, talk to me about phase two.
E: Phase two was probably the phase that I felt like I knew the most about already. My version of content marketing for the past two years has been throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, and there's been no method to the madness other than the fact that I did do some research to figure out when parents check their phones, and it is so true, y'all I'm a parent.
I know I look at my phone at 8:30 PM Eastern time. I know this, but if you post, I tried this out. If you post things at those times, like 6:00 AM and 8:30 AM or 8:30 PM, the algorithms are so much better and it is crazy.
I had to figure that out and I had been posting a lot of things for parents and honestly reposting a lot of other people's stuff. I wasn't really creating a whole lot of my own content when I was content marketing.
I was doing a lot of other people's stuff, building my brand of I'm like this person, I'm like this person. I never repost this over here. You may have felt like I'm not like this person...
I had done a lot of that on Instagram and Facebook, and these were just like one post a day because I linked my two accounts. I would have my coffee in the morning and post something I thought was fun or, spoke to what I wanted to say that day and then I would do it again in the evening.
That got a lot of traction. It got a lot more follows and things. I did have one viral post over Covid. I posted this comment. I was just sitting, it was like March, whatever of 2020, and I was sitting on my couch and my boys were like jumping on top of me.
We're all at home. We're supposed to be teaching these children and doing our jobs and like I just had this thought of "This is ridiculous. As child psychologists and knowing about parenting, what we're being asked to do is completely not realistic".
I just made this post: You're being asked to do three people's jobs. You're a parent, a teacher, and then you probably have a job. Don't worry about all that. Just play with your kids and have a connection and that was the gist. And it blew up. It went everywhere.
I got a lot of follows after that and I was like, maybe this is something like maybe I could turn this into something. And that was way before not way before, but probably six months before I even made the parent course.
That was a boost of confidence and "okay, people are paying attention. People want to hear more about this crazy time we're in". Because I think what I brought in that messaging or that comment is I also know learning and I knew that we were being asked to have our... like I had a kindergartner at the time, and I'm like, he is not gonna sit at the computer and do the rest of the school year. It's just not happening.
There was a lot of messaging coming out of we're gonna try to do this and we're gonna be online and all this, and I'm like that "Huh?". It was interesting to see how that all panned out and to see what I was able to do on my own but there were still limits to it.
When we got into Phase Two, I was like, "Okay, this is why I, this is why I haven't gotten like the exact audience that I want". I have a lot of parents, but then I honed in on this is the type of audience I want.
I want parents and teachers who wanna work together for our kids, which is much more specific and nuanced than just a general parenting blog, which felt like maybe people thought I was and I moved away from that. I really am just specific to kids with autism, ADHD, and anxiety.
Parents and teachers who are ready to work together because there are some parents and teachers that don't wanna work together. They just don't, that's a whole different group of people, they're usually very stressed and overwhelmed and they don't have the capacity to collaborate.
I'm ready to work with people who are ready to collaborate and do it together. I did have this challenge of adding a teacher audience, and starting to talk to teachers when most of the people on my email list were parents, so I just used that.
I said, "hey, parents, like I want you to start collaborating with the teachers you love, share this. I'm gonna start talking to them too, some parts of the year, I'm gonna talk to teachers. Some parts of the year I'm gonna talk to parents and I want you to stay and listen to all of it because we're gonna learn from each other" so that's how that evolved over time.
M: I think that's really cool because a lot of times when we see a hiccup or a speed bump in our branding or in our marketing, we're like, "Oh let's dodge that. Let's sweep that under the rug, or let's avoid it".
Instead, you shined a light on it and said, "Hey, this is going to happen and you might not love this content or you might not feel like it's for you and that's okay because this is who it is for and this is why I'm doing it".
Does it repel people? Yeah, of course, it does. . Something that you'll hear me say a million times is good marketing repels more than it attracts.
It probably repelled a little bit of your audience, but it attracted more of the right people and it solidified the relationship with the right people who were already there. I think that's really cool.
Now we're at Phase Three and you are one of the students that's going to be launching during the program and I saw your eyes get big, launching is a beast in itself. Do you wanna share a little bit about just what Phase Three has been like for you so far? We can dive into some numbers if you're interested in sharing audience growth.
E: Sure. I'd be happy to. I have loved learning all the tech behind this and having all my little groups on Mailerlite that I'm tracking, it's really validating to see what are people into, what are they open to, and what they click on, I've loved all of that data.
I also love the graphic stuff, like creating the emails and it takes a lot of time, but I enjoy it. It's this creative part of my brain. I don't mind doing it. It doesn't feel like work to me. I have absolutely learned the process of: you create it once and then you keep reusing it and you don't leave it at the wheel.
I love the systems that we're putting in place during this phase because I do feel like the next time I launch this it will be, I feel—I mean you may give me a different number—but I feel like it will be like 25% of the effort.
I already have all the emails. I'll be tweaking things I already have, I will already have the course completely made.
I will be hopefully refreshing some of the content to get people excited and the blog posts and stuff, but so much of it will already be automated.
M: And spoiler alert, you guys are hearing this after the fact because this will air after the open house, but this was my third time running the open house, so I was able to go back to two years previous of marketing materials of all the stuff that we needed.
We used the same graphic and changed the date—all of that “work smarter, not harder” type stuff is what makes it scalable over time where your money goes up and your effort goes down.
I don't believe in passive income 100%, but I do believe in automating. I do believe in systematizing. I do believe in repurposing so that your effort feels easier over time. For sure.
E: That's what is so enticing too, to keep this going is because, you know, there's no way to automate therapy in your practice. It has to be you, it has to be in person. Especially with my people, and so I, I think that there was no way to change that.
Plus, this is so rewarding over here where I feel like I can make a bigger impact and also see fewer people, so I'm less burned out in person. I know some people will get into this and maybe end up not doing therapy. I do think I will keep a caseload for a while. I just love the option of making it as small as I want it.
Or just making it as manageable as I want and having both until I'm older and I'm ready to, I don't know, my kids are grown, I'm ready to travel. I see clients two days a week or something. I don't know. I love the options that it creates for that, so Phase Three has been exciting.
I'm happy to share numbers because I'm a little unusual and came into this with an email list that I had grown somewhat organically, but also, I had done a summit totally bootstrapping it, flying by the seat of my pants with a colleague during Covid and we got a chunk of emails from that. That was another reason that I had an email list.
But again, I'm happy to share. Would you like me to share? Okay. I came in if I remember correctly, I think it was like 6,500 emails I had on my email list, which was great. I had not been emailing them though very much.
M: Wow, that's neat, and that's just from the summit.
E: That was from the summit and from, I had, so previous to Covid, I was blogging fairly regularly on my practice website. It was just like emails to read my blog because I like to write, I like to talk.
Those were the two things I was doing. I didn't know how to make podcasts, so I had not done that. I was only doing what I had time for and what I was able to do, but I had 6,500 people and then, of course, started sending information that was both to teachers and parents.
I was like bring on the unsubscribes. I know it's coming, it's fine. I lost probably 700 ish emails, but I've probably gained back a hundred already that are (like you said) more geared toward this type of direction I'm going in.
Out of that I started marketing to all of these people. I have 113 people on my waitlist for my course now for my Teacher course, then I have 88 signed up for my hype event in a few weeks and we'll see who buys the teacher course.
M: Yeah. And there will be some refinement of this audience because, and we talk about this, the difference between an unqualified audience and a qualified audience.
For some of those who are blog readers, a lot of them will turn into buyers and some of them won't. That'll be part of the process over the next few months is refining that audience into, okay, who's qualified and who's not.
There's still some work to do, but there's such a huge jumping-off point that's just so exciting.
I think what's neat is the response when we set something up and we're essentially dropping breadcrumbs for our audience and we know we're leading them to a paid course.
When we see them take up those breadcrumbs and do the actions that we want them to do at the time we wanted them to do it, that shows the level of quality in our audience or the qualified of our audience and your audience is taking action. It's really cool.
E: Yeah, it's exciting.
M: Yeah. Was anything challenging for you? Because it seems "oh, this is just easy breezy", so what was hard?
E: Not easy breezy. In terms of, I will say it's been a lot of work and a lot of time, but I have loved it more than I love my clinical work sometimes.
M: That's ok.
E: I love the kids I work with, but the difference is that this type of work doesn't burn me out. That's the main difference is that I feel energized by it. I love my clinical work, but I have limits, I have emotional limits to how much we can give.
I don't know. Do people have limits to how many courses they create? I don't know, I haven't experienced that yet. I'm just still in this phase of creating this thing that I'm so excited about and getting feedback on it, it feels so good. It fuels the work.
But yes, it has been a commitment that I've had to map out on my calendar. I've needed the accountability of the group and the ability to ask questions all the time.
This is a really supportive group. Very encouraging and that's been awesome. Knowing that everybody's a therapist and everybody's having insecurities about, who might offer this thing? I should stick with my therapy practice or whatever.
Everybody's having some insecurities about that. I had that a little less cuz I feel like I'm doing in my course what I, sometimes I feel like I'm doing what I did as a school psychologist, so I'm just packaging it in a different way.
I do feel like I had less imposter syndrome stuff that I know can come along with if you're totally pivoting and trying to do something different. But yeah, I loved that part of just the collaboration with everybody and the support and I'm sounding positive again, I'm trying to think of more things.
No, it's a lot of time and it's a lot of commitment, but that's what it takes to birth this thing. I don't know if you meant to make this a nine-month course on purpose, because it feels like I'm giving birth to this thing.
M: Actually, I think when I switched from the six months to the nine months a couple of years ago, I think I did use that metaphor.
E: It's evolved over time. I've needed every week of this course, I haven't felt like there's any wasted time if that's helpful feedback.
I feel even for me I knew a lot about the market, and social media marketing stuff in the summer, those were times when I felt like it was validating like, okay, so I am on the right track with some of this. That was all needed.
M: Yeah. We've weaved you talking about your program and Side Hustle together. We didn't really do separate chunks, but if you want, can you tell us just a little bit more about the course, who it's for, what it's designed to do, and then also where people can find more information about it.
E: Yeah, The Neurodiverse Classroom is my online course for elementary teachers. Really, all elementary educators. And you can go to learnwithdremily.com/teachers but at learnwithdremily.com, you can find the parent course that will be there as well as any media links and links to my sub stack.
I put my blog on sub stack and also there are links to my podcast, which currently is me reading my blog to you because that's what I have time for. Then in the future, I hope to expand my podcast and be able to highlight parent-teacher perspectives on that podcast.
M: Awesome. I know many of the listeners are parents themselves and their kids are in school. Many of us know teachers or our clients are teachers or whatever. I think that this is a really awesome resource.
I love what you're doing in this collaborative nature of the teachers and the parents and creating this ecosystem where both sides of this, we could even say adversarial relationship, you're bringing everybody to the same table and everybody having the same conversation, which is ultimately gonna help those kids, it's all going to have a ripple out effect and make the change.
I think that's just really freaking cool: learnwithdremily.com. We'll have slash teachers and slash parents and all of that. We'll have all those links in the show notes. Your Instagram is Learn with Dr. ...
E: It's actually not, it's… I know it evolved over time. Facebook and Instagram are at EmilyWKingPhD.
M: Cool, and we'll have that in the show notes for you guys as well. If there's anybody who's thinking about Side Hustle, if they've been a lurker like you for a little while and they're like, "Oh, is 2023 the year?", what piece of advice would you have for them?
E: I would say if you feel like you even have two half days on your calendar per week, it could be a full day, it could be all day Friday, or it could be even just two half days, maybe even less some weeks.
In my head, I had to commit to the time and then I had to remember if you have enough passion to want to get this done and want to make sure that it's done really well this will do it for you.
M: Thank you. Thank you. That makes me blush. Emily, thanks so much for being here and just sharing with us and it's so valuable to hear other people's journeys, especially when they've made the decision that you're thinking about making for yourself and I'm sure every listener could hear a piece of themselves in your story.
Thanks so much for sharing with us.
E: Thanks so much for having me. Awesome.
Alright, so that was our conversation with Emily, and I'm sure listening to her story, there's at least one part of it that you can really resonate.
She said some things to me that I was like, "oh my gosh, that's so true for me", especially asking yourself, "what do I know for sure? What do I know without a doubt?"
That's the journal exercise I was doing right before we started recording. I think that there's so much wisdom in listening to people who are just a step ahead of you in the game. I really hope that Emily's story resonated with you.
If you have been thinking about Side Hustle for a while, and maybe you wanted to join a couple of years ago and you're like, "Oh, next year.
Oh, next year". This is your year. Okay, you can do it and we will work together to make sure that this program is all that it can be for you and getting you towards this goal of your Side Hustle.
In Emily's case, it was a goal motivated by helping more people, and that might be true for you, or you might be like me and be money motivated, or you might be like some of my other students and be lifestyle or time freedom motivated.
Whatever it is that's drawing you towards adding on a side hustle, this program is designed to help you do it, and I would love to invite you to join us.
We're starting in January of 2023, so if you feel called, go ahead and head on over to marissalawton.com/side-hustle, and that is where you can fill out that application.
Remember, we're only taking 30 students for 2023, and many of those spots are already full. If you know that this is your year, I'm calling you in. Go ahead and apply and we will work together in the new year.
Alright, guys. We will be back next week. Until then, keep on rising.
