You Don't Have to be a Business Coach to Make Money
Did you know that your side hustle doesn’t have to be business coaching?
That’s right, you don’t have to be in the business of helping others grow their own businesses in order to make income online. All you have to do is SOLVE A PROBLEM.
Help parents manage the new normal with school
Help people manage talks about racism
Help youth sort through the difficulties of leaving for college/transitioning to college
We dive into even more examples in my latest episode so that you can get a holistic understanding of the type of Side Hustle that’s possible for you! Don’t restrict yourself to thinking that the only way to make money is to be a business coach. If there is a lifestyle problem out there, there are people looking for it to be solved, and you could be that person for them.
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Learn all about the NEW version of Side Hustle Support Group:
Full Show Notes (Transcript)…
Hey, Risers. Welcome to episode 84 of Empathy Rising. I shared in the last episode that the weather finally feels like fall around here and I'm just leaning into it real hard and enjoying the cooler temperatures. Something that I've noticed about myself, I noticed it this year but I can see the pattern going back several years, is that fall is my most creative season.
It's where I like to dig into longer-term projects that tend to be creative. In my business, it looked like having a holiday happy hour organized in the fall. If anybody remembers that was the summit that I launched this business with. The fall after that I had my website redone, which I wasn't exactly doing all of the creativity, but I was participating in a creative process.
Last year I did the person-centred passionate workshop, which was a longer-term project. That workshop turned into the curriculum for Space Holder. It turned into a new offer in my business. And also this year I did the Side Hustle Schedule Challenge in the fall.
That took time to develop. It was a creative endeavor. But outside of my business I also feel creative around the fall time. It's where I do a lot of home projects. I like to knit and create things.
Funny story, if you guys don't know, I used to sell hand-knit blankets and hand-knit things, mostly blankets, online. So I've also not only had a coaching business online, but I've also had a product business online before. I did it for one year. It didn't last long, but it started in the fall, so that's another thing. And then I sold them throughout the holiday season.
It was awesome because it was a short-term cash injection, but it paid for all of our Christmas presents. It paid for all of our holiday travel. Yeah, it's a cool experiment to get into the whole production side of things. So fall is just always my most creative time of the year.
Also, I'm an anxious avoider of rain. And so there's been lots of things going on this whole year, but especially this fall. I feel like I've really been diving into some creative projects lately and just spending a lot of time there. It also is coincidental that all these, the new things that are coming out for Side Hustle in the new year, I'm putting them into practice right now, building these new templates, overseeing all of the brand kits that are going in there, building the new textbook, the new trackers that all of the systems that are going into there. It's a long-term project, but it's also a creative project. It's just funny that what happens over October, November, even a little bit into December is when I start to just take on.
This is just a pattern that is showing up in my life and it's fun to get familiar with that. With that said, I want to remind you guys that the applications for Side Hustle are officially open. You heard a couple of weeks ago about all these upgrades and that's what I'm working on building right now.
But if you haven't listened in yet, I did talk about this on a podcast episode called Side Hustle 2.0, it came out just a couple of weeks ago. So if you're thinking about applying, go ahead and go back and listen to that one so you can see all of the upgrades that are coming, all of the new things that are coming and what I'm spending this fall’s creative energy pouring into.
We've got a great group forming already. I'm so excited about everybody who's joined Side Hustle so far, I can't wait to invest energy into these new projects and help them come to life over the next year. it's something that just really lights me up. It's my purpose. So if you want to be a part of that, we would love to have you in the Side Hustle family. You can go over to MarissaLawton.com/side-hustle to apply.
What I want to talk about today is that there's this myth out there in the online income space, in the coaching space, that the only people who ever make money online are business coaches who are selling other business-related products or programs.
There is a program out there that requires therapists to create a B2B offer. That's the only thing that they help them do. And so when we're talking about B2B or business to business or being a business coach, what that means is something that helps the bottom line of someone else's business. So mainly if you were going to teach someone else how to build a private practice, or if you were going to teach somebody else how to bill insurance or how to get off of insurance or any of those types of things, those would count as business to business offers.
There is a notion that selling B2B programs may be better, or is easier to sell, mainly because if you're buying a program for your business, it's a tax write off, it's a business write off, you get to claim it. So I think that's one thing that B2B programs have going for them.
Also, entrepreneurial people are likely to invest in their businesses. But I think that entrepreneurial people are also likely to invest in themselves, and that's not to say also that the self-help industry is a $10 billion industry. So people don't have to be entrepreneurial to only invest in themselves, people all over the world are investing in themselves in self-help, in books, in, courses in programs. And so Side Hustle, my program, takes a completely different view that it is not necessary to have to be a B2B person. You do not have to be a business coach. Your offer does not have to be business to business. Your niche does not have to be B2B.
My thoughts behind this is the fact that therapists are already doing B2C, so B2C means business to consumer, business to client, person to person. That's the foundation of our work is working with people. The fact that we're already doing this clinically, I believe that it's a much more natural transition for therapists to work B2C outside of the therapy room. To work business to a consumer outside of the therapy room.
So what I'm going to go through today is I'm excited to share several stories of current Side Hustle students. So these are students who are still enrolled. We don't finish their round of the program until December, a couple of weeks before Christmas.
So they are still in the program and these students have already made significant money and helped a ton of people with B2C, business to consumer offers. This is helping with lifestyle problems. This is helping with relational problems. This is helping with emotional overwhelm problems. Of course, these problems are not clinical.
They're not helping in a clinical capacity, but they're acting as life improvers, people who are not solving a business problem but are solving a life problem. So I can't wait to get into sharing their stories with you. I think what I love about Side Hustle so much, compared to any course on the market, not just these other courses for therapists and not just these other courses for online income, but really for any course that I've ever compared Side Hustle to is I bring this therapeutic notion of meet you where you're at. I bring that into this program. You can tell me your unique vision, your unique goals and I match strategies with your goals, with your needs, with your wants.
It's not the other way around. I don't have some prescribed approach that you have to fit into. Instead, I alter the approaches, I match strategies with you. I think that's unique to Side Hustle compared to really anything else you're going to find on the market because what I've found is that if you force yourself to fit into someone else's mould, if you force yourself to follow this prescribed plan, this one-way ticket, one path to one result, you’re not being put in the best situation.
The first thing is that when you invest in a program, you're putting a lot of trust in somebody. And you're often spending a lot of money with somebody, right? Whether that's a coach, whether that's a course, whether that's a group program like Side Hustle is. I think sometimes we expect it, and I do this too. I'm not saying I haven't ever done this either, but when we work with somebody who has more knowledge than us, or we work with somebody who does the thing that we want to do, we look to them, we look to them as a guide. But what can also sometimes happen is we give them our power.
We don't only look to them as a guide, but we look to them, dare I say, as a saviour or as a hero. They are the person, this is the program that is going to solve everything for me. That's not the way it works. But if you're entering into a coaching relationship or if you're entering into an investment in a program, I think we have a lot of hope and a lot of, like a lot of positive feelings that it's going to work.
And so we put a lot of trust in that. If you're putting a lot of trust into a one size fits all approach, that's where I think it gets dicey. You might have some initial success, right? That person's one size fits all might get you a first launch or some first revenue that comes in, but that isn't sustainable. That isn't a long-term business. That isn't something that is going to be with you and grow with you over the long-term because it doesn't take you as an individual into account.
And so I think when we buy these one size fits all approaches or we go for a program that is one path to one result, we end up in this position where we resent what we're doing because it feels constrictive. It feels restrictive. It feels like we are boxed in and almost trapped in one way of doing things.
If that way of doing things doesn't exactly align with your way of doing things you can start to get pissed off. You can start to reason that, and not only if it doesn't have to necessarily not align with your way of doing things, but if you learn one prescribed path, it's hard to deviate from that path. It's hard to grow. It's hard to evolve. It's hard to experiment. It's hard to play.
I think what happens is we feel boxed in. We feel like there's only one way to get there and if we don't match that way, or if that way doesn't feel right to us, then online income isn't right for us, then a course isn't right for us or a group program isn't right for us.
And that's not true. It's not true that online income isn't right for you. It's that this one size fits all path isn't for you. And so what Side Hustle tries to do is show you that there are multiple routes to a result, multiple paths to multiple different results. And what it's about is matching you with the one that makes the most sense for you that feels the best for you. That feels the most authentic for you.
I designed Side Hustle to be the exact opposite of these one size fits all. Is it systemic? Is there like step one, step two, step three? Yeah. But you get to pick what those steps feel like for you all along the way. So for example, as we're building out your funnel, you get a, yes, there is an opt-in that goes before a tripwire that goes before an email sequence that goes before a waitlist, that's the process of things. But you get to pick which opt-in you want to do. You get to pick the one that feels best for you. I'm not saying the only option you can do is a quiz or the only option that you can do as a workbook. I present all the data for you, I tell you which ones convert better, which ones seem to be working well, and then I also say, do you like to be on video? Do you like to do this? What's your personality? We match the right opt-in for you and your strengths and your goals.
Then we pick the right tripwire for you. Then you get to write your email sequence, bringing in your voice and your flavour and your experience, and then you get to have your waitlist, right? So we're still following the steps. However, you are represented in each step, because that's why I call Side Hustle like a mentorship program.
It meets you where you're at. It creates an offer that works for you. It creates a strengths-based marketing plan and it helps you build a personality matched launch. Strengths-based personality matched. These are the types of things that you get inside of Side Hustle because what I have found is that online business only works if you're authentic and if you're consistent, those are the biggest factors in all of this.
Do you show up authentically? Do you bring yourself so that the right people can find you when they need you? And do you show up consistently? So when they're looking, you're there to find. You have to be there for them to find, so you have to be there consistently.
If I forced you into a mould, if I forced you into a one size fits all approach, you're going to be neither. You're going to be neither authentic nor consistent because the one size fits all isn't going to feel like you, and then you're not going to want to do it. So my job as the facilitator of Side Hustle is to learn about you and to present you with multiple paths and to point out the pros and the cons of each path and to help you decide the path and then to guide you on it.
I think falling into the notion that everybody has to be a business coach just cuts off this evolution. It cuts off this potential for growth that I've been talking about for the last few episodes. You don't need to fit into somebody else's prescribed idea of what works in an online income stream.
What works is what works for you, what you can authentically present and what you can consistently present.
Today I'm going to just share a few of my current Side Hustle students' stories, just to give you an example of what these students have done that is business to consumer. Solving life problems for people and how they've been able to launch them within the Side Hustle program, and some ideas of the amounts of money that they've made before they'd even finished the program.
And none of these are business coaches, none of these are business to business or B2B examples. The first person that I want to share with you is Kariah. She's amazing. She is a mom too, I think, three little ones, either two little ones or three little ones, but they're little. They have been home with her the majority of the program. We started in June and we'll run to December and these little ones have been home with her the whole time.
They've been virtual schooling. They've been out of school, out of daycare, and so Kariah has been doing all of this with her little ones home. What Kariah wanted to do, which I think is so cool, I've never had anybody do this before, but I thought it was really neat. She used exposure therapy on herself.
She was really scared about visibility, really scared of the fact of wondering if online income could be for her. She has seen I, and several other people that she's followed, have success selling programs online, but she just never really could believe it was for her.
So she set up, this is a total of her own volition, this was not my idea. She set up an experiment to prove to herself that it was possible. So Kariah’s ultimate program is going to be relationship-based. It's going to be helping women recover after toxic relationships. But what she saw she was going through, she also saw that other people were going through is that there was a lot of angst and anxiety and nervousness about virtual learning and about going back to school and all of this stuff.
What this school year was going to look like for parents? Regardless of if their kids went back, if their kids stayed home, if they did full-on homeschool or if they did like virtual learning through the district. And so Kariah saw all this happening in her local parent's group for her school district. So she offered them a workshop.
She just put it out there and she said, Hey, I'm a licensed clinician and I'm going to create a psycho-ed workshop where I can teach you guys some strategies to cope with all of the anxiety around this new year. It was just a local Facebook group for her local school district.
She pitched this workshop and had more than 20 people register. And so it was more than $2,000 a day for her. While she was still a student inside of Side Hustle, while she was still learning how to do all of this, she took it upon herself to create this experiment and to prove to herself that online marketing works, It works for her and she can solve a problem, a nonclinical problem for people.
It has nothing to do with business. It had to do with being nervous about school, right? Talking to these parents about a how-to guide, how to handle their nervousness, how to guide their kids through this, the transition back to school. So again, it's a life problem. It's a business to a consumer problem.
What I loved about Kariah was it was truly entrepreneurial. She saw an immediate need and in a market that she knew she was familiar within the school. She was familiar with these people and she created an offer to fill it. She said, Hey, you guys have a problem. I can solve that problem. Pay me money to solve the problem for you. And it worked so well.
Other parents related to her personal view of this. It was the parents' personal relational and emotional lives that she was talking to. Some of these people might have been entrepreneurs. Some of them might have had businesses, but she didn't target them or their business. She targeted their life and she's targeted their lifestyle problem.
Now I teach workshops as a cash injection with Side Hustle. So we are going to go through and do a full launch around a month, eight-month nine of the program. But as you can see, Kariah is still in the program and she had this $2,000 day close to the beginning of our work together. So you could be potentially having a multi-thousand dollar cash injection early on in the process.
Mira is also another student who has done multiple workshops. She has sold three workshops within four months of Side Hustle. So by month four, she had sold three workshops. These workshops were dealing with racism and allyship. So teaching one of her workshops was teaching people how to respond to people in their lives like family members or loved ones when they said something racist. And so they worked through a workshop together.
What's your plan when that happens, how will you handle a situation that comes up in your family? What will your script be? Or what will your response be when somebody close to you says something racist? That was only one of her workshops. She has made several thousand dollars before even finishing with the program. Again, she's meeting consumers where they're at a pivotal point of their lives. This issue has always been important, but it's been brought to light this year, so it has been in the forefront of people's minds. It's addressing real concerns for all humans. Real legitimate life concerns for all humans.
It's not a business-related problem. I'm sure. Does racism show up in entrepreneurship? Does racism show up in business? It does, but that's not the problem she was solving. She was solving the lifestyle problem when a grandpa says something or when a brother, sister, uncle loved one, a coworker says something racist, how are you going to stand up as an ally? And how are you going to handle that?
I think it's an admirable B2C offering. She was able to create three different workshops in this lifestyle category.
Now, Julie is another student who also used one of our cash injection strategies. She was able to book a one-on-one coaching client from her station interview. So what Julie does is she helps kids. She doesn't call them failure to launch kids. She calls them something much more eloquent and probably politically correct, and way better than what I just said.
Kids who have tried to go to college and have returned home, that's the better way to say that. College kids who dropped out, returned home, and are now living back with their parents. She helps them figure out why the transition to college was difficult. She helps them figure out how to pick a better major, how to maybe understand expectations of university life, some adulting stuff that the kids might not have been prepared for.
These are college age, 18, 19-year-old kids that she's working with. None of them are entrepreneurs. None of them are business-related. She's not doing any business coaching with them and what's unique is Julie has two ideal customers. She has the parents of these kids and she also has the kids themselves. Now the work takes place with the kids. I don't know, they're adults, they're over 18, but the young adults, that's a better way to say it. The work takes place with these young adults, but she can market to two different markets, which is neat and fascinating in itself. But what Julie was able to do is use our validation phase, which again happens very early in Side Hustle.
She was able to use that validation phase and turn it into a booking phase. She was validating interviews with some coaching clients or with some potential customers for a group program. And in that validation interview, the customer said, how can I work with you now?
And so she ended up booking them as a one-on-one coaching client. So this is something that can happen, is you can book them if you're open to one-on-one, you can book them and just work with them right then, or you can pre-enroll them in your program and you can already have a sale ready for when your program goes live.
This is something that happens quite frequently in Side Hustle, where people book coaching clients from their validation interviews. Also, what's been pretty cool for Julie is through doing this one-on-one, she's been able to shape parts of her program that were a little bit nebulous, and redefine some of her curricula and redefine like, having more of a directive style for her coaching than her therapy.
So she's able to get paid to learn this, get paid to experiment with this. And again, it's helping young adults just navigate a transition, which we could do clinically, but we can also do in a way that is nonclinical from a directive standpoint, from a consultative standpoint. And that's really what Julie realized is she considers herself more of a consultant than a coach.
Without working with this one-on-one client, she might not have learned this as early on in the process. So it was cool to see Julie use another cash injection strategy, but also serving in a way that has nothing to do with being a business coach. It's a lifestyle problem and she's solving it extremely well.
Now, the last person that I want to mention is Chassidy because Chassidy just did a full launch. So that’s three people that I mentioned before were doing cash injection strategies, Chassidy did the full launch. She did a challenge. She did sales emails. She did the whole thing. Open cart, closed cart.
What she launched is a membership site for moms who had lost their sense of self after having children. So really reclaiming an identity other than motherhood, and maybe not even reclaiming, but in some cases forming a new identity after motherhood, but something that has to do with the self separate from being identified as a mother to somebody else.
Again, nothing to do with business to business. Some of these moms might be business owners, but that has nothing to do with what Chassidy is solving for them. She's helping them take a look at it at identity other than being known as little Jimmy or little Jenny's mom. So what was super cool about Chassidy is that she opened the doors to 16 founding members for her membership site.
So 16 people are paying her a monthly fee to be part of this membership site regularly. And this was a founding members' launch. There are so many strategies that Chassidy can do with these founding members to be able to grow the membership site from within, through referrals, through all kinds of things before she even opens the doors, which she plans to do again in January.
And what's awesome is because she already has all of the assets for the launch that she did inside the program, now she can launch again, outside of the program, and not have to recreate a lot of stuff. There are things that she learned about this launch that she wants to tweak and change, but most of the foundation is built.
All of her same sales emails are written. She can repurpose them. She can repurpose elements of the challenge that she did. I think she's using the elements of her challenge as her opt-in now. So by doing the work once she can now use it over and over again, she has a repeatable launch plan that she can add to grow those 16 members into 16,000 members if she so chooses.
I think it's worth reiterating that each of the women that I've mentioned in this episode, they’re current Side Hustle students, still have several weeks of the program. They've already made substantial money. They've already helped substantial people and they have the foundations to do it over and over again.
And I think that it's worth busting this myth that we don't have to be business coaches to make money online. We do not have to be affecting somebody's bottom line or somebody's business to help them make a huge transformation for them to see the value in the work that we do. And in fact, it's an easier transition for therapists to do business with consumers.
I'm sure as you were listening to these stories, you've probably seen a lot of clinical clients who are moms who need an identity. You've probably seen a lot of clinical clients who are young adults who dropped out of school. We can treat those clinically. And we can also work with those issues in a non-clinical way.
And Kariah, Mira, Julie and Chassidy are all proof that it does not have to be a business program to be valuable, to sell well, and to have an impact.
So if you have a calling to help on a bigger scale and you don't want to have to only help businesses or business owners, now that you know that business to consumer programs work just as well, I want you guys to know that when you enroll Side Hustle, you will have the firm foundation to be able to identify the customers that you want to work with. You will have the processes to help them, whatever problems they are navigating in their life. But you're also going to have to work through a program that goes many routes to one result. It is not a one size fits all program. You get to, while you are learning to help people with their lifestyle issues, you get to learn how to do it in a way that works for your lifestyle, right?
You don't have to fit into anyone else's box. You don't have to believe in any of the myths that people are telling you out there, and you can help other people with their lifestyle problems. So just remember that my goal and my job is to learn about you and to match you with the right strategy, not to force you to fit into some kind of mould or to follow some prescribed path.
There are multiple paths and multiple results, right? I would love to invite you to apply for Side Hustle Support Group. If this feels like the kind of work that you want to be doing and the way that you want to be doing the work you can head on over to MarissaLawton.com/side-hustle. We're waiting for you with open arms and we can't wait to have you join the side hustle family.
And until the next time, guys keep on rising!
