Notes
Most people who want a business they can run from anywhere are not short on motivation. They are short on an answer to a simple question: what should I actually start? Eric answers it for the owner still in the side hustle stage, working a 9 to 5 and trying to build something on the side.
He first maps the stages a digital business moves through (dreaming, side hustle, all in, team builder, C-suite and legacy) and the five processes you work on the whole way: leadership, lead generation, lead conversion, collecting and managing money, and project management. Then he gives seven side hustles chosen because each has a proven track record, plenty of training, room to build a team, and the potential to become an asset you can sell. Web design, where you can sell the work and have others build it (he points to Josh Hall). Recurring web subscriptions, because high monthly recurring revenue covered his family’s expenses through months of travel when his own productivity dropped (Steve Schram, episode 9). Reputation management as the first rung on the ladder (episode 10 with Craig). Digital marketing through a fulfillment partner instead of trying to learn every service yourself (Agency Coach). White label SaaS with Go High Level. Courses and memberships, learned from Stu McLaren. And coaching, starting with Donald Miller’s Coach Builder.
The leadership tip is the part that applies no matter which model you pick: leaders set aside the time it takes. Eric started CEO time as one hour a month while getting up at 4:00 a.m. for courses, selling at lunch and building on weekends. It grew to a day a month, then half a day a week, then a day a week. If all you do is build the widget and sell the widget, you build yourself a job, and nobody buys a job.
Key Highlights
- Monthly recurring revenue is the key, because it covers your expenses in the months your own productivity drops.
- You do not have to do the work yourself; you can sell the service and have other people deliver it.
- Leaders set aside the time it takes, and CEO time can start as one hour a month.
- Block CEO time and protect it like a surgery date, because that is how a business moves forward.
- Nobody buys a job; people buy systems, processes and the results those systems produce.
Key Takeaways
Okay. Testing. One, two. Testing. One, two. Here we go.
Are you ready to ditch the cubicle for the open road? Ready to travel and make money while traveling so you can fund more traveling while you’re working while traveling? Well, if that’s the case, in this episode I want to share with you some of the best side hustles to get started that you can grow into full time gigs, giving you the freedom to be location independent.
Welcome to the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. My name is Eric. I am the digital nomad entrepreneur. I’m traveling around the world with my wife and four kids and having an amazing time. And we’re able to do this because I have online businesses. Now, I have a couple, but really we do this with the support from just our primary online business, our web design and digital marketing agency, In Transit Studios.
Now, I want to, in this episode, talk to those of you that are in that first stage of business. You see, there are five stages that a typical digital online business goes through. And the first stage is the dreaming stage. This is exactly where you are trying to think of what could we do? Is it possible? What if we could live wherever we wanted to for however long we wanted to do it?
Because you see, once you accept the fact that it’s possible for you and begin to work towards it, you typically are going to move into the second stage, which is side hustle. Now, you don’t have to go into the side hustle. You could get a remote job working for somebody else. Totally possible. It’s not my preferred way to go. There are several reasons why I don’t like it. Yes, it can sometimes help you get there faster. Absolutely. But you’re totally at the mercy of somebody else making the decision whether they’re going to continue to let you work remotely or not. I would rather just own my own thing and be building something that has value to it. That’s part of my retirement portfolio. And so I like owning my own business.
Plus, if you are currently not location independent, there’s a lot to do to get ready to become location independent. You may have to figure out what you’re going to do with your property and your belongings, and you’ve got to figure out all the travel insurance kind of stuff and passports and visas and taxes and where do you want to go and what kind of travel do you want to do? Do you want to fast travel? Slow travel? Do you want to travel in spurts where you have a home base but you go out for a season and you come back for a season? So there’s a lot to figure out there. And while you’re doing this, you can step into a side hustle.
Once you have that side hustle, then you’re going to be ready to go to the third stage of business, which is the all in. And that’s where you ditch the 9 to 5. You’re 100% focused on your business, continuing to grow it and develop it. And it is like on you. You’re good to go at this point. You can go location independent. In fact, you may decide to go location independent and, depending on the type of business you are, go to a country with a very low cost of living because you can live in a much lower cost of living while your business isn’t making as much as it will in the future.
Then from the all in stage, we move to the fourth stage of business, which is team builder. And this is where you begin building and developing a team, and then you begin to give responsibilities away and build out leadership in your company. And then that’s when you move into the fifth and final stage of business. I’m sorry, not the fifth and final. You move into the fifth stage of business. C-suite. And then after C-suite, you can move into the sixth and final stage of business, which is going to be legacy.
Now, with that, there are five business processes that you’re going to work on while you’re taking your business from side hustle all the way up to C-suite. And I’ve talked about these a lot in the past, and so I’m not going to go over each of these, but those five business processes are leadership, lead generation, lead conversion, collecting and managing money, and the fifth and final one being project management. You’re going to do all five of those in place.
What I want to do now is I want to share with you seven, just seven, side hustles that you can get started with and give you some resources to help you with that. Now, this is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination. There are reasons I have picked these seven, though. I believe these seven have plenty of a proven track record. They have plenty of resources to help you train and be trained and learn. It’s easy to build teams around these things, and these are some businesses that can grow as assets that you can sell in the future. And so again, this isn’t an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination, but just to kind of get your juices flowing a little bit.
So the seven side hustles that I think you could get started on real quickly and grow into a full time gig so you can begin living location independent.
Number one is web design. Now, I might be a little partial to this one because it’s kind of how I got my start. But I still love web design. There are so many avenues and so many opportunities in this. And if you start looking in this, you can do simple web designs, you can do complex, you can do e-commerce, and you don’t ever even have to actually learn to design websites. This is one of my favorite things. You can sell website design and then have other people actually do the work while you’re out selling more web design. And so it depends upon you. There’s so much flexibility in web design and so many ways to do it right that it is something that you can really kind of customize into your own thing.
Now in the episode notes I am going to link you to Josh Hall. Josh Hall is the guy. Web Designer Pro. And I’m telling you something, he has got the courses, the know how, the community that you’re going to need to get started with building your own web design. In fact, if you go to his website, JoshHall.co, he just says right there, helping web designers build and scale a business that gives you freedom and lifestyle you love. And he’s great at it. He’s one of the best teachers I know out there for this. He is the best teacher I know of when it comes to web design. He is one of the best online teachers I know and his courses are extremely affordable. And I have seen countless people start with Josh as a side hustle and grow into an all in kind of deal. So I definitely would recommend checking out Josh Hall and Web Designer Pro, and he’s got a podcast as well and all kinds of great things over there. So that’s the first type of business I would recommend.
The second is along the same lines, just at a slightly different angle, if you will, and that’s a recurring web subscription business. It’s a way to sell web design that has a faster road to a larger monthly recurring revenue. And that is the key to any type of business you want to start and be a digital nomad or location independent with, is the monthly recurring revenue. In the business world it’s referred to, you might see this as MRR. Monthly recurring revenue is key.
Here’s why. In a few months, my wife and our four kids and I, we are planning to do a fast travel trip through South America. Now, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you might be thinking, whoa, you were just talking about the fact that you were headed to Spain for a year. Well, plans have changed. Spain is completely off the table now. We were going to be heading to Spain this fall as I record this. But we’ve decided that’s no longer what we want to do. One of the benefits of this lifestyle is we don’t have things that hold us down to places.
And so now we’re talking about doing about a four month fast travel trip through South America where over those four months we’re going to see lots of things. We’re going to go to Patagonia, we’re going to go to the Bolivian Salt Flats, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Cusco and Machu Picchu, Ecuador, the equator, the Galapagos Islands. Like, we’re just going to bounce around. And to do this in an affordable way, there are going to be a few of those transition points that are going to be by bus or train. And by bus, I mean some long bus rides. And I’m just not a great worker on a bus. Train, sure, but not on a bus.
And so during those four months, my productivity will decrease. And it will be really hard for me if I was having to build a website to make money. But since we have a high MRR, it’s totally okay. I know all of our expenses will be covered for months on end and I have no pressure on me. And that’s part of setting up to become location independent. And I talk with my buddy Steve Schram on the recurring web subscription model in episode nine. Now, if web design is totally new to you, I would look at a combination of Josh Hall and Steve Schram. I really think it’s kind of a power punch that helps you really get to a higher monthly recurring revenue faster.
All right. So what is the third out of seven side hustles that I would recommend getting started with? Well, the third one is a foot in the door that helps you start building up to move into the fourth business model, if you will. And then I’ll talk to you about that here in just a moment. But the third thing I would recommend that you would consider is reputation management. And I talked in episode ten, I talked to Craig about ReviewLead, and I love ReviewLead. I’ll link to it as well there.
It is like a business in a box. Okay, literally it’s like a business in, well, I guess not literally. Well, depends. If you see your computer as a box, then it’s literally a business in a box. For a very, very, very low investment to learn, you get access to everything you need. Everything you need. I mean, literally within a couple of hours, you’re set up to start selling reputation management. In fact, within 45 minutes, you will be equipped to put out your first lead that starts getting you your first prospects, and it just works. It’s absolutely wonderful and it’s a great way to get started.
Now, I do know of some people that have built an entire business around reputation management, so it’s something you could look into. But reputation management is a fantastic first step. To me, it doesn’t make sense to stop at reputation management, because reputation management is a great first rung of the ladder that you can begin leading customers up into, increasing your wallet share from them. You can get them started with reputation management at a very cost effective, very easy start up. And then you’re going to be able to just, you know, after they’re on it for a month or two and down the road, you can add some additional services and you can have the fourth business model, a fourth great side hustle, which you can jump right to. Again, you can jump right to it. But I like number three to build up to number four.
And before I share with you what that is, I want to take just a moment and talk about a solution, a solution to an issue that is very common for location independent business owners. And that’s what to do when it comes to a phone and phone number for your business. I don’t want to carry two phones. I like having just one phone and I don’t want to give out all my personal number. Plus my personal number changes every 3 to 6 months as I get a new SIM card. We do not have a standing phone service anymore from our passport country. We used to have T-Mobile. We got rid of it. It just wasn’t worth it. And so we just now get a new SIM card, and everybody that we need to have regular contact with is on WhatsApp. And so they can just keep messaging us through WhatsApp and we can change out our number there.
What we did is we got a Google Voice number and we use that Google Voice number then to change our WhatsApp number to, and that’s it. We don’t have to change our WhatsApp number anymore. But Google Voice doesn’t do two factor authentication. So while that was a good solution for us for personal communication, I didn’t want to have my business then in WhatsApp. I like having a separate thing just for my business that I can set up for do not disturb times and things like that.
I tried several and hands down my favorite solution was, is I should say, OpenPhone. I use it to this day. It is extremely cost effective. I think the basic plan is like $15 a month. It’s still what I’m on. It’s all I need. It does absolutely everything. It gives me a second number. I have do not disturb hours set up, so it only rings my phone Monday to Friday 9 to 5. The rest of the time it goes to voicemail. If I miss a call, it automatically can send the text message letting them know, hey, sorry I missed your call. How can I help? It’s got missed call, text back. There’s a lot in it. You can add additional numbers for only $5. You can share a phone number with your team. I just absolutely can’t imagine trying to run my business without OpenPhone. It does two factor authentication codes, like I said, where Google Voice doesn’t and many others don’t. And so it’s absolutely my top solution for my business phone number.
Now I have a partner link with them, that if you use my OpenPhone partner link, either from the show notes or go to DNEPodcast.com, go to my resources page. There I’ve got a whole list of business tools that I use and one of them is OpenPhone. If you click on the OpenPhone button there, not only can you sign up for a free trial, but you’re also going to get 10% off your first three months because you used my partner link. That’s a special opportunity for you through my partner link, and I want to say thank you to OpenPhone for setting that up with me. And when you click on the button, it’s going to pop open a page and it’s going to say welcome Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast listeners. That’s you. Sign up for the free trial. See how the interface works. It’s a great web app. I’ve got a Mac app. I’ve got it on my iPhone. So many things I love about OpenPhone.
All right. Back to our list of side hustles. Recapping. Number one, side hustle to full time gig, web design. Number two, recurring web subscription. Number three, reputation management, which leads so nicely into digital marketing. Becoming a digital marketing agency where you’re offering pay per click services, SEO, social media. Like it is a great thing to do.
Now, if you’re going to try to do all of those things, you’re going to struggle. It’s going to be trouble. You can’t learn all of those things well enough and sell them and execute and provide customer service. Like you just can’t. It’s going to take you to, you’ll never get to travel. You’ll never get to travel. I don’t want that for you. I want you to learn how to provide digital marketing solutions using a fulfillment partner.
Now, again, I could open up and show you how I do this with my company, In Transit Studios. But honestly, you’ve got to be better off getting first generation training on this. Okay. Getting first generation training. Now, I’m going to recommend Agency Coach. I’m going to link to them. Mike and AJ, if you want to learn how to run a digital marketing agency, Agency Coach. It’s not hype. There’s a lot of them out there that are hype and, you know, promising seven figures within a short period of time. And that’s not Mike and AJ. Mike and AJ own a digital marketing agency. They have grown it. This is from the trenches stuff that’s working. It’s absolutely amazing. All of their stuff is great.
Now I do provide coaching, but I provide coaching on the business level, on those five business practices. Leadership, lead generation, lead conversion, collecting and managing money, and project management. No matter what kind of business you operate, you’re going to need to work on those five over and over and over, because that’s how you grow your business. And that’s what I help people do. I don’t help people build a specific type of business. I help digital business owners who want to set their business up to be location independent. That’s what my coaching does, regardless of the type of business you have. But if you want to have a digital marketing agency, well, my friend, Agency Coach is the place to go.
Now, the number five on the list, the fifth type of business that I recommend starting as a side hustle to grow into a full time gig, is a SaaS. SaaS stands for software as a service, and one of my favorite softwares as a service to sell is Go High Level. It is a fantastic solution. Lots of great things with it. You can’t go wrong. And so I have a link for that where you can go out and check it out. They’ve got all kinds of resources to help you learn how to do that. And yeah, so I would definitely suggest going out and checking out Go High Level as a software as a service.
Basically, it is a piece of software that you white label as your own thing. So it looks like your product, your software, and then you turn around and sell it to businesses that need it. And you can niche down to one specific kind of business. You can sell access to it to businesses in general, and it does all kinds of things. At the heart of it, it’s a CRM, a customer relationship management platform. You can do email marketing through it, text message marketing through it. There’s just so many things packed into it. You’ve got to check it out and then you can sell the benefits of it at a very reasonable price. Plus, my favorite, favorite part about Go High Level is you pay a one time set fee and you can have as many clients in there as you want. It doesn’t get more expensive for you the more sub accounts you have in it. That is literally unheard of. Okay. In SaaS. Yes, there are people that are now copying High Level with it, but High Level is the master at it. So that is number five.
Number six is you can create a course and membership. And I’m telling you right now, you want to know how to build a membership? There’s one guy you’ve got to know. Stu McLaren. Stu McLaren is the membership guy. Everybody’s doing memberships for a reason. People love subscriptions. We lived in our passport country, the United States. We had our toilet paper coming to our house on a subscription. Our razor blades coming on subscription. Our toothpaste and toothbrushes, we had Quip, it came to us on a subscription model. I love subscription models. Do you have Hulu? Netflix? You got Disney Plus? Do you have them all? Right. Subscriptions. People absolutely love subscriptions.
There’s all kinds of memberships you can have. You could have a community based membership. You can have, you know, a teaching learning type membership. Stu talks about all of this. I mean, you know, if you want to know what somebody knows, read who they’ve read. All right. And who have I read on this? Stu. Do I have a membership? Do I offer courses? Yep. Who do I learn it all from? Stu McLaren. He’s your guy. I’m telling you something. You have knowledge that others will want to pay you for. You just have to learn how to put it out there. Right? You’ve got expertise. You could create, like I said, you can create a community. It’s absolutely fantastic. Stu’s the guy. He teaches you how to test it out with the founding members launch. I mean, I’m just telling you right now, if you want to have a course, you want to have a membership, you want to know about Stu McLaren.
Now, the seventh and final one on my list is to become a coach. Now, a coach, a consultant, is great. It is a little more challenging to be a coach or consultant when you want to be totally location independent. All right. Because of time zones, all the other things not nearly as big of a deal. This is one that is a little more tricky, but it is not impossible. And you can grow. Starting out, it’s a little more tricky. But once you get your coaching business really going, you’re going to be able to have a train the trainer kind of model where you’ll be able to build up your own trainers that will actually be delivering the coaching that you’ve created.
And I’m just going to tell you right now again, I’m not going to try to teach you how to do this. Do I do it? I do. All right. But I’m not going to try to teach you how to do this. Where do you want to go for this? You want to read the book Coach Builder by Donald Miller. Go to DNEPodcast.com. Go to my resources page. I’ve got a list of books I recommend and this book is on there. It is the newest addition. I’m reading one right now that may make the list as well. I’ll let you know in a future episode if it does. But Coach Builder has made my list of recommended books, so I would encourage you to go check it out. And I’ve also linked to it here in the show notes.
That’s your next step, right? Next thing I want to do is I want to share with you this week’s leadership tip of the week. Now, why do I want to do that? Because I like talking about leadership. And your leadership capacity is the lid to your business growth. And so the more you learn leadership, the better you’re going to be at leading your business. And let me tell you something right now, with that, your business will grow.
Okay. So today’s leadership tip of the week is this. Leaders set aside the time it takes. That’s right. Now, it may sound pretty simple, but leaders set aside the time it takes. Now, the time it takes to do what? Well, what do you need to do? You need to work on your business. You set aside the time.
You see, followers jump from one thing to the next. From one task to the next task, from one direction to the next. They let other people define the fires that have to be put out. While leaders are never immune from responding to urgent things that come up, leaders look ahead and set aside time to work on the things they need to. I call it CEO time.
I began doing this when I was running my business as a side hustle. And I was it. I had no team. It was just me. I had a full time 9 to 5. I was getting up at 4:00 in the morning to work on, you know, learning. I was watching courses and learning how to do things. And on the way, you know, I was taking my lunch time to do sales meetings. And then on the weekend I was having to build the websites I had sold during my lunch time, and building them on the weekends based upon what I was learning to do in the courses at 4:00 in the morning. And I just couldn’t get out of this, and I knew I had to, and had all the best intentions, but I finally had to just start setting aside. And it started as an hour a month. It just started as an hour a month. It was my CEO time. And then it became a day a month, and then it became a half a day a week, and then a day a week. And now the majority of my time is CEO time.
And I use a journal to keep myself organized. I have questions that I ask myself. I have CEO prompts that I ask myself on a recurring basis to help keep myself centered and focused and to keep my business moving in the right direction. But I don’t do it if I don’t set aside the time to do it. And so I have to block out time. I’ve got time in the morning where I work on things before I check email, before I even check chat communication. There are things that I do. I’ve set aside the time. I’ve got days of the month set aside where it’s just blocked out. You can’t get on my calendar. It’s locked. It’s locked down.
You might be thinking, well, what if something comes up? Well, what if you were having surgery? Like, nobody can come in at that point, right? That’s how you treat this. You block these times and you protect them with everything you’ve got. It’s how you move a business forward. You sit there and you work on leadership topics. You wrestle with your lead generation. You look at all of the things and numbers for lead conversion. You look at your processes for collecting and managing money and budgeting and all of those things. You work on your standard operating procedures and processes and handbook and all of the project management stuff. You’ve got to have that time and you need to do it consistently. A little bit here, a little bit there. A little bit here, a little bit there. And one day you’re going to look up and go, holy cow, I’ve built a company. It’s how it gets done.
If all you ever do is work in your business, building the widget, selling the widgets, building the widget, selling the widget, if you’re just all focused on that and that’s all you do, all you’re ever going to do is build yourself a J-O-B. And in the future, you’re going to look at me and go, it’s just a job. I just have a job. And guess what, my friend? Nobody buys a job. You can’t sell a job. All right. Why would somebody give you money for your job? That doesn’t happen. All right. Instead, people buy systems, processes, and they buy results that these systems and processes are getting. Those systems and processes together, those processes of leadership, lead generation, lead conversion, collecting and managing money, and project management, those systems build a business, and that’s what people will buy.
Well, I love it, but it doesn’t happen if you don’t set aside the time to work on it.
All right. Well, you’ve reached the end. I want to thank you. Please subscribe. Leave a review. Share the podcast with somebody. You are the person that can do it. And I’m asking you to do that for me. And I look forward to reading your review very soon. Until next time, chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.
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