587: 10 Creative Side Hustles that Make Real Money - Part 6

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1:13Part six. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. Happy Thanksgiving to you. This is a holiday where in America at least we take a collective pause for gratitude. before diving back into the wholehearted consumerism of the holiday season. But hey, if you're in an e-com business, then that means good. If you're in an ad business, that means good RPMs for you. But Thanksgiving means a couple things to me aside from that, you know, pause for gratitude. The first is our longstanding Friendsgiving tradition.

1:47Now on year 17, and perhaps more relevant to today's show, it means it's time for our annual roundup of creative side hustles that make real money. This is the sixth installment of the series. They're always a ton of fun, one of my favorite episodes of the year to put together, and some of the most popular in the 10 plus year history of the podcast. It's an opportunity to showcase and highlight some of the most interesting side hustles that have come across my desk over the last year. And we're going to get right into it with number one, which is a niche cleaning business, I think shared by Brian Winch from Clean Lots in the Side Hustle Nation Facebook group.

2:23And that's a barbecue cleaning service started in 2021 by a then 16-year-old Jacob Scheidel in Ontario, Canada. Jacob reported earning$12 ,000 in his first year and$16 ,000 in his second year. And I want to pause right there because that's an incredible level of income for a seasonal part-time high school business. I mean, could you imagine what a$16 ,000 spring and summer would have felt like at 17? Now, the interesting thing about Jacob's business is it wasn't one that customers were necessarily proactively looking for. I mean, how many times have you Googled like barbecue cleaning service near me?

3:01So what he did instead was went door to door offering to clean people's barbecues. Hey, that's kind of a novel offering. Yeah, I guess it is kind of dirty. And the very first doorbell he rings, he gets a yes. And he's thinking to himself, maybe this is going to be easier than I thought. But it turns out not so much because this becomes a story of persistence really quickly. The next 50 houses in a row are all no's. He tells globalnews.ca, even now, I'll have up to 200 people in a row say no. It's all about persevering and looking at the light at the end of the tunnel. I love stories like Jacob's.

3:35I think there's definitely an opportunity in niche cleaning services. And we featured a bunch of them on the podcast from Johnny Robinson's window washing service, Josh Belk's mobile car detailing business, Brian Winch's parking lot litter cleanup service, and some students of his, Erica Crouppen's pooper scooper business, plus some residential and commercial cleaning services. Stuff gets dirty and people pay to solve that problem. So the question is, what could you go help him clean? In fact, in response to customer requests, Jacob actually added pressure washing and car detailing to his menu of services.

4:08So that's creative side hustle number one, the barbecue cleaning service sold door to door by a high school student there. Now, creative side hustle number two is selling plant clippings. I'm Brian Alexovich from The Lots Project, where I assist people in earning extra income by utilizing their unused property space. Whether it's a city lot or undeveloped secondary property, I have a solution for you. Learn more at thelotsproject.com. Today, I'd like to talk about one of the solutions I offer, selling comfrey root and crown cuttings. While there are various ways to monetize the comfrey plant, this particular avenue kickstarted my incredible side hustle.

4:49I first learned about comfrey and the concept of selling root and crown cuttings about eight years ago through the Survival Podcast with Jack Spirko. Jack explained the incredible properties of the comfrey plant and emphasized that the most desirable types are sterile with new plants only able to be propagated from existing ones. After contemplating the idea for about a year, I finally decided to take the plunge and order some roots from a reputable seller. Although I spent a couple hundred dollars, I wish I had acted on the idea sooner instead of wasting that first entire year. During the time it took for the comfrey to establish and become strong enough for harvesting, I dedicated myself to thorough research of the plant.

5:30By the time the plants were ready, I had a total of eight products to market from my new comfrey patch. And the best part, it just keeps growing back. As for the root and crown cuttings, I posted ads on platforms like Etsy, Facebook Marketplace, and Craigslist, and the order started coming in. In my ads, I made it clear that I only harvested on Sundays and shipped on Mondays, which allowed me to limit the time I had to invest into this hustle. Before I knew it, I was making a couple hundred bucks each week from just a few hours of work. And that's just from the root orders. The comfrey plant is a nice ornamental plant that has many possible benefits to you and your property.

6:09The best part about this hustle is if you shut it down because it's just isn't right for you. The plant's nice to look at and benefits the soil just by growing there. So what's next for my hustle? Well, my wife and I decided to sell our farm in Minnesota and embrace a full-time RV lifestyle. To ensure my hustle continues, I partnered with several individuals to start businesses using my root stock and guidance, allowing them to fulfill my orders as well as establish their own side hustles. I'm more than ready to assist you in starting your own Comfrey side hustle, whether it's from providing roots and crowns to get you started or offering guidance throughout the growth and management process, I can offer experienced advice on a variety of products that can be produced from this awesome plant.

6:55You can find more information on my website under the services section. Sign up for a 30-minute chat to determine if Comfrey is the right fit for you. Additionally, you can learn more about our journey as full-time RV living and discover my other interests on the Lots Project podcast. Visit thelotsproject.com for necessary links and details. Once again, thank you, Nick, for having me on your show. Thanks, Brian, for sharing that. I've heard of a few people selling plant clippings as their side hustle, which I think is a really interesting little business because it just grows back and then you could do it again.

7:30Now, maybe not something that could be a huge operation, but probably a fun way to make some extra money, especially if you already love plants and gardening. Creative side hustle number three is another plant related one. Although the scientists in the audience are going to tell you mushrooms aren't plants, but I connected with Doug at FinCon, who you'll hear from in a moment, where I was fascinated by his home mushroom growing side hustle. Hey everyone, my name is Doug Brunson and I built out a small mushroom farm in my basement. Company name is Nutfield Mushroom Company, located in southern New Hampshire.

8:01I grow about 240 pounds of gourmet mushrooms every single week. That primarily consists of shiitakes and king blue oysters right now. I've been interested in mushrooms for a couple years and the end of last year, I just decided I was going to grow some mushrooms. So I started experimenting with that and started growing them in my closet, actually. And then took over my closet and then my bedroom and then my living room. That's kind of the point where I was like, this could actually be a business. So I started gutting my basement and then building out all the infrastructure that I'd need. A lab space, a fruiting room, an incubation room.

8:43And I've spent way too much money for where I'm at right now. While I was getting my basement this spring, I was actually also working to scale and get into a warehouse. The warehouse leased didn't end up working out, but I had bought tons of equipment to outfit this place. I bought commercial autoclave from a pharmaceutical lab that was shutting down. I bought conveyor belts from post office. I bought robotic arms, fridges. I used expensive building materials that I could have done for much cheaper. probably$30 ,000 in right now. If I was just doing this in the basement, if I could do this over again, I'd probably be spending around$5 ,000.

9:23In terms of my first client, it's actually to this awesome guy named Eric. He has a mushroom farm up in the White Mountains. He does farm tours every Sunday. One Sunday, I was like, I'm just going to go check out this guy's setup. So hopefully he doesn't kick me out. I went and built a really good relationship with him. And he asked me if I would supply some of the mushrooms to him. Because he has a really good restaurant and farmer's market distribution network. There's such a high demand for mushrooms in my area. So he was actually my first client and started selling him wholesale for pricing in my area.

10:03It's about$8 a pound wholesale to$16 or more retail if you're buying them at the farmer's market. The majority of my business is wholesale. I have some retail as well. I'm grossing about$2 ,000 a week from the wholesale side of the business and it costs me about$1 ,000 to produce that many mushrooms. Right now, I'm working on increasing my top line by getting into winter's farmer's markets. And then also building out the infrastructure to lower my cost of producing the mushrooms. So I'm talking about$500 to produce$2 ,000 of wholesale mushrooms or up to$4 ,000 retail. That's what I'm working on right now.

10:48And then also experimenting with some value add, anything that would add more value to the mushrooms, such as mushroom powders, mushroom coffee, extracts. just working on products in that direction as well and i'm going to be continuing doing that through the winter and then in the spring i've saved up some cash i'm looking to buy some vacant land either throwing up a steel prefab or getting a couple of shipping containers and outfitting those so i can expand production i just started a youtube channel to document my progress and and what I'm up to. It's called Speakeasy Myco, Speakeasy M-Y-C-O.

11:31And feel free to follow along if you're interested. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to share. Thank you. Thanks for the inside scoop on that, Doug. I'm excited for you. And we'll be sure to link up the YouTube channel as well. Just hit up the show notes link in the episode description. We'll have links to everything mentioned. So these mushrooms, apparently they grow really fast.

11:54So And then selling that at pretty healthy profit margins, even on the wholesale side. We're talking about a thousand bucks a week in profit, four grand a month in profit from that. Obviously some equipment costs that Doug mentioned, but there were ways to get started a little bit more inexpensively. In 10 plus years of doing the show, never heard of anybody selling mushrooms before to restaurants, farmers markets. So thank you so much for sharing that one. We have more creative side hustles right after this word from our sponsors. As your business grows, the last thing you want to be spending your time on is handling payroll, employee benefits, time off requests, and everything else that comes along with managing a team.

12:33Let our sponsor Gusto take these tasks off your plate. Gusto is the intuitive all-in-one payroll, benefits, and HR platform for growing businesses. With Gusto, most customers are able to run payroll in 10 minutes or less, and Gusto helps with the hard stuff too. filing payroll taxes, compliance, new state tax registration, and more with a simple, modern interface. Whether your hardworking team is in-person or remote, employees or contractors, Gusto makes it easy to support them and keep everyone on track. Join the more than 200 ,000 new and growing businesses that are using Gusto to build a great workplace for their employees.

13:10Right now, Gusto is offering Side Hustle Show listeners three months free at gusto.com slash side hustle. Get easy payroll, benefits, HR, and a happier team. So go to gusto.com slash side hustle. That's G-U-S-T-O dot com slash side hustle for your first three months free. Gusto.com slash side hustle. Big thanks to Gusto for sponsoring the show. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call, it's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the smarter way to run your business communications.

13:52Quo is the number one business phone system built for 2025, not 1995. In fact, it's rated the top choice for customer satisfaction with over 3 ,000 reviews on G2. Quo works right from an app on your phone or computer, and it means your team can share one number and collaborate on calls and texts. just like a shared inbox. And here is what is really cool. Because if you can't answer the phone, Quo's AI agent can. It can qualify leads, it can route calls to the right person, and it's going to make sure no customer is ever left hanging. Think of it like having 24-7 support without the 24-7 payroll.

14:30More than 90 ,000 businesses are already running on Quo, from solo operators to growing teams. Try it free when you go to Quo.com slash side hustle. That's q-u-o dot com slash side hustle. You can even keep your existing number. Quo. No missed calls. No missed customers. Creative side hustle number four is headstones for pets or maybe more accurately engraved pet memorials. This one was started by Rodney Melton in Arkansas and did over$200 ,000 in sales last year at an estimated 65 % profit margin. Now, he did have some equipment costs, a laser engraver, a granite saw, and some other tools. But one thing that he did that I thought was really creative was sourcing his granite from a local countertop manufacturer that had scraps.

15:19These pieces are too small for us to use on a kitchen counter or a bathroom counter, but they're plenty big enough to turn into pet memorials. So turning one company's excess materials or scrap materials into your physical product. Melton Memorials is his Etsy shop, where you can see that at the time of this recording, he's got over 7 ,500 sales since 2021. We'll link up that Etsy shop. And one thing that's cool about Etsy is that even without any outside research tools, you can get a sense for the popularity of a given product or a given store based on the public number of sales for each store.

15:52And so that's just something that shows up at the top of everybody's store account there. Now, for all our recent discussions about selling on Etsy, a lot of them have been in the print-on-demand space or the digital product space, talking about selling printables, selling spreadsheets, selling print-on-demand t-shirts and stuff, but there's still a huge amount of demand for custom handcrafted products. The upfront equipment expense is definitely a moat here, but that also spells some opportunity. And maybe it's not laser engraving that you want to get into, but maybe your research leads you toward a different kind of custom physical product.

16:24And then the lower overhead way to start something like this will be to partner with somebody who already has the tools because there's likely some downtime in their shop. They're probably not running at capacity 24-7. They might be looking to fill that capacity with incremental orders or rent it out to you so you can test the waters in a low-risk way. Creative side hustle number five is perfect just in time for the holidays, and that's Christmas light installation. Hey, how's it going? My name is Jeff Jarena, and I'm the founder of Christmas Lights by Design. You can check it out at christmaslightsdesign.com.

16:55And I got the idea from my Christmas lighting business back in 2001, which really was more out of desperation because I had just lost my corporate job. No one would hire me, and I was freezing in my home because I didn't have enough money to fix the heater. But I did remember a conversation with a good friend of mine. He told me I should install Christmas lights for money. So that's what I did. On November 1st, 2001, I launched my new Christmas lighting business. I created some basic contract forms, put a Santa hat on. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm sure I looked really silly with that hat on.

17:32But I knocked on some doors, and then something amazing happened. I landed my first customers. And then for less than$100, I bought my very first ladder, which is crazy because I still use it today. Since then, for over 20 years now and just two months of work each year, we've generated over$70 ,000 in sales each year with projects starting at$400. But you know, I think the best part of this business is that it's given me the money and freedom to spend more time with my family, as well as do other things such as speak at conferences, write books, host a Menoplog podcast, and start a web design and digital marketing business.

18:14And something that I'm really excited about these days is helping others get started in this business. Over the last few years, I've helped hundreds of people learn how to install Christmas lights, as well as how to start and run a successful Christmas lighting business. And if that sounds like something you're interested in, you can check out my training course, Christmas Lights for Profit, at christmaslightsdesign.com for Satch Install Training. That's Christmas, L-I-G-H-T-S, design.com for Satch Install Training. And Nick, thanks again for giving me the opportunity to introduce myself and talk about my business.

18:53Thanks a lot. Thanks, Jeff. I'll be sure to add those links to the show notes. And then after the recording, Jeff reached out and offered 10 % off his training program for Side Hustle Show listeners with promo code SIDEHUSTLE. So make sure to use that if you're How about that? 70 grand in sales, super low overhead. The homeowners are providing the lights. They just want to get up on the ladders and then come early January, you come back, take them all down and then you're done. There was another one that came across my desk where the woman, I think she quit her teaching job to do this full time.

19:25She was doing Christmas tree decorations for these high end homes and making like a thousand bucks a tree on average. She reported having a hundred plus clients. And so there's a six figure business that may allow you to take the rest of the year off. Let's see if I can dig up that link for reference. It was like, man, the number of creative ideas that people come up with and the different ways to make extra money just blow my mind. So I'll dig up that link. I'll put that in the show notes for reference. And then if you do want to expand, one thing that's interesting is we're starting to see some Halloween setups that rival any Christmas display.

19:57So maybe there's something there to take over other holidays or pivot to other holidays or use the same skill set to expand their creative side hustle number six is a signature coach and in the age of electronic signatures and docusign this is kind of a surprising one but priscilla molina of los angeles does hundreds of signature redesigns every month on her site planet of names dot biz she charges anywhere from 25 to 120 for each custom signature creation. And then your delivery includes three uniquely crafted signature concepts, specifications to match each customer style preference. So like there were drop downs, like, you know, simple, professional, dramatic, what kind of signature are you looking for?

20:42And this is a cool example of a productized service, I'm going to take this skill that I have, you know, handwriting and calligraphy, in her case, and go out and sell it. And who's paying for it. It's like, well, I'd signed my name the same way for decades. Now, according to Priscilla in an Associated Press interview, it's people who aren't happy with their signatures. They don't relate to who they are. They don't give the message they want to convey to the world. Eva's Facts, hat tip to Niall over there, estimates that Priscilla is earning at least$5 ,000 a month with this service, maybe even higher since her prices have increased since the time of that publication, and suspects that the majority of her sales are coming from TikTok, where she's got almost a million followers.

21:23What's interesting is her most popular videos are just simple letter writing examples where she'll draw a J, like a traditional J, and then cross it out, erase it, and then draw some more interesting looking J's. They're 30 seconds, 18 seconds, not very long, but you're like, dang, I never thought of drawing a J. They catch your eye. And so I think that's one way that she's driving business. So the question is, could you follow the same strategy with other unconventional makeover ideas like zoom backgrounds or fireplace mantle decorations or sales page copy to take it back to an online business type of thing.

21:58Because even if you don't know calligraphy, I think there's something here where if you can show people what's possible, here's how you're doing it today. And here's a relatively simple transformation. And you can show that like Priscilla has done with these videos, you establish credibility and instant authority that people automatically want you and there's no shopping around or competing on price. I don't even know if other people offer this service. It's hard to say, but like she is raising her hand saying, yes, I offer this. I will redesign your signature at a relatively affordable price point too.

22:27And she's done really, really well with that. Now, you know, I love me a good unconventional rental side hustle, something you can buy or build once and get paid for it over and over again. We've done full episodes on party inflatables, portable hot tubs that was a fan favorite in most recently mobility scooters in episode 564 but number seven on our list of creative side hustles for this year is renting champagne walls for weddings or maybe another trendy item that wouldn't cost a lot to build is the donut wall it's basically a pegboard a piece of wood with a bunch of pegs in it that you hang donuts on and then guests come on and grab one now but the champagne wall thing is similar large wooden board with rows of champagne flute holders or glass holders.

23:11And it looks cool. Guests can come by and they grab a glass during the reception. And according to Alexis McDermott from wandering wall co.com, these things can rent out for$450 per event. Now, I'm not an expert on the price of lumber, but I have to imagine it wouldn't cost much more than that to build one of these things, which means it's not going to take a lot of booking before you break even and start turning a profit. In her case, Alexis booked almost$30 ,000 worth of rentals in her first two years. She also offers seating charts and photo backdrop walls and welcome signs in addition to the champagne walls.

23:47So it's hard to say how much of that$30 ,000 in revenue was just for the champagne wall. But in an interview with Business Insider, she credited social media for helping her land her first rentals, along with some targeted photography collaborations with local businesses to help build out a compelling image portfolio for her Instagram account. That's one thing is like, well, you kind of want to see it in action. So if you're a bride and groom planning your wedding, how do I envision this in my space? Or how is this going to look at our wedding? Now, for my brother's wedding, we actually built this little harbor that doesn't look like much on its own.

24:21It's basically a bunch of two by twos. But when it was decorated with some greenery and some flowers, I thought it looked pretty good. It has been sitting in the garage ever since. So maybe that's our next side hustle come wedding season. Would anybody pay to rent this thing out? We'll come set it up for you. More creative side hustles right after this word from our sponsors. Did you know there's a disease running rampant among side hustlers and new entrepreneurs? It's called superhero syndrome. Symptoms include a feeling like you gotta do everything yourself, thinking you're the only one who can do it right, and struggling to let go of certain tasks.