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Podcast Episode Summary: The Side Hustle Show - Episode 601: The $100k Niche Consulting Business
Overview In this episode of *The Side Hustle Show*, host Nick Loper interviews Carter Osborne, a college admissions essay consultant who built a successful consulting business generating $100k annually. Carter shares his unconventional journey, insights on identifying niche markets, and effective strategies for growing a consulting business.
Key Themes
Carter's Background
- Unconventional Path: Carter started as a "broke, desperate graduate student" with a background in political science and public administration. He had no formal business training but found a niche in college admissions consulting.
- Niche Focus: Initially offering broad tutoring services, he realized that specializing in college essays would allow him to differentiate himself in a competitive market.
Finding the Niche
- Market Research: After testing various tutoring services, Carter identified a lack of specialized college essay consultants in the Seattle area.
- Short-Term Sacrifice for Long-Term Gain: By focusing on college essays, Carter aimed to enhance his reputation and tap into a broader client base over time.
Marketing Strategy
- Word of Mouth: Most of Carter's clients come from referrals rather than traditional advertising. He emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships with clients and other consultants.
- Networking with Established Consultants: Carter recommends partnering with experienced consultants to receive referrals, turning potential competition into collaborators.
Business Growth and Scaling
- Seasonal Nature of the Business: Carter's income is heavily concentrated during the college application season, particularly from May to January.
- Pricing Strategy: He initially underpriced his services at $75/hour, which led to client skepticism. After adjusting his rate to $225/hour based on market demand, he found more success.
- Hourly Billing: Rather than offering package deals, Carter charges by the hour, allowing flexibility in the nonlinear writing process of essays.
Tools and Logistics
- Operational Tools: Carter uses services like QuickBooks for invoicing, Squarespace for his website, and Zoom for client meetings, although he has room for improvement in scheduling.
Personal Insights
- Impact of AI: Carter expresses caution about using AI tools to write essays, advocating instead for brainstorming and ideation support.
- Future Aspirations: He plans to expand his services beyond college essays into related areas like summer camp applications and coaching aspiring tutors.
Key Takeaways
- Niche Down: Specializing in a specific area can help differentiate you from competitors and establish a reputation as the go-to expert.
- Leverage Word of Mouth: Building strong relationships with clients and networking with other professionals can lead to significant referral business.
- Know Your Worth: Understand the market value of your services to set appropriate pricing that reflects your expertise.
- Stay Flexible: The nature of consulting and creative work requires adaptability; be prepared for non-linear workflows, especially in creative projects.
Listener Bonus
- Free Resource: Nick Loper offers a list of 101 service business ideas that listeners can download from the show notes, providing inspiration for finding niche market opportunities.
Conclusion This episode delivers valuable insights into building a successful niche consulting business, emphasizing the importance of specialization, word-of-mouth marketing, and understanding market dynamics. Carter's journey exemplifies how unconventional paths can lead to lucrative opportunities in entrepreneurship.
*For more information and resources, listeners can visit [Side Hustle Nation](https://www.sidehustlenation.com)*.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Let's be real. Nobody starts a business for the joy of calculating tax withholdings. That's where our partner Gusto comes in to take the stress out of payroll, benefits, and HR, so you can focus on why you started your business in the first place. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So that means you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. I'm talking about automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401k, you name it.
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1:15And what's even crazier is that almost all of that comes in just half the year. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Light on the theory, heavy on the tactics. It's the entrepreneurship podcast you can actually apply. stick around today. We're diving into how to come up with your lucrative side hustle offer, how to get your first customers and grow the business, and how to handle the delivery logistics as a solopreneur, especially a highly seasonal solopreneur. From carterosbornetutoring.com, Carter Osborne, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
1:50Nick, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. You bet. We're going to dive into Carter's college admissions essay gig, very niche consulting service. But before we do that, your listener only bonus for today is my list of 101 service business ideas that you might be able to apply some of Carter's growth tactics to. You can download that for free at the show notes for this episode at sidehustlenation.com slash Carter, or if it's easier, just follow the show notes link in the episode description and I'll get you right over there. So Carter, you're doing tutoring on the side post-graduation, but there's hundreds of people offering the same thing.
2:25So you make this decision, maybe a counterintuitive one, to niche down and say, no, I'm going to focus on just a sliver of the tutoring market or this college admissions essay piece of it. Talk to me about that. So that decision came late in graduate school. I had become a tutor like any sort of broke, desperate graduate student. I needed some money to pay for tuition. And so I thought, I'll tutor on the side when I'm not doing homework or assignments. I started out tutoring standardized test prep like the SAT and the ACT. I tutored academics, everything from pre-calculus to history to English.
2:56And then I also tutored college essays. And the college essays were my favorite part. I always knew that that was something that I wanted to invest more heavily in. Frankly, too, I had to look myself in the mirror and go, I am not a good standardized test tutor. I mean, I'm just not. I'm not the kind of person who has the kind of organization and rigor and the sort of like dedication to repetition that it takes to be a good SAT tutor or a good SAT taker for that matter. Even though people were referring other students to me, it just wasn't the right direction for my business. And the same went for academics.
3:25I remember sitting down in coffee shops or cafes with students and learning pre-calculus as I was trying to teach it to them. I was remembering how to do things from my old high school pre-calc days as I was trying to teach it to students. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's been a few years here. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to say one chapter ahead of the kids. Exactly. And I'm going, yeah, I don't think this is what their parents are paying me for. So eventually I went, okay, I think that I have enough of a foothold in this whole tutoring industry to specialize in one service. And yes, that means sacrificing clientele in the short term, but hopefully it also means defining my reputation as a college essay specialist in the Seattle area.
4:00And with that more specific reputation, tapping into a broader market of clients in the long term, right? So it was sort of short-term loss, long-term gain. That was the theory. And so far, that's exactly how it's worked out. I kind of like this tactic of starting a little bit broader just to get a sense of what you like doing and what is delivering results for clients. Because you have to kind of test the waters there. And when I'm a beginning freelancer, like if you're going to offer to pay me for whatever it is, like I'm going to take that work. I'm going to say yes, yes, like play the improv game.
4:31Yes. And by the way, we could also offer this other service. But as that business matures, you start to recognize, okay, well, this is really where I think my wheelhouse is. Even if it means it's kind of scary, like I might be cutting off 75 % of my revenue here, but I think there's a bigger piece of the pie or an opportunity to really carve out a niche for myself here on the essay prep side. You mentioned, okay, I'm going to do this in the Seattle area, but you could theoretically do it virtually. Like, do you find most clients are local though? So before COVID, if you were sort of like a premier tutor in an urban area like Seattle, which is what I was trying to market myself as, the expectation was that you would meet your student in person, right?
5:09And that means either going to that student's house or meeting them in sort of a middle ground location, like a coffee shop or a cafe or somewhere local where they can kind of have a neutral ground. So I was spending my time just shuttling all over Seattle, getting caught in traffic on I-5. I spent a lot of time singing in the car to myself between meetings, a lot of wasted time, frankly. And then COVID hit and suddenly it became okay to have a tutor meet with your student virtually. That became sort of an understood and expected thing. I have been virtual ever since. I don't meet with students in person anymore at all, even if they're local.
5:41They could be two blocks away from my house and I would meet with them over Zoom because I structure my schedule intentionally that way. And what that allowed, to your point, was that I started to pick up clientele outside of Seattle too. So now my big hubs are California, Seattle, Chicago, New York, and even a little bit internationally every year now too. Well, it's funny. You know, we're 25 minutes away from each other. I had the thought for a moment, like, we should record this in person. But it's like that just breaks the whole system. Like now I've set up a remote recording. Like, let's just stick with what's known.
6:11We'll do the thing. On the marketing side, though, I'm thinking of SEO and keywords. Like you probably have to focus on Seattle essay tutor or Seattle college admissions essay help versus more difficult to cast a nationwide net there. Or have you found a way around that? Well, you know, what's so funny when it comes to actual marketing, I have never placed an ad in my life for this business. I've never done a Google keyword ad. I've never done any sort of physical mailers. I've never done any sort of promotional marketing. Part of that, frankly, is that I have no background in business education and I don't really know how to do it in an effective way without sort of throwing my money away.
6:45But part of it, too, is that within the realm of college admissions consulting, a lot of practitioners, the sort of agreed upon position is that proactive marketing like Google keyword ads is actually really ineffective for our industry, which sort of makes sense when you think about it. right? For a product that someone might consume that's helpful for their daily life, that kind of stuff is effective. But when it comes to your kid's college education, right? Parents are putting a really high stock in hiring someone who they think can get their kid into the school that's right for them. For most parents, you don't want just the guy you saw on the Google ad when you were like shopping for groceries.
7:19You want someone who your friend told you about and said, hey, you know, I worked with Carter and he was great. So I recommend working with him. And then you have that referral. So for almost everybody in this industry who's an established consultant in college admissions, most of our business, in fact, almost all of our business comes from direct word of mouth referrals. And very, very little of it, in my experience, comes from promotional or sort of proactive marketing. And that's why I haven't invested in it. And I haven't really seen any reason to invest in it, given the sort of power of the word of mouth network.
7:47It's a challenging business in that, in the sense that it's kind of a one-off purchase. and maybe that family has siblings, but they also know other families whose kids are of a similar age. So like you could see how the word of mouth starts to spin. And it was the same thing for my wife in wedding photography. It's like, if everything goes right, this is a once in a lifetime thing. But those brides and those bridesmaids, like all knew other people of a similar age who are getting married soon. So she found it was kind of surprising, like how quickly that word of mouth started to spin. But the challenge is you got to have clients one through five before anybody can spread the word about you.
8:21And in their case, it was ads on Craigslist, like almost last minute, whereas like the brides they were serving early on, the choice was either, you know, their friend with an iPhone in the back was going to take this picture or we'll roll the dice and take a chance on these new photographers, like just to build up their portfolio. What was it in your case, like finding, you know, those first one, two, three, four, five clients specifically on the essay prep side? Well, first, can I compliment your wife on dealing with the wedding industry? I mean, my goodness, I think college admissions is stressful.
8:48Oh boy. Weddings would be a whole nother level. Yeah, for me, my start and the start that I recommend to a lot of the folks who I sort of coach nowadays, this is sort of a new service I offer is professional coaching for folks who are looking to start their own tutoring services. The recommendation I give them is try to make yourself useful as an addendum to another established tutor's practice. So what I mean by that is to say, hey, let's go find somebody out there who's an independent college admissions counselor who has, frankly, too many students. And this happens all the time, right? The average student-to-counselor ratio in a high school is something like 1 to 400 these days for public students.
9:23It's unbelievable. So what this market is experiencing is that there's way more demand for private consultation for college admissions than there is supply. There are way more families looking for help than there are counselors to help them. So it creates this bizarre imbalance between supply and demand, which basically means if you're an established consultant in this industry, you're booked up. I mean, you have a wait list. Almost everybody is running a wait list in this industry. So when I was starting out, my - This wasn't even a thing. Like, can we just pop? Like, either this was not a thing or it was just not on our radar 20 plus years ago when I was applying to school.
9:59But it's become a huge industry. And these independent college consultant people, like 10 grand, 20 grand, like it's a significant investment before you even start talking about paying tuition at some of these schools. That's exactly right. Yeah, it has become an entire industry in itself. I think the latest estimate from McKinsey is that the college admissions consulting industry alone is almost$3 billion this year, and it's expected to grow prolifically over the next five to 10 years. It's an extraordinary marketplace. And when you think about it, it makes sense for parents and families who are going, okay, the average admissions rate for the kind of schools my kid is applying to is like 20%.
10:32That's one of five students, and that's one of five applicants who think they're qualified for this school, who dared to fulfill an application. Those are long odds, right? And if I can hire someone for, I don't know,$3 ,000 to$5 ,000 over the course of the next few months who can help my kid beat those odds, and I'm already going to end up paying a lot more than that for college, I'll kind of just think of it as a lump sum. I'm already estimating I'm going to pay$100 ,000 to put my kid through four years of college. If it's$103 ,000 to help them get into the school that's best for them, I'll take it.
11:02That's the kind of calculation that a lot of parents do in their minds when they're thinking about this cost. So, I mean, for better or worse, the industry is here. It's growing. And for a lot of families and students, it actually is a genuine sort of outlet. It's a stress relief. It's a place where they can go to feel confident in what is otherwise an extremely complicated and stressful and opaque system, the system of college applications. So it is helpful for a lot of families. And for a lot of folks, it's worth the cost. So the strategy early on is to try and locate some strategic partners amongst these college admission counselors or these independent college consultant people to say, hey, if If you're oversold, send clients my way.
11:40Or if you don't handle the essay prep side of things, send people my way. Am I hearing that correctly? That's exactly right. Yeah, it's basically turning folks who would otherwise be competitors into collaborators, someone who can help you out. So my start, my first batch of clients came from an established consultant in the Seattle area who's been a mentor of mine ever since, who doesn't like doing essays. She's a fantastic consultant. She does list building. She does high level application strategies, all that stuff. But she hates the essay process. It's just not her thing. It is my thing. So I went to her and I proposed, hey, you know, could I help you out if you have some overflow clients who you can't get to maybe pass them my way?
12:15She was perfectly happy to do that because frankly, she was booked up and she didn't want to do it anyways. So she outsourced that work for me. Her clients were happy. I was happy. She was happy. It was like a win-win all the way around. And those became my first clients who then referred their friends to me the next year and their friends the next year. And off we went. Okay. So and that's kind of the cool thing. I think you highlighted first year, three clients, next year, 14 clients, five figures in revenue. It doesn't take a ton to really get something off the ground. And then you start to see the word of mouth can start to spin.
12:46So if you can get your foot in the door with just one of these strategic partners, that can make a huge, huge difference. Remember what the initial outreach or what the pitch or ask was to her? This is where my background in PR comes in handy nowadays, right? It's easy to send sort of like tailored pitch mails to different people. But back in the day, I think I reached out and I said, she was a Stanford graduate as well. And I said, look, we went to the same school. Can you help me out? You're established in this industry. I would just like to talk to you since I'm new. It's stunning to me the amount of people in the college admissions space who are willing to be resources for others who are just starting out.
13:20And again, I think that's a product of the surplus that's in the market right now, right? If this were a more cutthroat or competitive or small margin environment, maybe that wouldn't be the case. But again, for established consultants, a new player in the college admissions space isn't necessarily a threat to their business. There's too much demand out there. They're not looking at that and going, oh, this is someone who's going to knock my revenue down next year. They're saying, oh, great, someone else to help out in this overstuffed market where people need a lot of help. Sure, I'll give them some advice.
13:47Why not? So it's a unique time in this market. But I think for anybody interested in starting, it's a time that's full of a lot of opportunity. Were there other people, as you mentioned, well, there's a ton of people offering test prep tutoring. and just general academic tutoring, was there a level of existing competition on the essay side of things? So the answer to that is basically no. There's two sides to the college consulting world. There are folks who do full suite college application consulting, and that's like list building and getting into the admission strategies. They'll help out athletes with recruitment.
14:18And then there are specialists like me. Some are financial aid specialists and some are college essay specialists. That second side, the specialist side, is much more rare, right? We are not that common. Most people go to the full suite consulting side, or they'll do standardized test prep, or they'll do academics or something. So when I came in, I was one of the only essay specialists in the Seattle area. I'm still one of only a handful. And I'm one of the more established ones now. Again, that's back to your first question about that pivot from being a sort of broader tutor to someone who's a specialist.
14:47Yeah, you narrow your market, but it's easier to become the established name in your local region to be like, Oh, yeah, Carter, he's the essay guy. Sure, I'll send my kid to him. Right. You become, you occupy that brain space as the go-to person for this very specific service. And it's so much easier to make those referrals. Like, oh yeah, I've got somebody who specializes that. And we've seen that in paid traffic from Google. Like, oh yeah, I have a specialist to talk about that. Oh, you need somebody to do nonfiction book covers? Like, yeah, this is your person. It makes a lot of sense, even though it can be painful to a percentage of the other people who were paying him.
15:20More with Carter in just a moment, including the essay that got him into Stanford, how he prices his service, and the role of AI in this field. Right after this. Did you know there's a disease running rampant alongside hustlers and new entrepreneurs? It's called superhero syndrome. Symptoms include a feeling like you got to do everything yourself, thinking you're the only one who can do it right, and struggling to let go of certain tasks. Does that sound familiar to anyone? But the good news is there is a cure. Our sponsor Indeed can help you find the best candidates for the roles you need to fill and find them fast.
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17:50You can even keep your existing number. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. I gotta ask, what was your essay about that got you into Stanford? I should have seen this question coming. I was a musician growing up, and I came from a family of musicians, But I was the first in my family to do both jazz and classical. And so my essay was kind of about the different way you approach jazz music versus classical music and the sort of ways that both of those reflected different sides of my personality. I can't remember what my main sort of core theme was, but it was something around the dichotomy there.
18:22I don't think it was a particularly great essay, frankly, looking back on it. But that's a sign of growth, right? When you can look back on your old work and go, wow, I can't believe that worked. Like I would have improved that if I'd gotten another crack at it. But sure. Yeah. With the benefit of hindsight. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. My essay, and I can't imagine anyone at University of Washington ever even read this based on the other side of the application, but mine was about everything I know I learned from watching The Simpsons. It was just kind of this silly piece about on the surface, kind of a crass show, but underneath there's lots of fun lessons from this little nuclear family.
18:57So I was looking it up on my machine. I was like, no, This is many, many hard drives ago. Oh, that's awesome. Lost to the Amazon history, but that was one of my essays. You know what? For an overworked admissions officer who's read too many applications, I think that would probably be a breath of fresh air. Smile a little bit and think about The Simpsons. Something to stand out. That's right. If that had any work. Talk to me about pricing this service. And I don't think there's any public pricing on the tutoring website. Talk to me about what does it cost to hire Carter these days? My flat rate right now is$2.25 an hour.
19:27I think for the Seattle area for full suite college application consultants, that's a little bit on the low end. Specialists tend to charge a little less than those full suite consultants just because we don't offer as many services. So it's a little bit on the low end, mainly because I'm trying to scale up. But the pricing question comes up a lot. And I think in the interest of kind of sharing with listeners some of the missteps that I took early on that hopefully they can avoid. When I started out in this industry, I priced myself really, really low. I priced myself at$75 an hour. And at the time, as a graduate student, that felt luxurious.
19:58I didn't really do a full market research to understand that in the world of college admissions, that's not only cheap, that's sort of suspiciously cheap. That's like, what's wrong with this guy that he's not charging more than 75? And actually, I would not be surprised if a couple people saw my rate and said, ooh, I don't know if I really trust this. I'm going to move on. It's like looking for the Groupon for skydiving. You're like, I don't know if this is something I necessarily want to discount on. That's exactly right. That's a great comparison. Yeah. Well, so that's exactly it. But I think my error back then is I remember thinking, okay, what am I worth?
20:29You know, as a college admissions or as a college essay consultant, what do I think I'm worth? Well, I don't have any experience. And yes, I took some creative writing classes and I have Stanford on my resume, but I don't know if I'm really fully qualified to charge$200 an hour or something. I think that was my error, right? Because it's not about what you internally think you're worth. it's about what the market can handle, what they're willing to respond to. And that has nothing to do with your own self-worth or positionality or anything. If I'd done proper market research and thought of it more as I'm an actor in this space and less of what am I worth relative to other people in the field from a sort of inherent emotional standpoint, I think I pretty immediately would have seen you need to start out at over$100 an hour.
21:07I would have started higher. And it's taken me a little while to scale to 225. I think now I'm in a more comfortable place. But it was an interesting transition early on. And you kind of build hourly. That's a little bit surprising. I was expecting to say like, oh, it's a flat package for X thousand dollars. And that includes deliverable one, two, three, four, five, but you are billing hourly. Yeah. I bill hourly and not a package deal. And that's a very intentional choice. Actually, most people in the college admissions space do a package deal. These are folks though, that do the list building and the strategies and the athletes.
21:36It's kind of like they offer a fuller suite of services, which means you can carve them more precisely into packages. From my vantage point, the reason I charge hourly, there's a practitioner's reason and there's a business reason behind it. I'd say the practitioner's reason is, frankly, essays with high schoolers don't move linearly, right? I mean, I can't say that it's going to take four meetings for a high schooler to get a personal statement out because they're 17 years old and they're out playing volleyball with their friends and they forget to do their essay one week or maybe they do it really quickly, but it's more messy than we thought it was going to be.
Read the full transcript
22:07So you got to go back and fix some things, right? Writing essays is fundamentally an artistic practice in my mind, which means it's inherently nonlinear, right? It's kind of hard to predict. You have to come at it from different angles. And that inherently resists something like a package deal where you say, okay, you're going to buy five meetings and three revision sessions. And at the end of it, you'll have these essays. It doesn't work that linearly. Working with high schoolers on something like writing, especially personal creative writing, reflective writing. That's my experience. What's more of a fit for them is saying, okay, nice work.
22:38We're going to need to tack on an extra revision session for this. And oh, maybe you have an extra question that we didn't think about. So we're going to tack on a little bit more there. That hourly model tends to be the kind that has the flexibility that high schoolers need to adapt to their process. It sounds well rehearsed after many conversations with parents, I imagine, because they're like, well, how much is this going to cost me in total? You're like, well, it depends. You know, it depends on your student and how long it's going to take. Yeah. Yeah. You can't just say I don't know to that question for sure.
23:07Yeah. Yeah, give people that ballpark range and kind of that prospective clients. And it sounds like it's probably also intentional to have that conversation over the phone rather than just like plaster it on the website. So you can explain all of that and how the process works. And I think that's common for probably a lot of consultants that aren't super productized with like we talked about deliverable one, two, three, four, five. Yeah, that's exactly right. The onboarding call has a lot of importance there. And I've made that a more robust part of my service in the last few years to be like our first point of contact when folks reach out to me is a 30 minute onboarding call.
23:39Right. I'll get their first email and say, thanks for reaching out. Do you have time to get on the phone before we even go back and forth over email? Just because there's so many nuances to get out. And you're right. Having a conversation about it is just the best way. I'll also say about the hourly thing just to kind of get the sort of business side of it in. I find that when it comes to working with folks hourly, you'd be surprised at the number of people who continue to add on beyond the original scope of what we thought we were going to do together. They continue to add on just a little bit more and a little bit more.
24:08This will be like, oh, we added another school and they've got two essays and we need some help working on those. Can you help us out? Just two more essays and then we'll be done or something like that. Or I want just one more review of this personal statement just to make sure it's accurate, even though we've already reviewed it sufficiently. Stuff like that actually does add up and become a significant part of my revenue every year. Whereas with a package deal, when you get to the end of the package, it's a natural breaking point where people say, great, I've fulfilled the thing. See you later, right?
24:34I've done it. This is a natural time for me to walk away. Hourly, there is no natural time to walk away. And what you see is a lot of folks kind of hang on a little bit longer. So it does generate some additional revenue over time. Any tools in tech you're using to schedule billing or schedule clients or just handle the backend admin? Oh man, see, this is where I invite you or any of your listeners to help me out. I am such a Luddite when it comes to technology for business operations. I am so bad. I finally started using Intuit QuickBooks to work with the sort of like revenue and invoicing. That's been a blessing.
25:06Thank goodness. I'm not like managing my books by hand anymore. I am still doing my scheduling by hand, which is terrible. I need to get a calendar service going. So I have some catching up to do, but I will say, yeah, I run my website through Squarespace, which I found to be perfectly good. I have no complaints about them. I do my invoicing through QuickBooks, and then I do my meetings over Zoom. And those three applications alone, I have found to be enough to run the business if you're willing to do some kind of gunky scheduling over email. I am right now, but I know there's a better way to do it.
25:33I just got to get on my horse and figure it out. I imagine there's a ton of tools aimed at that solo freelancer type of person. Practice was one who had sponsored the show last summer aimed at that solo service provider type of business that I had built-in scheduling and I want to say payments and invoicing too, but just curious about that because people are like, it's always like, and then it's like, well, my first client, do I start at like invoice number one or do I come up with some random three digit number that makes it look like I've been doing this for a long time? Yeah. All that. Yeah.
26:03What's been the impact of AI on all these essays? Like are people trying to turn in some chat GPT stuff these days? It is a disruptive force for sure. I think I'll say this. It's really hard to predict where this will go in the next like five to 10 years, because nobody really knows how generative AI technology will change. I'll say that right now, if you're a parent out there or you're a student and you're approaching college applications, please do not use these tools to write your college essays. You can use them to brainstorm, to help generate ideas, right? Bounce some ideas off the chat GPT or BART or whatever, or Gemini now, I guess, right?
26:36Whatever you want to use, you can use it to maybe make some suggestions about the clarity of your writing. You know, hey, I feel like this sentence is kind of mangled. Can you help me write it more cleanly? That's fine. Please do not generate any significant amount of text that you'll actually put into your essay because these tools aren't there yet. They cannot produce strong college essays. My theory is that by their very fundamental design, they can't produce strong college essays. These tools are trained as large language models by absorbing a corpus of human-generated content and then basically averaging it, trying to estimate what an average thing would be and making it clean and compelling.
27:11But by definition, they're not in the business of producing things that are memorable or that stand out or that are sort of unusual in an attractive way. That's the artistic side of college essays. That's the whole point of them is to stand out, right? Your essay was about the Simpsons. It's like, if you ask ChatGPT, what are good personal statement ideas? I guarantee it would never recommend that because that's not an average thing to recommend. Now, five years from now, I might be out of a job when ChatGPT evolves into some sort of sentient super agent or something. I have no idea. But for now, that's where we are.
27:42Fair enough. It sounds like it's very dependent on you being the expert and delivering these one-on-one sessions at$225 an hour. Is there anybody else on the team or just trying to get a sense of the logistics and the timing? Because up until very recently, doing this still on the side of a full-time job. Yeah, that was a whole situation right there. I mean, this podcast is specifically for people doing things on the side. And I have massive respect to anybody sort of making that juggling act work. But boy, howdy. I mean, that was tough, right? Especially towards the end there. I had sort of progressed in my PR firm.
28:14It was challenging to balance both of them as my business sort of started to pick up. I will say this. I don't have anybody else on my team right now. It's just me. That said, this is going to be my first year of full-time college essay, college application consulting. So we'll see if I can scale to the point where I need to bring somebody else in. I think that would be great. I sort of explored the option last year, didn't end up pulling the trigger, but might be able to this year. We'll see. So it's a little bit of an experimental zone right now. I may have to send you an email in a year and say, hey, here's what happened.
28:44But for now, yeah, I'm sort of the one running the show. Was this like early morning? Was this late night sessions after work hours? I'm at it maybe pounding it on the weekends. Like what happened? Yeah. Well, so it depends a lot at the time of year. I think you referenced earlier the fact that this is an incredibly seasonal industry, right? The application deadlines for college are mainly in November and January, which means that, for example, right now in February, I'm in the off season, right? I'm hanging out. I'm walking, taking my dogs on walks. I'm going on runs. It's great. I can just relax.
29:13But when we get to September, October, I basically go underground and I say goodbye to my friends for a couple of months. I'll be back in January. And then I reemerge when the season is over. So to answer your question, it depends a lot on the time of year. When we're in the busy season or when we were in the busy season, I guess when I was still working full time at my PR firm. The pattern was to wake up early and do suggestions and revisions on papers before I logged on to work during the day, right? So I do that from like 6.30am to about 7.30am, give or take, log on to work, work my day. And then I would get off at five and I started meetings at 5.30.
29:47I would go 5.30 to 6.30, 7pm to 8pm and then 8.15 to 9.15. These are high schoolers. So they have like no problem meeting at 9pm. And then from about 9.30 onwards, I would work on essay revisions until I couldn't do it anymore. And then I'd go to sleep, wake up and do it again. So it becomes a grind, right? It becomes an all day long grind. And there's breaks in there. And sometimes a student cancels. So I get a little breather, right? I don't want to glorify like overworking yourself, certainly. But for a seasonal industry, sometimes it does come down to just pushing through it when the time comes.
30:18So that was weekdays. And then yeah, on weekends during the season, I usually meet with five to six students a day. Those are one-hour meetings with half-hour breaks in between, which eats up most of the day. And then I have recap notes to do and some essay revisions in the evening. So in the season, it's very intense. It really takes over the schedule. Outside of the season, it's really not intense at all. So it's feast and famine in this industry for sure. More with Carter in just a moment, including when he felt comfortable taking the business full-time and the almost shocking lack of traditional marketing it took to get there right after this.
30:49A lot of side hustlers suffer from what-if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path? But one thing 100 % of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot. They phased down those what-ifs and they got their answers through taking action. Our partner Shopify helps turn what-ifs into why-nots. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names to the very guests on this show. What if I can't design a website? Shopify's got you with ready-made templates to match your brand style. What if people haven't heard about my brand?
31:23Shopify helps you find customers with easy to run email and social media campaigns. And what if I get stuck? You can tap in to Shopify's award-winning 24-7 customer support. Let's turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle shopify.com slash side hustle what's the stress level coming into february march april may you're like is the business going to materialize come the fall or did i just make a horrible mistake walking away from work here it's so much stressful we had one of these businesses that came across my desk was like i make a 150 grand a year doing christmas decorations and like the entire business is november and december yeah and it's like is that going to materialize this year?
32:15It worked last year, but to go through like this huge, like cashflow dry spell and yours is not that extreme, but similar. Yeah. I think that would terrify me, honestly. Hats off to that person for making it work. So I'll say that in this year specifically, just to kind of pick on this year, I'm positioned pretty well. I have many more clients this year already than I usually do come February. Like pre-booked. Pre-booked out for when we usually start, which is traditionally May or June. That's when I usually start working with students. So that's handy to kind of have a scope of like, okay, I know at minimum, I've already got 15 clients on the books.
32:46I'm going to be fine to start out in my early season. And then from there we can go. But yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of faith involved in this every year. Of course, I think that's any seasonal business. You got to have a little bit of faith and you've got to activate the referral network properly. So I wish there was something I could say to say, you know, oh yeah, this is how I guarantee that I'll have a proper amount of business for the coming year. But I think when it comes to running your own business, that's part of the trade-off. You don't have a boss and you don't have anybody kind of telling you what to do.
33:11But on the other hand, there's no guarantees for anything. You don't have an established salary. You don't have anybody who's going to hand deliver your clients for you. You have to go out and get them yourselves. There's sort of that sense of vertigo kind of looking over and going, oh, there's no safety rail here necessarily. So all to say, there is no guarantee. But that said, I think that in this industry, the general direction is the more people you work with, the more referrals you get, the earlier you book out, the more kind of consistently you can count on having a full roster of clientele.
33:39And now having done this for the better part of seven years, I'm to that place with a fairly mature client base where I can count on those referrals coming in. Yeah, I guess the 12 month calendar is somewhat arbitrary. It's maybe shifted in your mind. Well, my year starts in June or whatever, versus thinking, well, it's all stacked up at the end of the year. How am I going to eat in the spring? One concept that I like to try and drive home is the concept of what I call gravy time. And this is the point in the year at which you have earned enough to cover all your expenses. And for the average person with a typical 5 % savings rate, they're working into like second week of December before they're like profitable, basically.
34:16Like it took all year to cover my expenses. And like the last couple of weeks is like, that's what I'm saving from. All else being equal, I'd like to knock this out in March. And then the rest of the year is gravy time. And we've had other people with seasonal businesses. They're like, well, once I hit my number for the year, like I'm good, I'm off to Costa Rica. I'm off to wherever. And it's kind of, well, if you want to keep growing, keep pushing it, and then you're welcome to do so. Was there a specific revenue target or lifestyle dread when it came to like essentially working two full-time jobs during the busy season that you're like, look, something's got to give.
34:51I see more upside over here. I like, I really want to do my own thing. Like at what point did you feel comfortable calling it quits at work? Well, first, can I say, I love the phrase gravy time. And I think if your shop ever needs new merch or something. That would make a great t-shirt too. All right. Gravy time. Patent pending. Yeah. The signal for me to move on from my full-time job, I think one of them is something that folks who launched successful side businesses often say, which is that the revenue from my side business started to exceed the revenue from my full-time job, right? I was earning more in my side business.
35:18That became true for me in 2021. It's been true ever since. That's a great place to be. And I will pause to say it's pretty uncommon in a service business or in an hourly service business just because of the time constraints. So you don't have time for making it happen. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's one of those things where I look back on all the lost weekends and go, was it worth it? Okay, I guess it was, but boy, it was tough. Yeah. So that was one of those thresholds around, okay, I'm making more money in my side business than my full-time job. So clearly there's something to think about here.
35:46I think the other thing too was it was getting to the point in this, just this past cycle where my service to my students was starting to suffer just a little bit because of the time constraints I had going, or if nothing else, just because of the kind of mindset shifts I was doing, right? You can imagine during my day job, my whole role was to do corporate communications. I was working for Fortune 500 companies, writing op-eds for senior executives, blah, blah, blah, right? All the stuff you do as a PR director. And then I would switch over and try to become a creative writing teacher in the evening.
36:18And it works to an extent. I certainly have a lot of practice with it, but it also ended up being like my first student that I went to half an hour after logging off of my PR job, I was kind of in the mindset of going, okay, well, the following three points demonstrate my interest in USC because X, Y, Z, it was too structured. It was too corporate, right? It felt wrong. It wasn't the kind of creative mindset I needed to be in. So I started to see that tension emerge where I just wasn't able to kind of fulfill what I knew was my full potential as a writing tutor and as a college admissions tutor.
36:47So I thought, okay, from both a financial standpoint and just from a service quality standpoint, it's probably time to move on. And that was what a month and a half ago. So there you go. Were you turning clients away? Like, I don't have the capacity for this. Like, do you anticipate being able to take on more business and grow the top line now that you have more hours in the week? Yeah, I really hope so. I mean, I literally have twice as many hours than I used to. So hopefully we can significantly grow the clientele. But we'll have to see, right? I mean, you run into sort of industry specific constraints too.
37:15Like I'm working with high school students. They can't meet with me at 1pm. Like they're in class. So I can't take meetings with them during that time. There is a certain constraint on the number of clients I can take just because of their natural schedules. So that's where I try to rely on the fact that I have clientele coming from across the country, right? 1pm here is 4pm on the East Coast. So maybe I can take some more East Coasters this year. There's some ways to kind of work the margins there to make it work. So we'll see. But honestly, I'm not going to pretend like I have the full schedule figured out, right?
37:43This is my first year of full time. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, I love that schedule flexibility. Oh, I can serve people in different time zones. I mean, My brother is a full-time tutor now and he loves that flexible schedule. Like, oh, I can ski until two o 'clock is my first meeting. Is it until high school gets out at three or whatever? I can make it down the mountain in time. Yeah, that's great. So that's like perfect. That's great. So as far as what's driving the clients in sales today, it's like primarily these strategic partnerships with specifically with like college admissions counselor type of people.
38:14Like, hey, do you have a go-to person for the essay side of things? If not, I want to raise my hand and be that referral recipient. Yeah, that was how it started out. I would say that's how I got off the ground. Nowadays, it's almost entirely word of mouth from either current or former clients, right? Folks who have worked with me, mostly parents talking to their friends saying, oh yeah, last year we worked with Carter and he was great. So you should really think about it. That natural word of mouth through the client market, that's really what's driving my growth right now. Do you have anything to incentivize that?
38:42Like$50 referral fee or something like that? So I never have. To be fair, I've never thoroughly explored what that might look like in terms of how other tutors have done it and how it's worked for their businesses. So there's some research to be done there. I never have. I only sort of reach out to former clients, especially ones who I've had a really good relationship with, and say, hey, we're coming into the next application season. Congrats on your kid for getting into wherever. If you run into anybody who's looking for help with college essays, just keep my name in mind, right? So it's just a little ask to people.
39:09I think that's something about the service industry, especially something where you're working with students on something as personal as like a personal statement or a college essay. There's a lot of trust and rapport that you have to build with parents and with students to make this whole thing work, which means that when I'm done with the process, I usually have really good relationships with my clients and I can go to them and count on the fact that they will indeed bring me up if the circumstance is right. So I haven't done any sort of specialized structural ways to promote referrals, but word of mouth so far has been enough.
39:36Do you need to go out of your way to collect Yelp reviews, Google reviews, Facebook reviews, anything? I imagine you have some level of visibility if somebody Googles you or somebody Googles essay help near me or something. You know what's funny? I don't at all. And actually, a lot of the best tutors that I know in the Seattle area and actually in other urban areas too, they don't either. This industry is so odd in that people view it almost like a luxury good. It's this sort of premier consultant, a premier tutor sort of thing. You're out there looking for somebody who's not just another service provider that got five stars with 40 reviews on Google.
40:10This is a special person, right? Oh, this is someone who's almost hard to find because they're so good and they don't need to advertise themselves. So that's the person I want to work with. That's surprising. Yeah. Do you see what I'm talking about? It's almost the luxury good economic model that we adopt in our positioning and our marketing. That's not the only way to go about it. And I do know consultants who do the more front-facing SEO maximizing sort of website-based way of marketing themselves. But for a lot of us, no, we kind of hang out in the background and count on that referral network to generate our leads for us.
40:38Okay. It's all part of that positioning. It's like that speakeasy where you got to know a guy who knows the secret code, you know, knock the times at this unmarked door. I know. Yeah. No paid traffic, no SEO. And I'm guessing no social media either, because that would be public facing out in the world, giving essay prep tips. Nobody is necessarily looking for that on those platforms. Well, yeah. And let me say too, I try not to like overly gatekeep myself. I don't want to pretend like I am really the guy that nobody can access. I think going out on social media and sharing content is great. There's a lot of college application consultants that do that to advertise themselves on Instagram and TikTok and whatever else, right?
41:15I think that's great. I don't do it because I frankly don't like social media. I don't have any personal social media myself. I don't enjoy it. So I don't go out and advertise. I know that's something that I'm not going to be able to consistently stick with. But for a lot of people that works for them and it generates value for the people that come to their page. They get a lot of followers. Like that can be great. That can be great for folks. It's just not my thing. So you've been doing this seven years. What's surprised you the most along the way? When I came into this and I sort of labeled myself as a college essay consultant, I came in with this mindset of like, okay, I'm a consultant.
41:45I'm supposed to have the answers. Your kid works with me and they pop out and through the magic of Carter, they will have great essays. And there you go. What I've found in the last few years and what I've tried to hone my practice around is the best essays, the best ones are the ones where the kid comes up with the idea, the kid generates their full draft, the kid works on a lot of their revisions, and I am kind of the guidepost along the way to help them better express the ideas that they already naturally have, or to help them dig deeper into the ideas that they're coming up with, but not someone who's coming in and saying, this is the best way to structure your personal statement.
42:17Or really, you should think about this paragraph here instead of that paragraph, because trust me, it works better. Those kind of guide points, they have their place. And sometimes you need those to kind of rescue an essay that's going in the wrong direction. But more often than not, I've found if you let the kid lead and you let them fully explore the idea that they want to go towards, the result ends up being great. It's compelling. It's personal. It has the kind of high school feel that college admissions officers look for versus the very manicured professional feel that can sometimes happen when consultants like me get too involved.
42:47To what extent are there templates or checklists that you can use to kind of streamline that delivery process? Or is every single one like, no, this really has to be unique and individualized. I'm just thinking of like, improving process flow, the more that you do. Oh, totally. Yeah, I've developed a process for sure. If nothing else, just out of necessity, right? I work with at any given time at the high point of the season, I'll be working with something like 25 to 30 students. If it were a chaotic, non-process oriented mess, I would lose track of where everybody is, right? So there's definitely a process to it.
43:20I will say most of that process applies early on for the personal statement, which is the messiest of all the essays. And then from there on, they get a little bit more consistent and you can follow a more consistent path. But through at least the first three or four meetings, it's a fairly structured process. And I can usually stick to that pretty well. Within the meeting, I don't really have a structure to the way that I talk with students. I don't have, you know, like a special three-step way to get the perfect personal statement idea. I think that's kind of overbaked in a lot of ways. Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at.
43:47And the reason for that was we had a woman on who was doing copywriting for crowdfunding campaigns. Like that was her niche service. And after doing a handful of these, what she found from the successful campaigns was they all followed a specific kind of template. And so after a while, it was like, okay, I can ask the client questions one, two, three, four, five, and have them. She would still massage it. But it was almost like fill in the blanks, paint by numbers. and there was a certain economy of scale that came with having done a bunch of these where she learned the template that works. That makes sense.
44:19Yeah, definitely. Well, when I think when it comes to business writing, that's great. I used to do that all the time in my PR job. Oh, we're doing a communications plan or I'm writing an op-ed or whatever. There are templates for those. There are structures you can follow to make it easier and simpler. When it comes to creative writing, personal and reflective writing, when you impose a pre-designed template or a pre-designed structure to an essay, it usually feels like you imposed a pre-designed structure to an essay. Do you know what I mean? But there are ways that I come in and when a student's talking to me about an idea, I'm thinking in the back of my mind, okay, is this a traditional narrative chronological structure?
44:51Is this a flashback narrative structure? Is this a thematic structure where you have a main theme at the center and then different anecdotes that they tell throughout the story that link to that theme? And then you reveal it at the end very climactically. It's kind of ironic. College application essays are in a way the most personal writing a lot of students have ever done. And that makes the job really fun and really rewarding, right? I'll often end sessions with students where they go, I've never thought about myself like that before, or I never knew that I believed in this thing, but I really do having told you about it and having talked about it.
45:21I really feel strongly about this. I love those meetings. Those always become great essays. Yeah, that's great. Maybe this is like a future product extension. It's like, well, I have kind of the recipe one, two, three, like, oh, does it fit into this bucket? Does it fit into this bucket. Like, okay, you know, if you want to hire me, I'll do it with you. That's going to be this price. But if you want the DIY version, like here's some guide rails, you know, digital product type of thing. But you mentioned potentially hiring some help this year, growing the client base now that the hours are more available.
45:52What's next for you? Where do you want to take this thing? Well, I think there's two directions. When I was first considering going full time, the big question was, do I pivot into being a full scope college admissions consultant and start taking on things like list building and college strategy consulting and all that? Or do I dig down and go deeper into my niche as an essay specialist? I've chosen door number two to kind of stay in my writing world and be an essay specialist. So hopefully ChatGPT doesn't get any better for a while because I'm in this world now. That said, the place I'm hoping to take it is to both deepen my work within college essays themselves and then also expand to take on some services that are just next door to college essays.
46:27So for example, I'm working with a student right now on application system specialized STEM-based summer camps, right? These summer camps are so competitive these days that they've started assigning essays as part of their applications. So I'm working with him, right? He's not even a senior yet. He's applying to summer camps. And yet here we are working on essays together. That's part of the deal now. That's part of the industry. And now hopefully I can start to expand a service there. Like I said earlier in the episode, right? I'm now working with students on professional coaching and consulting, folks who want to become tutors or even college essay specialists.
46:56I'm working with them to kind of talk about how to do it. There's some services that are just right next door to being an essay specialist that are easy for me to expand to. And then hopefully next year, I can add one or two more and the next year, one or two more and slowly kind of build out to be a more diversified and well-rounded business while keeping that core of the college essay world that I love so much. You get me stressed out. My kids are 10 years away from this world and it's like, oh gosh. Oh, yeah. Better start thinking about personal statement ideas right now. Oh, my goodness. Yeah.
47:25Yeah. No, I know. The whole college application world, it's kind of moved earlier and earlier in the educational process, hasn't it? It just every year, it feels like it's consumed more of the schooling life of these students. All right. Well, we'll cross that bridge. Yeah. Don't worry about it. You're fine. You'll get a call from me in 10 years. We'll be like, hey, Carter, we do some help, man. That's right. All right. Well, very good. CarterOsborneTutoring.com, Osborne with an E. We'll link that up in the show notes at sidehustlenation.com slash Carter as well. Thanks for joining me. This has been fascinating.
47:56I'm taking a ton of notes as always. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Yeah, thanks, Nick. And thanks for having me on. And may I say too, to all of the people who have been on your show before, thank you too. I started listening to this show a few months ago, having no knowledge about small business growth at all. And it's been extremely helpful. Thank you for putting in the work to make this podcast happen. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there that's gotten a lot of value out of it. Well, thank you for tuning in. And then it's dangerous because you'll get lots of different expansion ideas.
48:22Oh, I could do this direction. That's kind of where I'm like, oh, shoot, what if I was in your shoes? Where would I go? But yeah, I know. Totally. I know. I feel like last week I was like, should I start flipping furniture? I feel like, wow, that could really work. Yeah. In terms of my number one tip for folks listening to this, this is a little bit of like a high level fortune cookie kind of thing, but take it for what it's worth. And hopefully this helps people. When it comes to pursuing some sort of business idea or vision, I always encourage people to not let any sort of predisposed ideas about what a good business owner should be like to stop them from moving forward.
48:53Do you know what I mean? I feel like when we get into this, people always think, oh, you know, I need to be particularly cutthroat or particularly clever, or I have to have this school on my resume, or I need to be able to think in terms of statistics and economics really well. People think they have to have these sort of preset qualifications, either in personality or in knowledge, to be successful with their business idea or to pursue some sort of side hustle or something. And for me, I'll just say, nothing could be further from the truth in my experience, right? I was a political science major.
49:20I went to graduate school for public administration, which is basically the study of local government. And then I pivoted into corporate PR. And now I run a business in college essay consulting. I mean, nothing about that makes any sense. And nothing about that set me up. It was all part of the strategic plan. Yeah. All part of the plan. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Nothing about that sets me up to be the kind of person that runs my own business. And yet here we are, right? So it's one of those things where I always tell people, don't look at your background and think, am I right to run a business?
49:47That doesn't matter. There's no actual limitation between you and starting your business more than there is for anybody else, including people who got their degrees in business administration. You can pursue it just like anyone. There's no barrier there. Don't construct one yourself. And if you have any doubts, just look over to me and see the kind of wild zigzag path I've followed as a proof point of that. It's kind of a funny note. There was a funny line from Johnny Robinson on the show a couple years ago. And he was a college student, built this amazing window washing business while still in school.
50:15And when his buddy approached him with this idea, he's like, well, nobody in my family is entrepreneurs. I thought you needed a degree to start a business. And he kind of slowly realizes like, no, that's not the case. And over the course of 600 something episodes, it's like, it may almost be a detriment. Start something, start fast, get results, iterate and move forward versus like, it's almost an excuse for procrastination. There's a lot to learn along the way, but you don't necessarily need to do it in a classroom. So I appreciate that number one tip. A couple takeaways before we wrap up. I love the idea of trying to find this blue ocean niche.
50:48Like, hey, I tested the waters. I did a bunch of different flavors under the broad scope tutoring umbrella. I found this was the one that I liked the most. This was something that people were willing to pay for. And it had a fraction of the competition as anybody else. So I think that was really cool. Thinking of whatever you're a relative expert in, like, okay, what's the equivalent in your niche or your industry? I love the idea of tacking on to a big purchase. Hey, you're already going to spend a hundred grand on tuition, Mr. or Mrs. Perspective Clients, Parents. What's an extra three grand in the grand scheme of things to give yourself better odds?
51:20And you see this really common in the wedding business where it's like, oh, you're already spending 20 grand on this wedding. What's another thousand dollars for flowers or something? You're like, well, that's still an extra thousand dollars. But that's kind of like the different mindset. I like that idea of how to phrase that, but going after a market where people are already spending money with kind of a complimentary or add-on service. I like that. And then this idea of going after lead fountains, especially when you're starting out, like who are those one or two, doesn't take a lot, key strategic partners that can shortcut you getting in front of prospective clients versus playing the long SEO game or the long social media game.
51:57It's like, Hey, it may only take a handful of clients here to make significant side income. And you won't have to overthink it or look at other ways to play business in the procrastination way instead of just going after it and going directly to the source in this case. I think that was really cool. Again, the listener bonus for this week is my list of 101 other service business ideas that you might be able to apply some of Carter's growth tactics to. And there's probably little micro sub blue ocean niches within each of those too. So you can download that for free at the show notes for this episode.
52:28Again, sidehustlenation.com slash Carter or just follow the show notes link in the episode description in your podcast app. Big thanks to Carter for sharing his insight today. Thank you for listening and supporting the advertisers that help make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. And thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
52:59So fire off a text message. to say, hey, you got to check this out. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.
From the publisher
When you hear "college admissions essay consultant," you might imagine some dull, overly formal academic type.
But Carter Osborne from carterosbornetutoring.com took a pretty unconventional path to dominating this niche business.
When he started providing tutoring services on the side, he was just a "broke, desperate graduate student" in need of some extra money.
Carter actually had no formal business training. His background was in political science and public administration—so not exactly the traditional entrepreneurial breeding grounds.
Not exactly the traditional path for an entrepreneur, right?
And yet, the untraditional route Carter took allowed him to build a unique $100k consulting business, with almost all the revenue coming in just half the year.
While Carter's career path didn't seem logical as a tutor, he was about to discover an untapped market niche that was waiting to be explored.
Tune in to Episode 601 of The Side Hustle Show to learn:
How to come up with your lucrative side hustle offer
How to get your first customers
How to grow the business
How to handle the delivery logistics as a solopreneur
Full Show Notes: The $100k niche consulting business
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