Lessons - How To Make Money Wit Your Passion | Stacy Tuschl, Best Selling Author & Serial Entrepreneur

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. Let's go through the stuff that you built and either purposefully or accidentally what did you learn? So both times were accidents, and I think that's part of my success was I never led with I want to make money. It was I love dance so much how do I continue this while I go to school and then get a real job. And then it was I didn't realize this but I actually grew up in an entrepreneurial family so my parents and grandparents, they had a construction business, still have it over 50 years old right now. So I lived and breathed small business and I didn't really even put that together growing up, right? I just got to hear conversations. So what happened was I realized more than liking dance, I love business, I love strategy, I love all the things. So I led with my passion, but then very quickly realized, okay, but I'm going to need the skill sets of how to sell, how to market, how to retain, how to build systems, how to lead, right? All of that stuff. So I think leading with passion, if you lead with just money, at some point you burn out or you, it's not exciting, I've actually had more than just two businesses and all of the ones that I quit, there's two reasons either one, there was partners involved and I highly recommend do not get involved with partners. Number number two, I thought, ooh, I'm going to make a lot of money over here and I jumped on something hot and trendy at that time. And at some point I was like, I don't really like this, like this isn't really fun for me. So those businesses always stopped because I just was no longer interested. So lead with passion, but then the passion can only take you so far, you've got to figure out how to, how to build, how to market, how to hire, how to fire, how to all the things, right? So I think that's a big, big thing people do wrong as they think, well, this is, this looks like it would be profitable or this looks like it would make a lot of money and then they realize, wow, this is a little harder than I thought and then they quit. So when you are building out and you're building based on your passion, how do you find the quickest path to revenue so that can be sustainable? Yeah, okay, I love this question. So lead with passion, but then I think the next question is, what is the fastest way to make money? Because here's the deal, you will run out of funds at some point, right? At some point you don't have cash flow, the credit cards maxed out, bank accounts drained, et cetera. So you have to ask yourself, how do I get here as fast as possible to at least break even and then to profitability? So sometimes I actually do tell people like, once you pick what you want to do, you might have to do something in that same category, which for me, maybe it was teaching one on one. Like I don't really want to teach one on one, but I know I can make money as fast as possible if I consulted privately. So I started consulting privately, even though I knew eventually I wanted to be a one to many type model. So yes, there may be some sacrifices you're going to need to do. I think online, a lot of people will come into the business or come into starting a business and hear about online business and passive income. And then they'll start working with me and the first thing they'll say is, oh, I don't want to do all the stuff you're doing. I just want to, you know, put out an online course to make money every day and I'm behind the scenes. Yeah, you and everybody else, like, you're not going to start there, right? You're going to have to do some things in the beginning temporarily till we get you understanding your market, understanding what they want from you. And also getting you good at the skill set of teaching, coaching, whatever it is you're doing in this business, there is practice and repetition that's involved. Once you get good at that, right, and you start to create demand, which is what most small businesses are missing in the beginning, you don't have demand. You have lots of supply, but no demand. You've got to create the demand. And as you create demand, all of a sudden I was maxed out with private clients. I couldn't take anybody else on. So I started to raise my prices and then I kept raising them. And at some point I said, you know what, I don't need more money. I want my time back. So I started to say no more private clients. I'm only going to coach in a group setting, right? So I got to lower the price, but maximize my time. So whatever you can do, go to that temporary sacrifice, reminding yourself it's only temporary and start making money as fast as possible. Most people's businesses cancel clothes because the cash flow, it's the number one problem white business is shut down. And to back it up, because I'm going to talk about growth and how to grow and everything. But when someone's starting, so I've always spoken about how you can start something while you're still working in a job. Is that good, bad, indifferent? What's the best way to start? Yeah, so when I graduated from high school, I was going to school full time. I was teaching dance at a dance studio. I was teaching the kids every Sunday in my parents' backyard. And then I had two bartending jobs because I could only work from 10 p.m. till 2 in the morning. So yeah, like that talk about a hustle, right? Like sometimes like getting started, ideally people say like, take the leap, quit your job. Okay, well, how much money do you have because at some point you will run out of money? So my bartending gig was funding my business until I said, okay, I think I'm making enough money here that I can take the leap, but it was a smarter leap. I knew that I already had a proven established business and taking that leap eventually, quitting the bartending job, right, was what made me say, okay, now I need to really start paying myself and really start building a real business. So I know a lot of people are going to say like, burn the boat, right? I do think though, you've got to look at how much money are you sitting on? Do you have, I mean, if you're going to use credit cards and if you don't want to go into credit card debt? So you've got to be really smart about what you're going to do if this is going to be your full thing. I mean, it can take you a year, two years to really figure out how to make money. I mean, some, it goes faster than not everybody, so you've got to be really careful. Don't just assume. I want to point out like there's, you were talking about like coaching businesses and service-based business, but also like widgets that you can sell like, or it could be a technical person who wants to develop an app like these, yeah. So first, find somebody that you can model, right? Find something that's already working. So when you're talking about an app or anything like this, do not just use them though, as well, people always say like, well, they're making three million, and if I could just get a fraction of what they're doing, I'll be like, that doesn't work like that, but we all want a fraction of the person, you know, making this much money. You have to really start to look at what your product is doing and creating, right? How do we get that thing working? How do we get that selling? So the first thing you want to do is look for a model. Don't copy, but start to really understand in a few different competitors what you think is working, what you think is missing, what you're reading on reviews, what they're loving, what they're not loving, right? I mean, we get to cheat. We get to go look at reviews on lots of different platforms, and we can see some honest reviews of loved it, but we should have this, you know, really liked it or really liked this about it. That's where you start to take that information and create your own version that looks different. Now, the big thing you want to be thinking about is how do you already go in a place where there is demand, but you become a little bit different than what is already there. If you try to become so what we call blue ocean, which is based on a book, blue ocean, which is talking about go where it's not saturated, but if you go where it's really not saturated, is there even enough demand? Do you have to educate people on you need this, right? So go where there's already a red ocean, and there's a lot of demand, right? But you go in and you be the different offer that nobody has seen before, right? Make your app, make your course, make your service, your products so different than anything that is out there, and that information, it might come from you, but a lot of times it comes from the user, it comes from the person that's already using it or needs it. So you really want to do that market research, and you don't have to have clients for that. You get to go into other people's Facebook groups, other people's forums, and you get to look at all of that information to take that and create whatever it is you're selling.