69: Side Hustles with Lucas Walker

good afternoon everybody this is john barrows make it happen monday so hopefully you all had a fantastic weekend i took the weekend off and went down to a newport and watched a polo match which was always fun uh i got drunk and made fun of some super hoity-toity rich people uh blew off some steam there but i'm excited because today we're actually uh i got lucas on and lucas is actually a colleague of mine he actually works with jay barrows runs all the social stuff so all those uh images that you see on social all the videos and everything else uh lucas is the man behind the scenes on that one so lucas i'll say hi to everybody hey everyone i'm glad to uh finally be on the podcast after producing well this is episode 69 of make it happen monday so we've thrown in a few other bonuses so it's nice to be on the other side of the microphone for a change but i am not looking forward to editing it and hearing my own voice and hearing how terrible i sound so yeah that's always the hard part about like i always tell people if you want to get better at something immediately just record yourself doing it right and it's like and this is related to cold calls right if you quote like i highly so here's some small tips not that the topic is this but just some small tips out of the way early people cold call yourself leave yourself a voicemail message you're not going to need any coaching because you'll listen to exactly how bad you think you sound um same thing last off saying like uh um listen to yourself once exactly and uh even presentation skills training so when i i didn't do presentation skills training when i first started doing this and then all of a sudden about four years in i was like all right you know what i probably should go at least get some basics here right and i they recorded me and i was horrified by some of the stuff that i was doing up in front of a classroom so uh record yourself doing stuff get better at it but that's not the point of today's topic today's topic is side hustle because we hear a lot about side hustle i mean obviously lucas we're big fans of gary v here and he talks all about side hustle side hustle challenge go garage sailing at 6 30 on a sunday right so you know and i and i talk to a ton of people especially in san francisco california texas who all have side hustles or things they're working on that are kind of bigger picture or something kind of dream that they have to to go after so i you know i thought we'd spend this half hour just chatting about side hustles and and our perspective on them and how i think you and i look at them um so that people don't get uh too distracted on side hustles and think they absolutely need them or um you know think really more about the purpose of side hustle let's talk so let's talk about side hustle like what's your perspective on first of all what's kind of your definition of a side hustle uh and then what's your perspective on them and and how should we approach them right yeah so let me let's take a step back and i'll give a little bit of background for the listeners so a few years ago when i was working full quota carrying a e-job we started an e-commerce company treats happen i know a few people have actually mentioned me meant messaged me saying that they've heard about it on the podcast it's a natural dog treat company we were just making some dog treats for ourselves some other people wanted them so if you're you know what let's see if we can sell them let's see if there's a market for it and at the time we just thought it would be a way to write off some stuff that we buy for our dogs uh come tax time and i know you know working in sales with your commission checks going up and down it's sometimes you pay way too much tax sometimes you don't pay enough so then you get a nice little tax at the end of the year so that's really what we start how we started it as and since then over the last few years we've grown now we're in a couple hundred retailers across canada the u.s we're talking to some more big ones and that's where we are now that have that's grown from a side hustle but that's really not what everyone wants with a side hustle and to me it's really a hobby that you're monetizing monetizing in quotation marks because you might not make money but you might get experience from it you might get to give back maybe it's it's something else so for example maybe you volunteer with a charity to run their email marketing and you're not really making any money doing it but it's the exact same work that you could be doing for some small local businesses running their social or doing anything like that so i really think that for me a side hustle is a way to monetize a hobby or even your spare time because it might not be a hobby it might be a skill that you're learning or doing what gary does and going garage sailing and flipping it on ebay and it turns into a hobby but it's really a hobby that's for profit well i think it's also with purpose right i mean to your point whether it's for profit or for experience i think the the thing with side hustles that concerns me a little bit is that it really takes your focus away from your primary right so you know if you're so like if you're selling right if you're in sales and you got a side hustle and you're doing something else my position is this is like if it supports what you're doing and it kind of complements it and so you're learning a different skill and that type of stuff and you can then relate it back to your job okay or if you're in a job right now where you just really don't like it and but you don't have the luxury of saying you know what fuck it i'm just going to bail on this and i'm going to go do something different right if you don't have that kind of luxury because you have bills to pay and those type of things your side hustle can be something that you ultimately want to do um that's different that's completely different but it's got to have it's got to be part of a plan right don't just do it gaitano from sales hacker did a post on linkedin recently about it and it was the perfect example where he interviewed someone for his marketing team and career-wise it would have been a lateral move i think the person was in it or something but they didn't really have a lot of marketing experience they didn't know how to use google analytics and you know how to use hubspot or have any inbound certifications and that's really supporting where you want to be and gaitano said to him hey go get these certifications and work on a couple of your friends businesses and show me that you can run a few reports and come up with some critical suggestions and you can do that in your spare time you can go start a business or go work with someone else if you know that they don't have the resources to do it to say hey let me help you out if maybe you get to the point where you can charge a little bit or maybe you are doing it with that purpose of saying you know what i want to apply for jobs but i don't want that junior position so i need some experience i need to be able to show a few things that i've done i can now go in and say hey this is the report from google analytics that i pulled these were the suggestions that i implemented or these were the suggestions we we discussed implementing and these were the end results so now without leaving your job and giving up that income for six months 12 months two years you have those stories that you can go tell and not be making that junior move and really i think that one of the reasons why side hustle have become so popular is you couldn't really do that 20 years ago you couldn't go do accounting for someone part-time or work on their books you couldn't say hey you know what let me design some magazine ads for you because the cost was so high to implement them but now the cost to implement anything has come down so much anyone can really do it at any time which i think that's a topic for another day is has the have barriers of entry gotten too low but if you're motivated you can really go and do anything you can write a book you can get it published you can do literally whatever you want there's not a lot of barriers to entry here yeah but i think again if it's not either supporting what you're doing so you're learning or it's not put it in place for a plan then i think it's a i think it's a bad idea personally all right i'm sure there's plenty of people that could argue the other way right fuck it just go hustle regardless hustle let's hustle but this kind of gets back to my whole mentality of you know i used to have you know my 12 guidelines to success right like my 12 principles whatever uh and one of them was always have a plan b like that they like for for a few years when i first came up with them i was like hey always have a plan b actually no you know where this came from it was when i got fired from staples um i didn't have a plan b right so i was for seven years head down trying to grind trying to figure it out not looking at any options at all and then staples you know offered me the position and ultimately fired me and i kind of had a panic attack there because i'm like holy shit i haven't even thought about anything else here and so what am i supposed to do and so inherently i was like you know what i should have had a plan b right because i knew this wasn't going in a good direction i probably should have started looking otherwise but i i actually now disagree with that pretty strongly because with with a plan b that means you always have a default right so that which which in my opinion takes you away or distracts you from your planning right i think you should be the my opinion is like when you're going for something burn the paddles you know what i mean get on the island burn the boat and and say screw it i'm i'm all in um because otherwise you're like yeah well if that doesn't work out i could always do this and that means that plan a is never going to work out as well as you want it to and you're not going to give it the effort that you could now with that you know i've shifted that i'm not always on plan b instead of that to make sure you're okay with worst case scenario right which is every decision you make make sure you're okay with worst case scenario but i want to talk about how that distraction like how do you see the plan how do you see hot side hustle if it's completely outside and it's really just something to make a few bucks here or there like how do you see that impacting somebody's actual what they're doing and and their growth path for what they're trying to accomplish yeah i mean i think it really depends on what you want to do i mean going back to is it that monetizing a hobby so i've gotten into triathlons recently and they said they sent out an email saying hey we're looking for officials so i signed up and took the course and now i can make a little bit of money on the side just officiating if i'm not racing or competing and it could be maybe like working on cars so you buy old beater cars you fix them up then once every couple of years you sell them and you have to make a bit of profit then you do it again so is that is having a hobby going to take away from your growth probably not if anything it's probably going to help because who knows who you'll meet what doors it'll open they can help you out but i think it's really when it switches into your your mental capacity if you're focusing on your side hustle as your primary and then your work really becomes your your side hustle to support that hobby or that lifestyle that's really when it is and i think it depends on where you are in your career as well if you're still early in on your career and you're focusing you're honing your craft i mean i've been doing social now for nine and a half ten years and it's interesting because it's always changing but it's also at the point now where i'm comfortable i'm only now getting comfortable with what i recommend with how everything plays into the bigger picture so if you don't have i'd say 10 to 15 years experience you really do need to focus on that core growth to start and then maybe you're looking to shift something else so it's you need to time box it it's you and you also need to be be really honest with yourself and say am i putting way too much into this it's am i skimming away a couple hours during the day when i could be more productive on my main goals that's paying the bills and it gets into something that you and i were talking about especially in sales where it's uncapped let's say instead of that that side hustle time let's say half an hour a day during the week and a half day on the weekend so an extra eight to ten hours every week if you put that into closing an extra deal a quarter so a deal where that gets you into accelerators what's your commission going to be on that versus what you get out of doing the side hustle you might make 200 bucks on your side hustle which equates to four bucks an hour or that one deal that you put in that extra work all of a sudden now you're making 600 bucks an hour because you're in a much more advantageous spot so you really need to know what you're doing with your time but it's a personal choice too what makes you happier what do you want to say i think a lot of it has to do with your satisfaction and your drive for your existing job right so if you have a side hustle that is uh because you're not liking your job then make sure that that is a a bridge to another career or a bridge or to your point opens up other opportunities or puts you in a position to have conversations with other people that might open up opportunities for you in whatever direction you want to go in right because you know i i just i don't know i've all i look at shark tank so i know the they got the shark tank version up in canada and they get the one here too but you know every single time i see when i talk when i watch shark tank they'll ask hey is this your number one job like is what you know do you all have full-time jobs or how you manage them and they're like well you know this is no i'm a full-time doctor i'm a full-time lawyer i'm a full-time whatever and i do this on the side and those people unless the idea is so fucking good you know what i mean where it's like holy shit you know yes like we're going to invest in that unless it's so good like none of them will invest but even then the idea is worthless unless they have some ip that they can afford to not do it they never get invested because it they know it's not that distraction and there was that one episode where robert just bought the company out right and said i'll just pay you to run it for the next two years i can tell you're going to want the next shiny thing but it's such a cool company i think it was a the portable record player that it was a car that could spin around on the record and play it and robert just said i love it i know you're not going to run this you're going to run it into the ground in two years so let me run it i'll put you in as ceo for two years give you a nice fat contract and a royalty and then when you want to do the next thing you can go on to the next one but you really can't juggle two things you can't be all in for both you can't even side hustles i mean even side hustles that are complimentary i mean i will say like one of the the other thing that that i constantly you know try to do for myself is is focus right you know we talk about that that big five-year plan about where do you want to be from a lifestyle standpoint and then back into that and figure out what goals do you need to be you know going forward to be able to hit that bigger goal right yeah and and i'll give you an example like um probably about four years ago i came up with something that i thought was was perfectly complementary to what i was going to do and um and it was my opinion here a great idea um it was the whole sales from the streets right and so for those listening sales from the streets what it was and this was about four or five years ago so the and if there's anything i've learned in in in startups and everything like that it's timing right timing's timing's everything there you go still there even though we brought it down right um but timing's everything like you could have the best idea ever if the market's not ready for it it doesn't matter how great that idea is i mean i've seen idea after idea fail and then come back around like for instance uber wasn't the first uber right it was time that way so for me sales from the streets the whole idea was crowdsource sales training right where i could go around and get a bunch of video tips like two minute video tips from all my everybody i knew in this industry and then compile them and tag them based on industry roll and trigger and on sales stage and that type of thing having a little app so now reps could walk into the office and say oh objection handling it'd be 10 videos from sales reps out there doing objection handling and they just thumb up thumb down that type of thing and so i was like you know what this is perfectly complementary what i do i train in nuggets i train in tips and so i dropped probably twenty thirty thousand dollars into this i spent a lot of time getting video tips from other everybody else right i built the app i had the app and because it wasn't my primary focus it died yeah there was i can assume that there's not enough promotion because you couldn't put the time in and it's that's why one of the reasons that i'm so passionate about sales is everything is sales if you're going and pitching influencers or media or someone to talk about you you're selling you're selling them to cover you and then you're either negotiating what you pay them to do it or why they should cover you and not the 50 other pitches that they've gotten that way and it's really hard to do everything as a side hustle no matter how great the idea is well and that's and that's i mean i'm looking back on it as cool as that idea is and to this day like if i came out today if i relaunched that app today i think it'd be a massive hit because i think now video and all that stuff and just in time learning is there um but it's easy to produce video too now right it's a lot easier than it was a few years ago right and so now it's kind of like but i look back on that and i'm like shit man i wish i didn't do that because not only did it cost me 30 grand to give or take but it also cost me a significant amount of time that i should have been putting into you know the training improving the content or whatever it is and who knows right i mean obviously things keep moving in the right direction we're you know we keep growing but i maybe could have grew a little faster you know what i mean i might have made some better decisions moving forward with other investments instead of making that investment so you know i i look at it at focus being the key to anything i mean i talk when we talk about training right my number one recommendation for reps and training is when it comes to time management because that's always a huge issue every rep is always like oh time management you know and i always look at them i'm like time it's not because you're too busy like they're like oh i'm being asked so many things doing shut up you're not busy no like look how much you travel and how much you get done yeah same thing and i don't want to toot my own horn but i work for you full time i'm running a business on the side i'm an advisor to my first startup i'm running triathlons yeah i have a life but it's just about focus right i mean i think i'm busy there's people out there who are 10 times busier than i am and and but i still get my shit done because it's because i i've stopped doing a little bit of everything and i've started to say okay you know what for an hour i'm just going to do research for an hour because i can get very efficient in that hour doing research now for the next hour i'm just going to make cold calls because i can get very efficient making cold calls when i'm just making for the next hour i'm going to do this right and by focusing on that you can have that okay i can get this done and it's the same thing from a business standpoint the more diverse you are with all the different things you're trying to get accomplished the less you're actually going to get accomplished yeah you can't say oh i'm gonna go in quickbooks here i've got three receipts here just put those receipts aside and do it once a week once a month and do it all at one time because you a it's hard to shift tasks and b you get faster the longer you're doing it so you might start off doing one a minute but then at the end of the hour you're doing two a minute because you get into that routine and that pattern yeah it's also like from a consulting standpoint when i talk to a company like reps or people who are trying to start businesses you know especially in the consulting space i'm like you know what i'll just share with i'm like my recommendation whatever take it for whatever it's worth but i'm just going to share how i've built mine and how it's been successful is that i've gotten hyper focused on two programs right we got filling the funnel and driving to close and i always tell people look i'm a two-trick pony i got filling the funnel i got driving to close after that you know you want a 201 301 401 version of it not me you want somebody to come in and consult with you and assess your situation and map out like a full strategic plan not me those type of things which is very narrow in the world of sales i mean i could do a whole bunch of shit you know i mean i've been in sales now for 22 years i've seen almost every methodology there is out there i got experience that i can i probably forgotten more about sales than most people have learned early in the 20s and that type of stuff so i could do a lot of stuff but what i was finding when i first started doing this consulting stuff that the more random shit that i was doing i wasn't great at anything no so i just honed in and said you know what forget about that let me refer all those other right and now that's why megan does most of our sales our coo does most of our sales because i tell her don't sell either it's a good fit or it's not yeah ask these questions tell them what the program is and this is how much it costs if they want if it fits it fits if it doesn't it doesn't don't try to convince them right so and it's made sales so easy it's made our target audience so we know exactly who our icp is we know exactly what the value proposition is and that goes into one of my ethos of you see companies all the time try to do a million different offerings and try to be everything to everyone but if you can't sell a million dollars or a thousand units of this one thing what makes you think that you can sell a hundred million of everything else it's and jumping back into side hustles it's just try to do one thing like on the weekend i was making pickles with my buddy maybe your side hustle is something that you enjoy doing and then you go sell those pickles at a farmer's market and then you put away that money and you go on a vacation right and it's that focus you know what no all we do is dill pickles we don't go into bloody mary spices we don't do cut up speared pickles we do whole dill pickles and when you really start to think objectively of anything whether it's a crop an arts and crafts project like that or selling sales training it's what are you focusing on one or two things that you know so well that you can really say yes it makes sense no it doesn't versus trying to really shoehorn something into everything yeah definitely so i mean so the takeaway is again focus but it's if you have this if you have the side hustle support what you're doing so you can learn on the side or or how to be a bridge to something you really want to do to set yourself up so that you can make that transition in jobs and have some experience right yeah or have it as a hobby if you just happen to enjoy doing it and then you can make a little bit of money doing it sure but you don't necessarily need to build a full business you can just do it as something that you do on the side that makes a few extra dollars yeah i mean what do you suggest to people that are out there right now that because like you know again i'm gonna bring it back to gary and a lot of times you know a lot of the advice from a lot of these super successful people is you know if you don't like your job quit and go do something else or you know have this side hustle and make a few hundred dollars here or there and you know just hustle hustle hustle what do you think the danger of that is um but i guess what's the real message and what's the danger message out there about side hustles from your perspective i think getting distracted it's i don't think enough people focus on their craft long enough where and we see it all the time you know eight months into an sdr role you're not that happy so you start looking around but sometimes just ride it out for another few months do make sure you experience two full seasons so two summers two winters really get to know it and you'll learn what you like you'll learn what you really don't like doing and so that'll let you know what to do i think with a side hustle it's too easy to say oh i gotta chase this and everyone wants to do the super sexy side hustles but they're also the most competitive and hardest like the patent industry what we started in it was just a sheer coincidence that we happened to be doing it if i was doing it now i would be much more pragmatic but what i would do and it would probably be the least sexy thing like selling insoles to old people for their corns on their feet but that's the stuff that you happen to make the most at if you're doing it in a really pragmatic approach just really focus on what you want to do and don't get distracted don't give up super easily don't use your side hustle as your lottery ticket to get out of your job use it to to export it use it or to as a multiplier to get where you want to be going a little bit faster use it as a way morgan's a perfect example his side hustle was the was the sdr chronicles it was creating content it wasn't to make money but it was a hobby that really accentuated his growth in what he was doing yeah so really have it be complimentary but make it a commitment as well if you don't get any sales or if you don't get any better that first month don't give up yeah keep at it keep getting a little bit better but don't use as a lottery ticket to get out of a job that you hate because if and it's so cliche but really if you won the lottery you should still want to the first thing your first thought when winning the lottery shouldn't be wow i'm going to quit my job right away it's yeah if that's the case then you need to kind of take a different perspective on the life view of where you want to be and again make sure that what you're doing right now is supporting where you want to go because it doesn't and that's the one i keep saying to everybody like everybody comes to you like john you know i'm not happy in my current role or i you know what do you think about this i'm looking at another job and my my question was always like all right where do you see yourself in five years and i don't mean as far as work is concerned as far as like what your title is going to be in those type of things that's that'll come but like for literally from a lifestyle what kind of car what kind of house what kind of family what kind of you know travel whatever what does that look like for you then back into it and say okay now therefore how much money do i need to be able to make to live that and therefore what job do i need to have to be able to do that that's kind of the big picture now will give me that much money with the least amount of effort right right and then how can i get myself there right because you can eat a shit sandwich as long as like as long as it's on its way to a plan but if you're don't have a plan now all of a sudden you're just going to look for a better taste and shit sandwich and that you know and it's i made that mistake a little bit early in my career of jumping around a little too much i still think every move that i made was justified but looking back i probably would have held it held on a little bit longer like when i quit my first job looking back it was and you always have the rose colored glasses on it was a pretty good thing and i left to start a uh sauce company that's still going and quite strong so i think i did make the right choice but really have that long-term outlook and that discipline to look at where do you want to be and if you write out what you're doing right now will that keep getting you there can you keep eating this shit sandwich or are you just trading it for for a smooth shit sandwich to a chunky shit sandwich at the end of the day yeah and and let's um you know add into this the fact that don't don't ignore the fact that a side hustle can also be at your current job so yeah like don't don't uh ignore asking for additional responsibilities or for instance here's one very relevant to a lot of people that i talk to which is you know they like the idea of what i do right training and enablement those type of things and they're saying like well john how do you get started into what you're doing and my biggest recommendation is leverage your existing company so if you're a sales rep right now and you're and you're good at sales define your process make sure you can explain your process whatever it is and then go to the enablement department or go to go to whoever like hr to talk about how they're doing onboarding and what they're doing from a process and a structure standpoint and see if there's some projects you can work on with that company to help like develop programs and stuff so everybody else can do it right yeah and then from there you know that will first of all show that you're hungry and now you have to be executing it your existing job you can't not execute it that and there's no way they'll let that happen but if you're hitting your numbers you're doing your thing and you want to take on some extra responsibility like those are the people i think morgan always says that you know like do more than what the job description is if you want a promotion don't just do the job description and look for the promotion right no be so good that you're putting them in a position where if you decide to stop doing it they're screwed right like that's how you get the leverage that's how you say move me into this position or i want to be the head of enablement when you've been training all the reps and if all of a sudden you say you know what i'm really too busy to be doing both now and i'm not getting paid for this i really got to focus on my main job that's when you have that discussion to get into the position that you really want and even lateral moves i know a lot of sales reps who have gone into marketing and go write some blog posts for your company for free say hey can i go into the google analytics can i see what trends i can find can i try writing some ad copy and there's a great book the copywriter's handbook it's phenomenal for anyone in marketing but also in sales if you can write a really good sales email you can write a really good ad yeah why not do both and it's just work with the teams i think that's a good little segue into as we wrap it up here a few different ideas for side hustles is one work within your current company find something that you want to do work with a not-for-profit if you want to make a move from sales to marketing go offer to do the monthly newsletter for a charity that means something to you you can probably do a better job than they can if you want to get into sales start offering to get donations for a charity figure out how you can help somebody else with yours monetize an existing hobby that you have if you're really into photography go to a show and shine if you like photography and cars go to a show and shine take a bunch of photos of everyone's car post it on your instagram page and say hey if you want a private photo shoot send me a direct message and coordinate something that way like give it away for free and then figure out something that you really want to be doing so whether it's doing e-commerce or refereeing or having some other little company that can be fairly hands-off do that yeah excellent all right well we gotta get going here we're gonna wrap it up but yeah i think um you know long story short on on the side hustle like i said like we talked about focus right don't let it be a distraction either let it be a bridge to something you really want to do or support something you're already doing but it has to be part of a bigger plan uh don't just go out there and have a side hustle because you don't like what you're doing now and you think that by making a few extra bucks on the side that's going to help because to your point lucas you know if you just put that extra time into selling something else or whatever it is it's probably way more than what you're going to make on a side hustle unless you're selling something that's that's pretty bananas um but that's it we got a couple of conferences did you want to mention anything on the way out the door here yeah so i'm coming down to boston next week i'm going to be at hypergrowth inbound aaisp event uh we might do a mini happy hour meetup we haven't decided yet so stay tuned on social for that if we do it so hit me up lucas at j barrows hit me up in the facebook community uh wherever message john if you want to meet up i'm really looking to meet with other marketers that sales companies so definitely hit me up so we can chat about collaborating in the fourth quarter and end in 2019 yeah definitely and i'll be over a 10 pound morgan and i'll be a 10 pound this week out in san francisco so come meet us there uh we got some make it happen gear if you take a make it happen if you take a picture with some make it happen gear with us out there and post it uh we're giving away a portal license plus an hour of my time or morgan's time and some gear so uh find us out there on social find us out there next week and this week uh at the conferences and uh we will all see you on the flip side thank you all very much for listening make it a great week thanks lucas later i'm a great bye you you you you