680: $60k on the Side With This Niche Virtual Assistant Service

$60,000 on the side last year with this unique niche virtual assistant service. Here's a creative example of how the world is really only as competitive as we make it. With the right positioning, you can carve out some space for yourself. You can serve some happy customers. and you can make some money along the way. Today's guest did just that with a fully remote house management service targeting busy parents and moms and found traction almost...

immediately. From Heron House Management, Heron like the bird, Hannah Morgan, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. You bet. Stick around in this one. We're covering how you might come up with your niche service, something you could borrow on your own or start on your own. The most effective ways that Hannah's found to market the business and her plans to grow it to six figures.

Now, Hannah, when I think house management, I think in person. I don't think Vermont. I think somebody on site doing laundry, picking up groceries, maybe coordinating and meeting with contractors, but with...

Heron, it's all virtual. Talk to me about the inspiration, the spark to create this. You're right. House management is traditionally an on-site, on-staff role for ultra-wealthy people. And it's somebody that lives on-site or is on-site a lot, and they are responsible for the well-being of the entire home. So all of the people that work for the family.

and all the comings and goings. And so I thought, what if we could apply that in a micro sense to make it more accessible and affordable to people who need those services in a fractional way? So the inspiration for it was really out of my own experience becoming a parent in 2020.

I'm a project manager. My husband's a project manager. And I found that as you have children and your life becomes more complicated, there is just a huge administrative burden that people don't tell you about, right? There's the joys of parenting, but then there's also the paperwork that comes along with it.

And so I found that there was a need to put in place these systems, but also to be able to really have project management be a part of our personal life as well as our professional lives. I found that I was really good at it. I'm good at creating systems. I'm good at me.

them and applying my professional skills. And my husband is too. But I just had less desire to do it because all of a sudden I wanted to spend more time with my children doing something that was more fulfilling to me rather than staying up late on my computer or knocking off my digital to-do list.

were a service out there that might be able to address this need that I had. I found that there were virtual assistant services out there that were geared towards working with families, but I didn't find anything that really hit at the need, which was to truly relieve mental load. And so the mental load...

is that weight that comes along with the managing of the home, the planning, the anticipating, the researching, the managing. And so I thought, what if I could take my project management perspective and skills and apply that here and I could actually create a role that's... a fractional house management role that operates more like a project manager instead of a virtual assistant for our clients.

Yeah, a sub-niche within that. And by going niche, you go upmarket or you become more valuable to say. Other people might be able to do it, but this is all we do, right? We're the specialists in this specific area. The buzzword around mental load. I don't think I ever heard that phrase up until 12 or 18 months ago. It seems...

To be really front and center on who in a relationship, who's bearing the mental load? And what are you thinking about? How do we offload some of this? Just like, how do we sleep well at night, not having a million things left on the today? list. So I think marrying that project management background and expertise with this kind of trending topic and being able to speak to that, it seems like that really resonated.

Yeah, my aha moment came when my sister actually, who has children, she's much older than I, she brought the term cognitive labor to me and it clicked for me. I was like, wait, that's what I do. Hold on a second. And then it wasn't until a friend of mine said that she had a...

nanny who also did house management work for her who did things like notice that the toothpaste was low and buy more and i was like i do that i should be paid for that that should be a job and so it occurred to me that when we have the invisible labor of mental load. That's the things that are never really seen and often not talked about. It goes unnoticed, it goes unappreciated, and it goes uncompensated.

Yes. I want to pause and kind of briefly, well, the house manager was like somebody on staff for wealthy families. There's a business idea framework just in that to say, well, what are wealthy people spending money on? And is there a creative way to make that? more accessible in some cases. Well, we're going to have to bring it remote because we can't be there in person. House management, just one example. What are wealthy families spending money on and how can we...

Bring it to the masses. And many, many businesses, I feel like, have been born from that framework. So the overarching response I'll give you is that wealthy people are buying back their time. That's how they're using their money. So they're trading money for time. And that's something that a lot of people don't have the luxury.

to do because they don't have access to disposable income to be able to do that. And so we recognize that in the work that we do, and we're very committed to making solutions that are affordable. We have tons of free content. We have spreadsheets that are available for download that you can use.

organize a lot of this and project manage yourself that are $3 to $6, right? We're trying to make this accessible. But we also recognize that our service is something that should be compensated and that we feel like has market value. So the kinds of things that our clients see a lot.

of value in us doing is really that project management piece. And I'll give an example between the difference of delegating and telling somebody what to do versus having a true thought partner. And so an example would be the onset of summer or in some communities like January.

we're all frantically signing up for summer camps for our children. And we're trying to figure out how we're going to deal with the gaps in care, when we're going to plan vacations, etc. Yeah, yeah. They're all like 930 to noon. You're like, well, that's not necessarily going to work. And you got to sign up in March.

Yeah. And there's a 10-day break in the middle of July just because. So yeah, there's always gaps. There's always problems. And so instead of doing this research, staying up till midnight and trying to get the first one on the wait list, all these kinds of things, mapping out where everything's going to go.

Clients are able to ask their house manager if they can own the process and the success of the project by saying, okay, here's my kid's ages. Here's what they're into. Here are my needs and my availability this summer. Me and my partner are available to pick up.

these hours or whatever, we're willing to drive up to 20 minutes away from our house. And this is our budget for the summer. And so with these tools that we've developed allow the house manager to fully map out the summer. And then in my kids' summer, it's 11 weeks slot in various.

camps. And so it can be very complicated, and it can be very costly, and it can require lots of logistics because every camp has its own stuff you have to bring and instructions for drop-off in different times, and each parent is going to a different camp each week.

having a house manager to really own that process is enormous. And then they're also able to do the registration, the paperwork, pay for the camp, get all the dates on the calendar, line up any gaps in care if you need it, and then also suggest, hey, you've got a gap in care this week. Why don't you use some of your PTO and take that vacation that we've been talking about? So that's an example of something that has such a huge impact on our clients' lives. Yeah, especially I could see it for...

vacation planning, I can see for meal planning, I can see for coordinating home improvement projects, lots of different use cases. Oh, yeah. All are red and better. Yeah. During your competitive analysis, you find, well, there's tons of virtual assistant agencies, services.

And there are some higher end house management services, but like there may be a gap in the middle. Is that the hypothesis? Yeah, absolutely. I felt like the virtual assistant services out there that are mass market tend to leverage AI. They often use an anonymous portal where you basically put your request into a portal. Anybody picks up that need. You say, hey, I need a dentist appointment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to have a service called Fancy Hands. I don't know if they're still around. It was a great name, but it was just that. Throw it into the app and any number from the pool of different assistants could go make that restaurant reservation or do this initial...

research on other stuff that Adam do. Yeah, exactly. And that's great for small tasks like that. We also found a lot of the services use offshore talent and they use people who maybe don't have the same shared lived experiences that are...

clients really want to see their house manager have. And so typically who we hire are people who are teachers. project managers and former house managers themselves, because those are the people that are empathetic. They're fantastic planners. Some are parents, some are not, but they understand the complex working needs of a family in order to be able to truly anticipate the needs.

of making a reservation, like you put it into the portal and you say, make me a reservation here. Well, what if they don't have the right time? Or what if there's all these factors they have to go back and forth with you? Our house manager instead would say, hey, your anniversary is coming up in two months. Let's surprise your partner.

going to line up the babysitter. I found this hot new restaurant that meets your dietary restrictions, and I'm going to make the reservation, plug it into your calendar, get the childcare lined up, put it on the calendar so everybody knows where to be, and then maybe arrange for a nice...

gift along the lines of whatever the occasion may be, birthday, Valentine's Day, whatever. So that's the kind of anticipating that we bring to the table that's based on that relationship. And that's the kind of relationship you can't have when it's through a portal or somebody that you don't have that shared experience with. So we really pride ourselves on that one-to-one. I think that's a defining factor for sure.

Did your sister end up being client number one? Or tell me about your first sale here. So I actually talked to about 100 people, working parents who had this need. And I said, hey, what would it look like if there was a service that was more than a traditional virtual system?

service. Some people said that they had tried other virtual assistant services for families and these were their pain points. Other people said, oh, this is my wish list. And a lot of people said, I don't know if you can deal with this problem, but I have this kind of amorphous issue in my life and I don't. really know how to deal with it.

And what I found is that when we say yes, we get it done. Were these neighbors or these parents from school or like, how do you find these 100 people? They were one-to-one conversations, but they also happened on Facebook. There are a lot of corners of the Facebook social media world.

where working parents and moms gather. And that was where I got some of my best initial research because I was able to reach such a large group. And it was just a conversation and people were able to like riff off of each other. It wasn't a survey. It wasn't like something where we did statistical analysis. It was just like, hey.

Let's talk about this. And then we've been able to refine that over the years through the same model of just getting feedback from our clients and also getting feedback from these groups where people are talking about things like mental load, what they wish they could do to help.

Okay. Dean Maxwell would call it like his idea extraction method. Like what are the pain points? If you had a magic wand, how would you solve this problem? You know, what's keeping you up at night? You know, where do you see? this going in five years what have you tried so far to address this like all these kind of trying to pull out like in their own words their own language they almost arrive at the solution for you and you're like well now now it's just on me to build that

Yeah. And then you have to come at it from a perspective of curiosity and also commitment to the problem, not just attachment to the solution that you think would work. And so in this case, we definitely did massage and adjust our services and how they work and how they're structured to make sure that it met. the needs of our clients. But we're also interested in...

other ways that we can address mental load through products. We have our digital downloads. We have tons of content that we generate. So it's definitely like a bigger picture that we're addressing as far as having these conversations around mental load. The actual service of the virtual house management is one piece of...

that. Okay. And so from these initial 100 conversations, a percentage of those end up signing up for the service and say, yeah, can we just hire you? You're describing this exactly. I want to pay you to make this pain go away.

Our very first client is still with us. She has been with us since day one. And to her, I'm very grateful. She was the first person who took a chance on us. And I think we've done right by her. She's been a wonderful family to work with. And actually, the first person that I hired on my team is somebody that I've known and worked.

with, she and I worked together almost 10 years ago now, and she was my day one hire, and she's now our operations manager. So we're definitely committed to the longevity of the relationship and the service. So it sounds like this is parent groups, mom groups on Facebook, certain subreddits. Like, where are you finding these people to even get them to sign up? Shockingly.

a lot of people come from Reddit. I would have never expected that. And here's something very interesting. So there is a very slight gender skew for more men than women on Facebook, which I did not realize because a lot of the spaces that I exist on Facebook are women-only spaces.

moms in whatever industry or women in this industry. There's some sort of identity affiliation, moms by birth year in your community. But then when I went to Reddit, I found that there's actually quite a heavy skew towards men. And so a lot of our leads...

that are men that come to us are from Reddit, which I think is really interesting. And I think it's because they're in those subreddits that are like a little more open and you can access them through a Google search. So people will often say, oh, I found you on Google. But what they really meant is... they did a Google search and they found us through Reddit or some of our content, which is interesting. Talk to me about the Reddit strategies you have.

a Heron house management or a broader house management, virtual house management subreddit? Or are you kind of posting other people complaining about the problems that you solve and you're gently raising your hand saying, we might have a solution for you. How do you go about it? I mean, honestly, that's a great idea. I should do all of this. those things. But that's no, that's not how it happens. Somebody somewhere someday said, I have this problem. And I said, great, we can help.

It just kind of unfolded from there. And a lot of word of mouth will say, oh, I heard about this company. You should check them out. Or is there anybody that could meet this need? That kind of thing. Word of mouth is also a really big one for us. And we find that, you know, a happy customer who feels like they're.

problem has never been recognized, but now is being solved is often the most satisfied customer. Okay. Versus you going in searching for threads around mental load or I need some help or remote virtual assistants and then spamming.

links. It's more like the handful of initial clients started to post on your behalf almost and positively spread the word there, which is a great reputation to have. Well, yeah. The word of the mouth happens online and also in person. We also contribute to fundraising.

that serve our key demographic. And so that's something they say, go where the customer is. And so we wanted to contribute to our local community. And so we contribute to a handful of schools that have annual fundraisers as a way to be able to reach our target audience. And it's a way that we...

can make a contribution locally. And that's a nice way of bringing people in. But I find that because people are purchasing as more of like an experiment, they don't tend to stay as long. The conversion rate to long-term client isn't as high as you would expect.

They come in, they love the service, but they kind of come into it with the expectation of, oh, I'm just going to use this three-hour gift certificate or five-hour gift certificate that I won at a silent auction for my kids' school fundraiser. It's really the people who come in and they're like, I don't know where to start.

start. I'm so stressed out. What can you do? Those are the people that tend to stay with us the longest because we're able to change their systems in their home and in their personal life. And that's where the real change happens. I love the fundraiser angle, like the school fundraiser. It's like donate a three hour block of time. It's not that big of a lift for us. But for the person like.

Maybe it's a sampler platter of like, this is what it would be like to work with a virtual house manager. But it also has the benefit of every other parent at that silent auction as they're walking around looking at the thing.

hey, I didn't know you had this business. I didn't know you did this, right? It's like my wife does something similar for her photography business. Hey, well, the free family photo session, sign up here, expected value is this. And oftentimes that person who wins ends up... Well, now every year that goes by, we're going to need more family photos. They might have 10 friends that they refer you to. And everybody else who's there is like, oh, dang, I didn't win. But we really do need.

Christmas card photos coming up. So it's like a little bit of exposure, hyper localized. It's hard to scale that, but pretty low lift marketing strategy. More with Hannah in just a moment, including pricing the house management service and onboarding clients. So they stick around for the long haul right after this. For such an important channel like Faun, the software powering this important channel was...

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It's interesting you mentioned the photographer relationship because you often think of that as a one-time purchase, but what you're saying is that it actually recurs annually. And so I find that with our business, because we don't really sell a lot of one-off products, the ones that we do are the downloads.

We don't offer gift certificates year round. We only really offer them a couple of times a year for special events like Mother's Day and Valentine's Day and then these donations because we find that people really need to be committed to building that relationship.

foundation of trust for it to be a successful relationship. Otherwise, you are kind of stuck in this, oh, well, it's just three hours. Can you help me plan this one trip or just do this one thing, you know? And so that's, I think, why we don't see as great client retention. We still do it because I think it's part of our...

commitment to our community and having these conversations. And we've had some wonderful clients convert from it. And that's fantastic. But I think when you get into that like higher dollar, longer. longevity of our relationship, there's just a longer sales cycle with that because it's a mental shift that needs to happen. Yeah, I like the Mother's Day gift certificate angle. We had a guy who was doing a mobile.

car wash, mobile detailing business that went nuts on Facebook. It was pre-sold, you know, tons and tons of Mother's Day certificates. So like, well, here's a unique novel gift. We'll get mom the car cleaned out. Yeah. But yeah, it's like, how do you translate that into... a long-term relationship versus like transactional here's my three-hour type of thing going back to reddit are you doing anything proactive or are you kind of relying on the client base the community to

to pump you up and refer you there? I won't lie. Reddit is not my native language. Every Reddit has its own rules about what you can post and what you can't. Some you can share links, some you can't. So a lot of the work that I do is on Facebook, the Reddit stuff.

I think it's just old comments and posts from a while ago that maybe I made, maybe other people made. I'm not even sure at this point. But the Facebook is kind of where more of those conversations tend to happen. And then we also have a weekly podcast. And that's a nice way of reaching a different audience.

we feature a new guest every week and we have people that come in and they talk to our target audience, which is working parents about how to create systems that minimize stress at home. And so anytime we have somebody on the podcast, they are also bringing their audience with them because they're sharing on their social networks, and they're promoting the content that they've created with us. And so that's a nice way of expanding our marketing reach organically.

Got it. This is De-Stress the Nest. If you want to go check out the Heron House Management podcast over there, tips to minimize stress at home. Do you get people saying, hey, we heard about you on the podcast and now we want to sign up? Oh, yeah, totally. Absolutely. And it's interesting seeing like what are...

highest performing episodes are, they're not always what you would think, right? People seem to really crave the kind of structure that I thought they would be resistant to. So we have an episode on creating SOPs for your personal life and creating a project management tool.

to help bring your family and get your kids involved. Which appeals to people who live in spreadsheets and that's their love language. That's exactly it. I can see other people, their eyes are glazing over, but I can see for my wife and I would be like, yes, that's what we need. This is great.

Yeah, people love that kind of content. I always say it's a choose your own adventure. Like we have episodes about ADHD, about meal prepping, about all kinds of other things that are not highly systems oriented and like for the spreadsheet nerds of the world. But I'm always surprised when I see how the...

trend of episode topics is. And yeah, people love that kind of content. And we also do it in 10 minute snippets. So every episode is only 10 minutes. And the idea is that my experience as a working parent is like I drop my kids off at school and then I have a 10 minute drive home. I want to be.

to listen to something start to finish. So I love your podcast, but it's longer than my walking the dog episode. So I have to like split it up. Yeah, that's going to take you a week back and forth. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so the podcast is a unique content marketing angle there.

I mean, it's a unique business because it doesn't take that many clients, right? We're looking at ranges from $450 to $900 a month on the pricing packages, of course, subject to change, but it doesn't take that many to build a meaningful income here.

Can you talk to me about how you thought about the pricing structure, you know, having it in blocks of hour packages versus just straight use it or lose it hours versus, I don't know, like there's different ways you could structure it. Yeah. So we did have people say, oh, I wish I could have something. just on demand where I could just say, hey, I need help with this one thing.

I found as a business owner that was not a sustainable business model because it creates too much variability in your income. And you're unable to really keep your team happy and staffed with consistent hours, which they're all independent contractors. And so them.

having a set number of hours every month so that they can plan their schedule, they can plan their income. That's a really important part of sustainability and something that we offer our team that I think is important because I'm a freelancer myself. I come from this world and I understand how challenging it can be to have.

a last minute request or a client that's five hours one month and then 50 hours the next month. So we design the packages so that it's more sustainable for our team and also our clients because our clients can budget how much they're going to spend every month on our service. So of course, you know, our client...

clients can escalate or de-escalate their hours. They can pause. They just have to give us 30 days written notice. But that's so that we're not leaving them in a lurch, like in the middle of a project. And so we find that that kind of consistency helps smooth the feeling of chaos, of...

oh my God, I got to get all this stuff done. This is a really busy season. And then it drops off when life changes or you go on vacation or whatever. So we want to have that kind of consistency for everybody. I was in a presentation last year and it was one of the most...

interesting or eye-opening presentations on pricing that i'd ever heard and he gave the example of spotify and disney plus and youtube tv and spot like all of these like streaming services like how they're all very intentionally priced to be like

one percent or less of your monthly budget they become a utility where you're just like well i'm not going to cancel that it's one person who cares it's netflix 15 bucks a month like who cares right and it's like whether you watch anything or you didn't the guy who was presenting ran kind of a an executive assistant matchmaking type of agency where it's like three thousand dollars a month and so he's like our target client is making 30 to 90 thousand dollars a month in their business

It's like we want to become a utility for that. And our onboarding process is so detailed and in-depth where it's like the switching cost is going to be so high that you're never going to leave us. Like that's his goal to have zero churn. And it was so eye-opening to be that. pricing strategy of like,

How can we position ourselves as a utility, something you would never cancel? You wouldn't dream of canceling. It's so valuable and so affordable compared to the household income that we're bringing in. It's an essential. We're not turning off the water. It's a utility. We're not turning off heroin. a utility. Exactly. Yeah. Imagine it's probably similar here, but on the onboarding side, is there anything...

that you do it to like in a positive way, wrap those tentacles around such that like you become so indispensable that nobody's ever leaving. Every client is different, but I will say that we do have a number of clients for whom we do those recurring.

tasks that need to happen every week. And that's where we see our house managers becoming knit into the fabric of their life and their daily rhythm and their weekly rhythm of their family. So an example is we have a lot of clients who have variable schedules because they're dual docs.

And we have a lot of dual business owners. So two parents, they've got young children at home, and they both have very demanding and often variable schedules. And so our house manager is able to sit down with them and present the schedule for the coming week based on.

all the kids' activities, everybody's work schedule, where the nanny needs to be, after a care program we've got at school. And those kinds of repeatable things are where you see the essentialism of our house management services. Some clients, though,

They just want us to help them plan their vacation and then work on this project and then help deal with this issue. So it's different for every family, but our goal is to create systems. Sometimes the house manager is at the center of that system and they're the ones. making sure it runs smoothly. And sometimes they're just saying, hey, I have this tool. I'm going to build it for you.

you can carry it forward from here if you so choose. So an example would be like our gift tracker. It's something that a lot of people think about towards the holidays where you want to know who to send your holiday card to and make sure you don't go over your budget for your annual spend for Christmas gifts or whatever.

work with our clients starting at the beginning of the year on the annual gift tracker so that they can make sure they have everybody's birthdays and anniversaries, the important dates, everybody's address if they want to send a gift.

tracking what you sent them last year so you don't send them the same thing, and then tracking it against your annual budget. So those are the kinds of things that you could have your house manager own for you and to manage on an annual basis, or that we could just build for you and have you.

take and use in perpetuity. If you don't end up working with us again, like we don't take it personally, life changes. And if you want to shift your focus to other things, we totally understand that. Yeah. Building kind of a done with you early on, you're going to have to invest some more time upfront to kind of train. this person on your preferences and your household SOPs. But once you have that in place, it becomes less involved on a daily or weekly basis.

Yeah, and that's the kind of thing. Those conversations happening early on is like, hey, how far are you willing to drive to the dentist? It's like, I don't want to drive more than 10 minutes to the dentist or any service care provider. So figuring out what your requirements are, what's important to you.

cost reviews, referrals. Anytime you're picking a service provider, when we learn the preferences of our client, that's a very quick conversation we have at the beginning that then is an investment in future because then we can just schedule your biannual cleaning and we can get...

a rhythm here when you say you have a need, something's come up. We don't have to ask those questions anymore. We know what your dietary restrictions are so we can make a birthday dinner reservation for your upcoming spouse's birthday or whatever. And that really eliminates that mental load piece because you as a client don't.

feel like you have to be constantly like managing and telling this person what to do because they really understand your preferences, your needs, your requirements. And that's a lot from my background as a project manager is the requirements gathering piece, which you do at the beginning of a project onset because it helps. everything runs smoothly in the future. Was this set up as an agency from the beginning or was it you?

using your project management skills to serve the first few clients? Yeah. Okay. So I actually started a project management agency in 2018. And that was just me as a freelance project manager. And I was working with real estate and tech companies. And that was where I was freelancing.

And so when we expanded into the personal side, it was always from an agency model. So I was never working directly with the clients, although I do work very closely with them and I'm very involved in that relationship. So yes, yes and no, I guess is the answer to that question.

You're not anyone's dedicated house manager, right? Somebody on your team is that primary client interface. Exactly. Yes. Okay. How do you think about the pricing and the margins? How do you figure out how much to pay somebody? You ever have people trying to cut you out of the relationship? And I think there's another layer of complexity when you bring in other people. Yeah, absolutely. People are complex by nature. And that's what makes us beautiful and interesting. Okay, so one, we have...

a non-compete in our contract, ironclad contract, anytime you're working with people, especially friends and neighbors. But anytime you're building a team, you have to have a really good contract. And that governs how we work together, the nature of the relationship, the expectations, and then also what is not allowed.

things like soliciting a client to work with them. So we have a non-compete, non-solicitation that protects us there. We try to take really good care of our team and pay a fair market rate, provide upscale training, and also consistency with the workload. matches their lifestyle, their needs. Recently, we were looking to expand our team. We received over 200 applications for a role. And it's wild because there is so much demand out there for flexible work. And the thing that we...

often think about is, oh, it's stay-at-home moms who want to be able to work at nap time. That is not the case. The number one thing that people are looking for in work right now and in their career is flexibility. And so we found that we're able to hire fantastic people who are really excited to work with us.

us because we offer that flexibility. You can make your own schedule, your independent contractor, get the work done, communicate with your client. And because we're remote, it also expands our talent base. We only hire in the U.S. and we tend to hire people that are house managers, project managers, or former teachers. because they tend to have that innate set of skills and also curiosity about people and empathy and interest in growing. So when you're thinking about...

profitability and margin. It might be clear cut from the outside to say, you charge X for this service and then your cost is X for the person that's fulfilling that role. But there's a lot that goes into it behind the scenes. That's kind of the boring stuff that people don't.

really think about and don't love to think about. And it's the cost of your digital ecosystem, the project management software, the website, the email, the G Suite, all those kinds of things. Insurance, that's a huge cost that we bear. And that's something that if you're working with an individual.

providing the service, they might not have that insurance. And so that's something that we bring the benefit of that. And then we also do background checks. Anytime we're onboarding somebody, we're investing a ton of money by paying them for their training so that they come fully trained and ready to hit the ground.

running. So there's a lot more that goes into it other than just the hourly rate coming out of the hourly service that we charge. Yeah. I mean, you got to have some margin to play with there. So if you're selling time at $45 an hour and turning around and paying a team member. 25 or 30, like in between is like, like you said, all of that other overhead, plus hopefully some profit margin at the end of the day too.

Yeah, exactly. But that's some of the risk that you bear as a business owner that you just have to be comfortable with is, okay, I'm going to invest in my business with this new infrastructure or this rebrand or this partnership, whatever it may be, understanding it may not pay off. But I'm bearing that risk instead of my team. And that's something that I protect them from. They never have to worry about getting paid. I'm always going to pay them. If a client doesn't pay, that's my problem.

Yes, it's a level of consistency in setting it up for recurring billing versus the pay-as-you-go, on-demand, ramp up your hours here, ramp up your hours there. Harder to do.

Yeah. When we actually first started, I was building the business off of the infrastructure that I had totally bootstrapped for my project management agency. And it was literally just a series of spreadsheets and manual bank transfers. paper invoices, but basically the equivalent of that. And I brought a bookkeeper in and I was explaining to her how our system worked and how I basically duplicated it for hair and house management. And at the end of the walkthrough, she goes,

is there a reason you do it this way? And I was like, that's the nicest possible way you could tell me of saying my system is terrible. So she really helped me understand that if you're going to scale your business, you have to be able to eliminate as much manual steps from your workflow.

as low as possible. Anytime you're automating something, you're not just saving yourself time and money, but you're also eliminating opportunities for human error. So we now have a software that automatically bills our clients every month when their invoice is due, and it sends us a notification.

is a late fee if they don't pay on time, et cetera, et cetera. That is such a huge time savings because it's not just about sending the invoices. It's about making sure that they get paid, chasing people down for money, all those kinds of things. So as soon as we were able to automate that. Yeah. What tool is that? So we use HoneyBook.

for recurring payments. And then we use QuickBooks for our bookkeeping because there's a lot of things you have to assign hours to each client in QuickBooks to be able to assess profitability by client. And then anytime we do like a special project, we have to make sure that we're tracking everything to it.

category to be able to really assess which vertical is paying and which is a drain. Having those systems made a big difference. Also, we use it for sending contracts. That makes a big difference. It's just been a game changer for us because when you're scaling, you have to think, okay.

This is fine when I have this number of clients. What happens when we double next year? And that's exactly what happened to us is our business has doubled every year. It actually grew much more our second year because the first year was so short, but our business has doubled. And so I'm thinking, okay, what are we going to do?

to do next year. This is going to be a problem. Yeah. What's going to break at each tier? Yeah, exactly. Is HoneyBook the project management tool as well? We actually use Asana as our project management tool. I love Asana. It is something that a lot of project managers are...

But it's not used as much in the personal space of all the project management tools. I found it to be the one that pairs the accessibility so anybody can learn it with basically no tutorial. So our clients find it really easy to navigate, but it also has a little bit more.

complexity and features than a to-do list has. So we recommend it for all of our clients and they have a free version. So I've actually done a lot of sessions with people who say, hey, I want to know how you use it for your clients, for your family, and I'll walk them through it. They'll set it up on their own.

and they never become a client of ours. And that's something that I'm happy to do because it's such a game changer system. And I can testify as a client, I have a house manager. You can talk to my husband. The difference that this has made in our relationship, Asana and our house manager is just enormous. Yeah, use it for work stuff, but never, never thought about using it. I mean, it would be easy enough to create another sub.

project. But like, yeah, you could easily use it as a personal project management tool tool. Yeah, absolutely. It's got all the things you need, deadlines, dependencies, comments. You click the button and you get the confetti that says that the project is done, all that dopamine hit.

Anything else, tools and tech-wise? Yeah, so we have spreadsheets that we use. Those are hosted on Google Drive and then we sell them on Etsy. And the spreadsheets are really great because once you build the template once, you're able to distribute it really easily.

and economically. So they're free and available for all of our current clients. And then we sell it on Etsy. And that's something that's been a really interesting journey because there's so many people out there saying how to do it right. And it's been something like a fun challenge that...

for us and our team to be able to learn how to do that. But I like that we are able to offer something that's more affordable to people who can't use our services as an hourly service. More with Hannah in just a moment, including those digital download sales.

cool example of selling your entrepreneurial sawdust, plus our creative strategy to pitch Heron to business clients as an employee benefit. Coming up right after this. Let me know if this sounds familiar. You've got more ideas than you've got hours in the day.

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I was going to ask, because you mentioned these digital sales, digital product sales. And I was like, I don't see them on the website anywhere. Where do I go to buy these things? There's a little shopping cart icon, but I was like, where do I go? But selling them on Etsy. So they're on Etsy. We're going to transfer them over to the website.

as well, because I know that we lose potential customers when they don't see them on the website, but that's a work in progress because we're doing a rebrand right now. We've got a dozen or so up there and they're just the ones that are most commonly used. We have another 20 or so that we haven't published yet. So we're just kind of releasing them. What a creative example of selling the entrepreneurial sawdust.

we made this stuff anyways for clients or we made this for our own internal processes, but like it would be valuable to other people. We had Cody Berman from Gold City Ventures as like exactly how he recommended starting out. Like you can do the keyword research, but like you probably already have something.

that you're using in your own personal life or in your business that you might be able to squeeze out some incremental revenue, reach a new audience for. Yeah, exactly. And something that Cody said, actually, is people are paying for convenience. And so like you and I get excited about spreadsheets. That's not for everybody, but even the people that...

want to build a spreadsheet, they want it to be fully customizable, sometimes they also don't have the time or desire or were able to bring a spreadsheet that offers things that they wouldn't have thought about before. So I'll give an example. The process of choosing a new school for your child is...

obscenely complex where I live. We live in Florida. And so we have charter schools and magnet schools and public schools and private schools. And so for the past two years, my husband and I have toured almost 20 schools looking at different options for our children. And it's just too much information to be able to keep.

in a list format. So we designed a spreadsheet that would allow us to be able to compare across different factors, like is lunch included, driving distance from the house, total tuition costs, all those kinds of things. And then that was one of those, I think other people would benefit from this aha moments for us.

Totally. Yeah, I like that example. One of the interesting sections of the site, curious if you could speak to this, is the team benefits section, trying to sell this service, it sounds like, rather than a... business to consumer business now go on B2B. And like, how can we sign up companies and corporations to say, hey, look, as an employee benefit of working here, you also have access to hair and house management.

We have had a number of conversations with employers that want to bring us on to be able to offer this as a benefit or as an incentive for their team, because especially in environments where you've got...

high demand jobs for people that are in a growth moment of their career, but they also have kids at home and particularly women. There's a huge demand for these kinds of services. And if you take the example of like a law firm, any minute that your lawyer is spending planning their kid's birthday party.

While they're late night at the office, well, that's time they could have been billing to your clients making money. So this is a benefit that for the bottom line, a lot of employers see. But then from a more empathetic perspective, reducing stress, attracting more diverse talent and being able to.

people when they go through these busy phases of their lives by having company benefits like this can be a real game changer. So that's our B2B reach. And I would love to see it take off because it's gotten really positive response.

Any takers on it so far? Yes. An electrical supply company, actually. Not the one that you would think. That was our very first B2B client. And they said, yeah, we want to offer this because we think that it will improve employee satisfaction and it will reduce turnover. And I think it was really successful. I'd love to see it reach a little further, but there's definitely the challenge of the price point for a business being able to...

you know, you have a 10-person executive team and you bring this service in. Well, our monthly services times 10, that's a pretty big line item. So one of the things that we've been exploring with some companies is how to do like hours sharing, basically where they buy a pool of hours that a pool of... employees can all tap from. Yeah, I was going to ask how you would structure that, sell multiple seats, because not everybody's going to take advantage of it. And it's like...

Are they going to ask for a bulk discount? Yeah, you have to offer that. Another thing that people have done is buy a few gift certificates to use as rewards and to use as employee incentives. Oh, this goes to our employee of the month or recognition because...

you've been working so hard or we know you're going through a tough season or something like that. So that's another way that we've been able to work with companies. I like that angle. I like the selling your sawdust angle. What are you already creating? What are the byproducts of your business? How can you go sell those? And is there a way to go?

upmarket is their way to find like the you know we've called them lead fountains in the past well it's like hey you know if these demanding workplaces you don't want to offer this as an employee benefit it's like okay now i can make one sale maybe at a slight discount But it's a lot easier than trying to make 10 individual sales. And hopefully they have the budget and they see the value in it to keep it recurring. Maybe the churn is lower. Just trying to go, if there's a B2B.

And on that note, too, beyond the B2B, we're also working on a course for potential house managers. So people that want to start their own house management business would be able to learn from our lessons learned and our information.

been able to gather over the past year and a half of this business. Yeah. What worked? What didn't? What do clients really value? Yeah, exactly. Because people have come to us and said, how did you even do this? And it's like, I don't have enough time to tell you. It's literally many, many hours. Working on developing a course that people can start this in their community. I think there is such a huge need. And I think there is so much.

interest and desire for people to provide this service. And I understand that our reaches always can be limited. And so I would love to help other people be able to start this themselves. You've still got the main project management.

agency. We'll call that the day job. We'll call that the full-time hustle. Where are your hours going as it relates to the house management business? The hours fluctuate a lot. And I think that this is something any business owner will recognize. And sometimes it feels like it has no rhyme or reason. But I discovered early on that it was too much workload for me to be able to be the only person in the hot seat. making all the calls.

I brought in operations manager. She was my first hire. I mentioned her early. She's fantastic. She sits in this role that is really coaching and supporting and nurturing our house managers. And then I do much more at the sales and marketing side.

going out there, building the relationships, bringing the clients in, and then she's able to keep the wheels turning on a daily basis. And then she also helps develop things like our spreadsheets and our house manager course. I have an amazing team. I'm not going to lie. Like, that's the secret. I think that people...

often say to me like people in my personal life like I don't know how you do it all and I don't know how you have the time to do this and the answer is I have a team and I had to eat my own dog food and I had to realize that I couldn't just build a team of people that helped other people optimize their time I also had to recognize

do it myself. And so I have a house manager. I have an operations manager. I have a podcast manager. Like I have a website builder. I have people that are in my corner on my team. We work together. They're committed to the mission. And that makes a huge difference. And I had to recognize early on that it's not about telling somebody what to do and delegating. It's about bringing somebody in that really feels empowered to.

speak up and make suggestions and make, you know, a change to strategic priorities to work with you and setting those strategic priorities, but then also somebody who can really take it across the finish line maybe better than you ever could. I have to recognize everyone on my team.

team is better at what they do than I ever would be. And that's why I hired them. Yeah, that's the dream scenario. It's like, well, that's why I'm bringing you on because I suck at this. I need somebody who's at least as good or better than me. And that's how we can level up the whole operation.

Yeah, you focus on your zone of genius. You focus on what you're good at, what's important to you, what you enjoy. This entire conversation, this is the same one I have with my clients. I say, what is important to you? How do you spend your time? And one of the questions we ask them is like, how do you spend your weekend? Because a lot of times... that's where

We learn about how they're appropriating their time and what they'd rather be doing. Like a lot of times our clients will say, I am spending my weekends doing laundry and I don't know what to do because it feels like more work to have to take it to the laundromat for like a fluff and fold service. And I'm like, OK, great. Let's hire somebody.

to come in your home, do your laundry, fold it and put it away in everybody's drawer so that you can go out and enjoy your weekend. You could do something that's more meaningful to you. So laundry is not your zone of genius. It stresses you out. You'd rather be doing something else. Let's think intentionally about how we want to spend.

free time here because it is limited. It is precious. Yeah. I remember an ad, maybe it was on the homepage of a landscaping company and that was the headline, get your Saturdays back. And it was like, we're not, we're not selling.

Cutting your grass, we're selling you your Saturday back. It was like, oh, that's a great line. Yeah, that's what we talked about at the beginning of the show. You said, what are the ultra wealthy people using their money for? And it's to buy back their time. And we're bringing that in a more affordable way to people. Now, you're a few years...

into this. Anything you would do differently starting over? Any big surprises along the way? Oh, my God. Every business has surprises. You launch and it's this moment and you're scared. You think, how are people going to receive it? And then you think, OK, I got it dialed in. Let's do this. Let's hit the ground running. And you're going to.

iterate and iterate and iterate every step of the way. And you're going to pivot all the time. And I think that staying flexible, being committed to the problem, not just the solution, is critical. And then also, I feel like understanding that It will grow. It will.

expand if you continue to invest in it and so there were moments at the beginning that felt very dire where i was like i don't know am i losing faith is this a thing it never goes as fast as you want it to you know the stories of like oh we sold out our product in 10 minutes with this one TikTok. That's not the nature of our business. And that's totally fine. But I would say for me, having a team and also my husband.

cheerleading and reminding me there's going to be sunny days on the dark days. That's what gets you through those tough times and those moments where I feel like I was losing faith. So I think if I could go back and do it differently, it would be to have a little more patience and to know that. Success is a moving target. And just incremental growth is really the name of the game. And that's also what makes it more sustainable.

That's right. Try and get a little bit better each and every day. So heronhousemanagement.com, where are you taking this thing? What's next? I have big goals and I have big hopes and I have big dreams. If we could... continue to do what we do now at a larger scale, we would be successful. I think that there's more out there for us, and I'm excited to uncover it as we go and as we learn more about the problems, the solutions that we could offer. I have visions of moving into

products. I have visions of helping other people start their own version of this business. I have visions of more content generating, more conversations that we're having with people about what's a valuable use of time and what's equitable at home. and reimagining what's possible when it comes to how you deal with your mental load and your stress. So I think there's big things on the horizon. I feel optimistic.

Well, I'm excited to see where you take it. Again, heronhousemanagement.com. Check Hannah out over there. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Just keep going. They say the hardest part is starting. I disagree. The hardest part is to just keep...

going. The moment of start is so exhilarating and exciting. And it's sometimes where you press the button or you cut the ribbon or you open the doors, but it takes showing up every day for your business to grow and to succeed. And it means showing up on the dark days and it means showing up on. the days where you feel like it could be your last. But if you keep going, I feel confident that

your business will continue to grow. Sometimes you have to find ways to fall in love with it again, but that's like anything. It's a long-term investment. You may pivot, you may change directions, but if you keep going, it will come back to you, everything you invest. It's funny looking at some of the people from a decade ago on the podcast and the ones that have had that persistence to stick with it.

Just start. Probably the most common piece of advice. But after that, you got to stay started. You got to keep it going. You got to be consistent with it. Absolutely. A couple of takeaways for me before we wrap. Number one, I love this idea of...

niche selection and you know the world's only as competitive as you make it if you can describe the problem better than your customer even can they're naturally going to assume you have the solution i forget who is responsible for that quota but it's absolutely true and you can kind of niche down to be market of one where it's like yeah there's these virtual assistant agencies but nobody is specializing in this specific area we could take something that is

something that wealthy people are spending money on how do we make it more attainable more affordable as a business idea generating framework and the other thing was to set client expectations from the start was like it's not going to be me it's not gonna be hannah but trust me like we've hired the best in the business they're going to take great care of you and avoiding from the very get-go kind of the

the freelance trap of trading time for money and selling your skills directly you know probably helps if you have some level of skills and expertise in the business that you're starting, but like not tying yourself and setting the expectation that like you are going to be the one picking up the phone when the client calls. Like, no, no, we're going to have a team member handle that. So I think that was super smart. So again, Heron House Management.

It's been awesome. The Side Hustle Show, as you know, as a listener, just had its 12th birthday. And so if you're tuning into this, whether it's your first time or you've been here since episode one, I appreciate you spending some time with us in your earbuds today. If you are newer to the show.

and you want to dig a little bit deeper, you can actually get a personalized playlist of some of our greatest hits episodes. All you got to do is answer a few short multiple choice questions at hustle.show and it'll spit back out this 8 to 10 episode. playlist of some of our favorite, most effective episodes based on those answers. Totally free. You can do it on your phone. Again, hustle.show for that. Big thanks to Hannah for sharing her insight.

Thanks again to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. SideHustleNation.com slash deals is where you'll find all the offers from the sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting those advertisers. 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. So fire off that text message to that person in your life who might be a perfect fit for a business like this. 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.