Welcome to the doctor nurse podcast.
I'm your host, dr. Sandra contenta.
I'm a doctor, Lee prepared nurse practitioner.
And I am so glad you decided to join me today.
The doctor nurse podcast is a podcast for nurses and nurse
practitioners that are wanting to understand what exactly their
degrees can do for them. After the birth of my son, I had
this baking desire to have more flexibility in my career
choices. Despite feeling like all the
alphabet soup, after my name didn't really afford me.
Me very many options, I launched the podcast to find the answers
that I, so desperately needed. I also knew I couldn't be the
only nurse who felt this way. This is sound like you, if so,
come and hang out with me as I figure out what our nursing
degrees can give us access to as far as career flexibility
control over our schedules and Entrepreneurship my talking with
NPCs and our friends who are doing exactly that.
Sit back and enjoy the conversation before we start the
episode. Would I want to tell you about a
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Doctor nurse podcast, fam. Welcome to the doctor nurse
podcast. I'm so happy that you decided to
join me today. Today we are talking with Nick
Loper. He helps people earn money
outside of their day jobs. He's an author, an online
entrepreneur, and the host of the award-winning show side
hustle, Show podcast which features new part-time business
ideas, each week as Chief side Hustler at the side, hustle
nation.com, he loves deconstructing the tactics and
strategies behind building. Income, which you guys know, if
you've been listening to my podcast at all that I'm All
About It. Welcome Nick.
To the point of view of Beth, thanks for having me.
I'm so excited to talk to you today.
I can't even contain it. I first wanted to just kind of
have you describe to my listeners kind of your story?
How you see yourself kind of what you envision or you kind of
how you see your role in day-to-day life?
Oh my gosh. Well, husband and father, first
and foremost, and then outside of that been doing this podcast
for like 10 years and And that's just nuts to me.
It started as a 60 dollar Mike when the corner of the living
room and like videos, anybody got a tune into this stuff and
it has I mean it was completely life-changing experiment took a
long time to be fair, but it's been an absolute blast to kind
of source and share these incredible side, hustle stories
and that's what most of it is me point in the mic at other people
and saying, well, how'd you come up with that idea?
How do you build that, how'd you get customers for that?
How'd you figure out how much to charge?
How did you grow that thing? All that stuff was driven by my
curiosity in the early days and it was fascinating and it still
is now 550 something episodes later runnable.
So yeah. So I heard about you through
your podcast and then I wanted to do my own research and so I
bought your book beside house all which I just love, I read
it, I love it, I think it's fantastic.
It's a really great place to start for someone that's looking
to generate a thousand dollars, a month, or more from From work
in a side game on your off time and as a nurse and nurse
practitioners, a lot of us, do shift work and so we have time
off. And so what I've been noticing
through different conversations Nick is that when nurses get
quiet and they spend a little time alone and they let their
souls talk to them. They start creating, and there
have been able to create some really incredible businesses and
Merchandising product type businesses.
And a lot of stuff that's been really neat on top of using our
nursing skills to create, you know, That you know, Healthcare
healthcare related businesses as well.
So I thought we could chat a little bit today.
If you wouldn't mind kind of describe how a nurse can get
started with a side hustle and kind of where you would take
someone if they were like, all right, Nick, I want to jump into
the side hustle game. Where do I even start?
Yeah. So the common advice is to, you
know, draw that ideal Venn diagram of your skills in one
box. Your Hobbies and interests to
the next box. And then, you know, what, you
can pay to do and you know, what you would love to do, and like
the magical overlapping Center is like, oh, that's the ideal
side. Hustle for you and we found is
for a lot of people, there's no overlap.
It's like, well my skills are over here.
My interests and hobbies over here.
And like what people would pay me to do with like off in this
other Circle? And it's like well then what?
And so instead, I think it makes more sense to start with pains
and problems and actually just this morning recorded an episode
With a friend of mine, I'm just like business idea.
Brain dump. Like, look, here's, you know, a
couple dozen business ideas is that that auto exist in the
world that you could start like. And almost all of them were born
out of our own pains and problems with kids, like trying
to sign up for summer camps or, you know, he threw out like the
pet discouragement service. Like, oh, the kids really want a
dog. I want the service that like has
a really difficult to train dog and they just like shows you how
hard this is actually going to be.
So just throwing out ideas that Auto list it to the world, but a
lot of them born from pains and problems and so normally like to
be a little more optimistic. But for this exercise, you gotta
put on your, your pessimist hat and just take notice of all of
the annoyances that happened in your day-to-day life, everything
that your spouse or partner is complaining to you about
everything, your kids are complaining to you about
everything, your peers, neighbors, co-workers.
Like you start to pick up on, like, everybody seems to be
griping about this thing or this is a painful.
Me and then you can turn is because on the other side.
Like that's what I typically spend money on is like make this
pain go away like something like I was trying to strip wallpaper
off our bathroom. It's like I think my time is
probably better spent so like going on taskrabbit and like
finding like somebody else could come and do this for me for a
couple hours. But like on the other side of
those pains and problems is often a business idea.
I think it's easier to sell those types of easier to sell
pain pills in. It is to sell vitamins, right?
Like I want to My back, my back hurts.
I need this to stop right now versus like, okay, how can I
prevent this from happening in the future?
Like that's it's not urgent yet, but if you can be on the pain
side, little bit easier to get started and find customers that
way. Yeah, I think that's really
cool. What you're what you're
describing and what I talked a lot about on my podcast is Gap
closers. So finding something that needs
to be filled, finding a problem that needs to be fixed.
These are things that you can easily do by just paying
attention to the world around you.
And as nurses were in the trenches with our patients.
We See these things happening, and we have a unique front row
to finding simple problems. And there's a lot of nurse
inventors that have again, come up with different fixes and it
able to, you know, invent things for that exact thing that you're
describing of a problem. But again, for the nurse that's
just like, Hey listen. I want to start, you know,
possibly a coaching business or, you know, I went through and
wrote down a bunch of things that you can do as a side,
hustle as a nurse. And so we talked about Nurse
writer nurse blogger nurse. Cast YouTube, digital products
merchandise. There's a lot of things that you
can get into as a nurse and one of the things that a lot of
nurses are also super interested in is creating passive income,
which I actually feel like is this unicorn that we're all
chasing, that doesn't exist because I think everything has
to be managed. I don't think that you ever get
away with just something completely passive.
You have to have your hand in everything.
It's just a matter of how much and then how much, you know,
time do you have to put in the foreign to kind of get that
passivity in the back end? So, what would you recommend for
a nurse? That's like, okay, so I hear you
find a find a problem, fix it. How do I then get that to
continue to pay me and and not require me to have to work on it
all the time? Or is like, I'm saying, is that
a myth? That's something that doesn't
exist. It's semi.
That's one of the great debates of online business like is these
passive income real and it's like the, there's the irony I
was thinking about this in the shower the other day is like I
don't get paid all the That's knocks.
Yeah. All the best parts coming to
shower. Get paid while I'm working.
So I can get paid. Well, I'm not working.
It is like this. Got another weird backwards
Paradox, but, yeah, it's like trying to set up.
So, passive income comes in. Probably four different flavors.
Right there is the, you know, I can go buy an income-producing
asset. I can buy a rental house or I
can buy a dividend paying stock, right?
Problem is takes money to make money.
The other option is like, well, I can go out and build a passive
income or an income-generating ass You know, I digital product
that you create one, sell it over and over again.
I think that one is probably the most viable, like low low
startup costs, like not a lot of investment aside from your time,
to go out and try and build this thing.
And we talk about different marketing channels for those
passive income method. Number three is to, like, rent
out an asset that you already have or could you acquire if we
had a guy, High School teacher, who is running out portable hot
tubs. And I was like this is
fascinating because he sent me a message on Facebook.
He's like, Nick, you talked about Out some unconventional
rental business. Like maybe it's guy had like a
bounce house you know inflatable party business or something.
Yeah he's like I got one for you.
I do hot tubs like hot tubs. Like how does that work?
You know how we keep them. He's like, dude, I you know I've
got a fleet of like 25 of these things are always rented out,
you know. And he had this whole formula or
you buy them used for this price and you run them for this price
per week or per month. It's like super cool.
Yeah, this whole mess is for sanitizing.
I mean so that was number three, kind of like renting out this
asset like another way. Get paid over and over again in
his wasn't totally passive because it's like, well, I gotta
go deliver this thing. I got to set it up for the
customer all that. And then number four, we be
reverse passive income. Like what are the expenses that
I can cut out the recurring expenses that I can cut out and
save money on a recurring basis? Those would be the four types of
passive income. But we go back to that, you're
creating these digital assets. We had John.
Hawes on the show, probably like 2016 time frame.
You now runs in nursing.com, he's like, made some investments
in this domain. Game over the course of several
years but he started, I want to say what he was, still a nursing
student, like creating these study guides putting them up on
Amazon, and he got very specific in these nursing study guides
and had like 25 or 30 titles by the end of this year, is making
money from book. Royalties, you created like a
medications app, like help you memorize, you know what
medication, solve what problems, what are their, you know, don't
mix with this. All the kind of different things
that you need to know for the for the testing and for patient
care. And his was an example of, you
know, kind of turning what was happening in his life.
You know, I gotta study for this stuff anyway, so I'll go create
the digital product related to it and turning that into some
asset down the road and he's built huge, huge community and
website on the back of those early early days, but don't have
to be in the nursing field either.
It could be, you know, around any, any topic that you're
somewhat curious about and I say that just because I think that's
what Jules you to keep going when you don't see the immediate
results right away. Yeah, that's what it was for me.
Some of my best content has come from that point of curiosity.
Yeah, I have two things to say. First you have a quiz online
that I love, I took the quiz on your website.
Where basically you, you asked a series of questions, like, what
amount of time do you have? What are you interested in?
You ask these very poignant specific questions about kind of
what you're looking for, from a side hustle.
And then you spit out with this quiz, Examples of what you can
be doing based on what you've got a lot meant in your time,
for which I thought was really helpful and a great place to
start for nurse. That's may be wondering, what
else could you be doing another thing that you said that?
I agree with is sometimes your side household doesn't and maybe
shouldn't be in what you do. And I, the reason why I say that
is because of nurse burnout, right?
So we've got a lot of nurses that are exhausted and they are
wanting to do something else. I mean, they are leaving the
bedside in droves, we are going to come and we're going to be
having a We had a nursing crisis before, you know, covid-19.
Now after the pandemic, we have even more nurses, that are like
I'm out of here. Like I don't want to do this
anymore, the joy and the love of what I was doing.
I don't want to do any more and what I've been finding is that
working. Part time has been something
that more and more nurses are considering and wanting to do,
which then freeze up that space outside of that outside of work
for you to go and do something else that you really, really
enjoy. And so that's the reason why I
also feel like What you're offering and what you are
talking about. Is so poignant because what, if
you can go and create something else, not even related to
nursing that you're like, I want to sell hot tubs and you enjoy
something hot tubs, and you're a nurse on the weekends being
like, why not, why not? And what if that is the balance
that strikes, the balance for you, to make really good money
on the side. But then also keep your foot in
the door with nursing and not get burned out.
Because again I think a lot of nurses go into nursing for that
with the with the heart of, I want to help people and what we
end up doing is we end up burning Them out and it's not
it's not conducive to keeping good nurses like we need nursing
care, is everything. I just had a baby two months ago
the nurse has made the difference like the doctor was
in there for 45 minutes. He was gone you know.
But yeah the nurse the nursing care was what was their day, you
know, Moment by moment second by second and so we need good
nurses. We can't we can't burn them out
but we I think we need to create kind of this hybrid system where
we've got nurses that are you know working from overflew and
not Deficit you know so that's willings.
Yeah because lnt nurses so like their suggest.
Yeah, they're saying it. Yeah, somebody pointed out to me
like well they're the only people in the hospital.
They get to like work with happy people.
Like people who are excited to be there.
It's like oh I never thought of it that way because we just the
patients require like that are just had our kids doctor's
appointment. He's like crawling up the wall
in fear out of getting the shot and patience of a saint this
lady just look. It's She just waited while he
just throw his tantrum as like, oh my gosh, they're so
embarrassing. But totally like yeah, what do
you really want to go? So there's lots of service based
options which, you know, doesn't really get you out of that time
for money predicament but could also be a bridge to say.
Yeah, I'm still, I'm spending my off hours on this side, hustle
in, kind of a service-based business, you know, maybe it's
coaching, maybe it's Consulting. Maybe it's being a doula, maybe
it's doing CPR instructions, some of the ideas from your
list, but it, you know, it kind of empowers you in a way.
They like what I'm more than my paycheck, or I have the ability
to earn Beyond just at the end of my shift.
You got that make sense. Yes, 100%!
I agree. And that's what I found through
building my podcast and building my other streams of income.
So, I have an Etsy shop, that I've been creating digital
content. I've actually created with
another company. We were able to partner up with
another company and create booklets with digital
information that helps nurses out at their clinical sites.
So we partnered up with a company to do that and then we
kept the rights over the book so that we could go and sell them
on our digital side as well. So we're getting a little bit of
revenue from that. And so I'm just kind of building
up these little streams, kind of like what you're saying, and I
know that you've got almost 17 streams of income coming in and,
I mean, something something insane.
So, again, I think it would be interesting to hear how you kind
of added on streams and how you went like, okay.
So I'm going to go Take this on because I think what I'm
struggling with is just the amount of time as a mom and you
know, this as a dad you know I'm trading time with my children
for the work that I'm doing that, sometimes isn't paid and
it's really hard to stay motivated.
What are some things that you do?
How do you decipher like okay I'm getting into this one.
I'm not getting to this. I'm going to build this or how
do you choose what you end up pouring your time into gosh?
It's so hard and that's, that's the trade-off as it.
Well, what am I, what am I really doing?
This for like, what's the, what's the endgame here?
And one of the exercises that I'll have people go through, is
they're evaluating different side.
Hustle ideas, like I'm trying to choose between these five
things, like try and project out, three to five years of a
reasonable degree of success and you can find somebody who's
walked that path and is a little bit ahead of you and you can
kind of see what what is their day-to-day look like, are they
still putting in 80-hour weeks or have?
They got a little more time, freedom, and flexibility.
And if I kind of Of the same path and had a similar degree of
success. Okay.
Would that be a win for me? Because a lot of side hustles if
they're it doesn't scale or some of them don't scale the way that
you might. Like you're like well I could do
this today and I might be still doing the same thing in three to
five years. And that does that really get me
where I want to go in the answer?
Might be. No, it's like, okay, I got to
try and choose a different path from the beginning.
Now I don't want that to Cripple you from taking any action at
the beginning because it's like, you know, the One of the most
common success traits of the 500.
Something guess I'll decide I'll show is, you know, this bias
towards action and, you know, taking Step 1, even if they
didn't know steps 2 through 10 like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna
see what kind of reaction this gets in the market.
If it works great, if it doesn't, Okay, I'm going to
Pivot over to this other thing that I think there's, you know,
a lot of people get stuck on the sidelines and I don't want to
have people stuck there too. It's like there's, you know,
there's a benefit from any action even if it doesn't.
Necessarily generate the results you were hoping for right away.
Yeah, I read that in the last chapter of your book where you
say that's the number one thing that all the entrepreneurs just
kept saying, repeatedly was suggest get started and to not
be afraid of taking that shot and you can you wrote that, you
will figure it. So that ends up leading to more
opportunities, which is something I actually wanted to
talk about to because it was through the podcast that I
reached out to this other company.
And I said, hey do you want to sponsor my podcast?
This is what it's about and through that conversation with
him. Him.
He he and I we recorded a podcast together and I said
something during the podcast and he was like, I like that.
I want to come back to that and I was like, okay.
So we came back to it later and ended up being the thing that me
and my girlfriend have been creating for the last six months
for this company has been these digital booklets and it was
literally just from the conversation that we had on the
podcast. And so I think it's very true
that even though yes, I didn't have a plan.
I wasn't like oh this is going to land me this thing.
It did bring about other opportunities that were I was
able to Actually generate income from that conversation aside
from my podcast so that was one of the things that I found
really you know kind of cool and that you kind of right you know
starting small these low risk side hustles I think are really
great because it's just such a low bit, such a low barrier to
entry and then as long as you just kind of keep motivated and
keep working at it and you just keep trying.
I've had this thing where I kind of go back to the scripture that
I love where it says, you know, all were Work leads to
something, all toil leads to profit.
And so when I read that I was like, oh so like I can work at
something and eventually this blind squirrel will find it.
Not like that's kind of what I began to realize is that like
you just have to keep at it. And I know that sounds kind of
crazy but maybe that's you know, putting mantras up all over
around you so you can just go like okay I got to keep going.
I got to keep going because I've been doing a podcast now since
it's been two and a Years. I've been podcasting my son's
almost for I started when he was maybe six months seven months
old. So like, yeah, it's been, it's
been a grind. It's been a struggle there.
I don't get paid for this. I don't have a, you know, all
these different things. And so you just have to keep
going. And then you do have a book
correct that you know if a podcaster or sorry podcast or
side Hustler is kind of wanting the progress with the journal
too. Kind of Journal through how do I
keep going you know you offer them something as well, correct?
Yes it. Well, different books of the one
you held up earlier was the side, hustles kind of a broad
introduction to side hustles. You're here are the three main
business models product/service, audience, based businesses that
you can start your some examples under each of those, the
progress Journal is kind of my personal productivity Journal,
it's best if you have something that you're working on like I
tend to work best in kind of like short-term Project based
Sprint's or I could set myself a four-week deadline and I'm
actually kind of going back through and kind of revisiting
the Is very rigid. I like here's a four-week you
know, projects print and it's like, well, if your project
takes longer than you know kind of it spills over into the next
thing. It says that you're too kind of
a type structure but again, that's the progress journal and
it kind of tracks the daily habits that I know what I'm
doing them. Consistently, I like feel
better. Like I feel like I won the day
and it's just sometimes some simple habits of naming my top
three priorities for tomorrow night before.
And if I check those out and like, even if In practice trying
to try to at least check off the first one before.
Yeah. Going into email and like
reactive mode. Like, okay, I'm going to move
the ball forward on my own agenda and that's huge for side
Hustlers like, well, we all have a limited time.
But if I could carve out a half an hour here, 15 minutes,
they're like just trying to build that positive momentum.
Super, super important is to gratitude habit, which is it's
just, you know, scientifically shown to, you know, help you be
a happier person. And then just try to keep an eye
on, you know, what are the What are the key metrics in this
business, in the side hustle, and focusing on almost, you
know, process goals versus outcome goals, especially early
on. Like, I'm going to produce the
podcast versus. I'm going to get ten thousand
listeners. So I'm going to, you know, write
500 words for my website versus, you know, I'm going to get a
million annual visitors from Google or something, like trying
to think of what are the process goals that will eventually lead
to the outcome. Yeah, one thing I was thinking
about when you were talking was about your your son and you have
a safe son, correct? Yeah, yeah.
Two boys. They're Seventeen point five.
Seven, and five. And you also are do you.
So with your income, have you been able to?
You've been able to walk away from your 9 to 5 and kind of
create that Financial Freedom that were all looking for as
nurse side. Hustler's.
Is that something that you've been able to do Yeah, I've been
really grateful to have been self-employed actually.
Since 2008, my original side hustle was a comparison shopping
site for Footwear which is a super random Niche.
But it would tell you where you could be get the best price or
do next pair of shoes and would earn affiliate commissions from
Zappo's, from Amazon, from all these other online, where
retailers and so that was the thing that let me quit my
corporate job. And so I was running that
full-time and starting other random side projects.
Being the site also show on the side from that and then kind of
within a year and a half like well this side.
Hustle stuff is a lot more fun to work on than this random shoe
business. That became the main focus.
Yeah, one of the things I think was you're talking to is, if you
start get if you just start getting working, then what you
will find is, you may be able to you may stumble upon the thing
that you really do enjoy. So again, I think it goes back
to what you were saying about just getting started on.
Thing because what you it will morph it could possibly morph
into something different that you didn't even realize, like
you said, starting off in shoes. And now being you know, this
side hustle host podcast owner and with all the other things
that you're doing with your books and I'm assuming you have
rental property as well. I don't kind of okay we got kind
of burned by like direct ownership in a lot of ways like
I'm I'm All For, You Know, rental real estate and you know,
as a as a fast. Track to financial Independence
but he got like pretty much three paths you could do, the
traditional investment path. And this is like the fire
community of all, I just saved twenty five times my annual
expenses. Yeah.
My you know retirement accounts or my you know even my taxable
investment accounts like okay you know, historically the math
says I can withdraw a 4% a year around.
I'm roughly gonna be okay so that's method number one.
Like it works if you have a high income and low expenses,
otherwise it's like you're probably never going to get
there. Number two, Is real estate
especially because you can be leveraged and and has lots of
tax advantages to and then the Third Way is the entrepreneurial
path. Like okay, how do I build my own
income generating assets through the business asset class and go
that way? So that's been the path that we
chose to financial Independence. Gotcha my last question of the
podcast, would you share with my again nurse?
That's like. All right, so I hear everything
I want to get started, you know, where can they go to see what
you're about? What can they do to you?
No, hear your side. Hustle podcast with, tell them
where you're located. Yeah, we'd love to.
Have you tuned in to the side. Hustle show.
You find it on any podcast app. If you hit up, hustle that show,
I'll build you a personalized playlist for what episodes might
be most pertinent to you based on the answers to a few short.
Multiple choice questions. You can add that to your device.
If you're kind of in the idea agnostic phase just want to see
what you what is out there. I mean, there's hundreds of
episodes, of course, you don't take your pick, Choose Your Own
Adventure, but sign of salvation, I'm / ideas is my big
laundry list of part-time business ideas.
There's no opt-in required over there.
And so my hope is that helps people get the creative Juices
Flow in a bit. Fantastic.
Well, thanks, Nick for coming on to the podcast.
Thanks for chatting with me and telling my audience, your story
and where they can find you and how you can help them, because
that's really what I want to do. I want to help nurses.
I want to set him free, and, yeah, I think this is a great
place to start, is kind of in this hybrid workspace, for
nursing because we can't lose. Good nurses.
That's what's Happening and I think if they had something that
brought them joy that they could maybe get paid to do as well,
that would be kind of The Sweet Spot is what I'd like to call
it. So yes.
Alrighty guys. Thanks for listening and as
always, don't forget to enjoy the journey of your career.
Emma, Emma, Emma and Tastefully to me.
So that's a wrap. Be sure to subscribe to the show
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purposes only and the information should not be used
in substitute for Professional Care by a medical provider.
The information in this podcast does not represent medical or
professional advice or services. Message me at the doctor nurse
podcast at gmail.com with any career professions that you're
interested in hearing about and just a friendly.
Reminder, the information on this podcast is for educational
purposes only and the information should not be used
in substitute for Professional Care by a medical provider.
The information in this podcast does not represent medical or
professional advice or services.