Ep. 116 – Tips on Skills and Side Hustles with Toolman Tim

How to develop skills while doing your side hustle

Toolman Tim and I talk about how to develop skills while doing your side hustle. Lots of side hustle tips in this episode!

It was -46 in Canada in mid-January. What it is like living in a mobile home in -46. Note that Celsius and Fahrenheit merge at -40.

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Skills Over Stuff

Practice with your equipment when the weather is good. “You don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to your level of training.”

Generator stories.

The pipes are leaking and you can’t get a plumber until Monday. Fixing leaking pipes with a bicycle tube – at least good enough to make it through the weekend.

Tim’s Workshop Adventures

Tim tells of his trips to workshops this year – Nicole Sauce’s workshop, and the Midwest Prepper Fest. And he bought land in TN for a vacation and retreat spot and he called it the Delinquent Gully.

Tim’s Side Hustle Tips

Side hustles that you can start easily: Lawn aeration, cleaning windows, property management, car detailing:

“If you start and you just take a whole bunch of skills or a whole bunch of things you can offer to people, throw them at the wall and see which one is your biggest and do more of that. And the ones that nobody wants, stop doing them. And soon enough, you’re going to find out each time you take that right path, you’re going to be making a little more money, a little more money. And hey, maybe you don’t want to do that full-time, but then you can go out and start another little service business and try that. You know, like car detailing for instance. You don’t need a ton of overhead to be able to clean vehicles. If you have a shop vac and a few other things, you’re all set.”

“When I was running my handyman business, someone asked me, ‘can you aerate my lawn?’ And before I even knew what I was saying, I’m like, ‘Sure!’ And I didn’t even know what the heck it was, you know? So I call the rental place and asked, ‘Do you rent an aerator?’ Yeah, we do. So I rented it the day before. And that night I remember going out beside the fence and I’d never even used that machine before. So I had to teach myself: what’s the depth gauge? How fast do I go? I probably looked like an idiot. But I learned, and you know what, by the next year, I realized I could rent an aerator for less than a hundred bucks for a day. I could typically do about 10 lawns a day, and I charged a hundred bucks a pop to do them. So that’s just one side hustle, a thousand bucks we could make from aerating with a roughly a hundred dollars rental for an aerator in one day. Wow. So if you could figure out 12 services that you could do just like that each year or each month, just one day a month, there’s 12 grand. You know, and it’s a good start.”

“There were tons of times that I wanted to give up, but having good support helps a lot as well. But it’s persistence – on and on and on that you just have to decide: ‘this is going to work, come hell or high water and I’m going to make it work!’ And each time that I discover something that doesn’t work, that just means I’ve eliminated one more option.”

“People say, ‘I’m building a new side hustle. Well, I can’t live off that. 10% won’t replace my income’. No, it won’t. But you start with one. Get a side hustle that gives you 10%. What could you do with 10% more income? All of a sudden you now have 110% income. And then build that into something else.”

“Entrepreneurship is 100% the key to self-reliance and independence. You know, finding the life you want to to live. Through the whole craziness that we went through a few years back, entrepreneurship basically let us do whatever we wanted to do. We got to pick the customers we wanted to work with, and we got to choose where we wanted to work.”

“The more someone pays for something, the less likely they are to complain about it.”

“Price by the job, not by the hour. If you price by the hour, the owner will constantly watch to see if you are on your phone.”

“Deals never work. You will get people who will always say, ‘Hey, if you give me a deal, I’m gonna share you to my friends and family members. You’re gonna get all kinds of business.’

I promise you right now, that business is never gonna show up. You turn around and say to them, ‘That’s great. I appreciate that. If you bring me business going forward, I’ll give you 10% off each job I do for you going forward for each job you bring to me.’ But don’t ever give somebody a deal upfront based on the promise of work down the road because that never materializes.”

toolman tim workshop — Toolman Tim’s Workshop

More of Toolman Tim:

Toolman Tim on Twitter

Toolman Tim’s Workshop

Toolman Tim’s Workshop on Youtube

The sponsor this week is Kerry Brown with Strong Roots Resources.

Check out the NEW 2024 Homesteading Bundle from Permies, which has 35 e-books, courses, videos.

What I really liked:

The Backyard Forest Garden e-book
Agroforestry
Restoration Agriculture: Designing Your Perennial Farm presentation from Permaculture Voices by Mark Shepard
Permaculture Thorns, A Book About Trying to Build Permaculture Community, by Paul Wheaton.
Plus 2 books by Nicole Sauce.

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Check out Thriving News – Thriving Community News, Without the Noise.

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