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Hoopin’ the Hustle

By Amy Nielsen

While I was in school I was introduced to the concept of the side hustle. Now, I am of an age where that term is somewhat shady so it took me a while to reframe the idea into one I could embrace. The word job scares the heck out of me but a side hustle as I discovered, is something right up my alley. Pun intended.

One of the guest lecturers at my school was Nick Loper from SideHustleNation.com. The idea of a side hustle is to use your passions and your strengths, in the in-between time you are spending doing your other work of life, to build a business that supports your fun; and possibly, eventually, if you want – you could parlay it into something full time.

My biggest stumbling block in this whole journey has been my inability to coalesce a cohesive business concept. I like to do a whole lot of different things. I like to teach about the intersection of your cells, your energy, and your environment. I like to teach cooking, meditation, movement, red tent journeying, and so much more. I like to preform given a loose script to follow. I like public interaction. I must travel, even if it is just between areas of the same city every day.

What I do have is a theme that is developing. I am working very hard to make sure I don’t get ahead of myself and jump into sophomoric mistakes of a newly graduated student and fledgling business owner. I am very well aware that I am in that phase of business building where the shiny object that might pay the bills could out weight the common sense of negative cash flow. Every decision I make needs to go back to that theme. As I dig deeper into my post graduate studies and complete the other certificates I am working on, the theme will become more focused.

Yesterday I participated in my second local community market day and flea market. I live in a rural county that seems to at the same time both shun and hold dear our rankings near the bottom of the state lists in just about everything. It is a stunningly beautiful part of the country, rich in natural and anthropologic history. The people are a mix of deep mountain hearts and newly arrived city shine. Sometimes they mix well off the bat, sometimes the nuts are harder to crack. This market day is a true, grassroots, hometown kind of event. I adore it.

My first foray at a booth last month was a success in that I made it to the event, set up, and ran the whole day. I even got a couple of people to stop and talk to me. I may have only gotten two conversations and one email that first day, but I counted it as a huge success because of the amount I actually made it.

I went home, regrouped, made plans and researched a better mouse trap.

To focus myself I decided to use the theme of joyful movement, a topic I want to develop a class around. I changed up my booth structure, added some trinkets to purchase that were on my theme of the day and decided to add some movement oriented toys for kids to play with as they passed by. Enter the hula hoop.

I made my table a mix of parts and pieces of all of the things I like to teach and put out flyers for the class I have already scheduled to start soon. Prominent was the email sign-up sheet. I prefilled the top two slots with my past emails and names of favorite book characters. To my surprise, someone actually knew one of the names and got a chuckle out of it.

Yesterday the weather was not the greatest, but not a complete wash out. The rain sprinkled a bit and I only had to cover the tables once. Once we got set up, I started hoopin’.

I have developed a reputation as being a “walking smile with the white hat” as I am generally friendly and free with joy and always wear my white hat when out. I know the organizer of the event well and she is also not a laid back wall flower. Together we laugh up a storm, calling from booth to booth, working to keep the banter fun and the event light.

My hula hooping became the second hot topic of the day behind the adorable, adoptable puppies running around. People watched me hoop a simple round pattern, nothing showy or fancy, just hula hooping and laughing, pretty much non-stop all day long. How long is she going to hoop for? I used to be able to hoop. Look at the little kid learning to hoop! Is she still hooping? She’s going to be tired tomorrow. Oh the boy can hoop too!

So what did I accomplish by hula hooping all day long - other than one hell of a core workout? Everyone was talking about me. I brought a smile to a whole lot of lips. They will remember the gal in the white hat, hula hoopin’ all day. More people stopped to talk to me. I only collected three new email addresses, but I handed out many more class flyers and personal brochures. I counted twelve conversations that lasted longer than three minutes. Overall, I had many more meaningful interactions with the public.

Success. I collected three new emails. Success. I had more conversations. Success. I worked on more and new language to promote myself and my brand, for lack of a better more elegant term. So the day was positive, even if the only items I sold were the Ugg clogs and one party dress from the batch of yard sale stuff I had brought for good measure. What I collected in data about my community was worth the twenty five dollar booth fee.

Next month I hustle on with another booth - new topic, new mouse trap.

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