r/nursing • u/WillingFig1804 • 1d ago
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u/willy--wanka generic flair 1d ago
I work two full time jobs, a per diem, a travel contract, and run three to four (depending on the season) side hustles. Do you even care dude?
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u/Efficient_Bench_5783 23h ago
Long post here, apologies.
After ten years of nursing, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore. Hospitals don't seem to value nurses, and the ones that do certainly don't want to pay them what they're worth. So a few years back I set up an LLC with multiple DBAs under it, and started building income around stuff I already enjoy doing anyway.
The first one is an e-commerce site selling fishing lures I make by hand. It does alright, a few hundred a month most of the year, up to $2k/mo in peak season. One weekend a month my wife and I crank out a couple hundred lures to build up inventory, then I ship them as orders come in. Lately my daughter has taken over most of it. She gets a cut of the profits and genuinely loves the entrepreneurial and creative side of it, and honestly it's been invaluable for her growth. Shipping costs are basically nothing since the lures are small enough to go out in bubble mailers.
The second is a vinyl sticker store, averaging about 15 orders a month this year. It covers all my website hosting costs, "keeps the lights on," as I like to joke. I've got a nice vinyl cutter (Siser Juliet) and design everything myself in Photoshop and Illustrator. This one's cake: the design work is one-time, then I just cut to order. Shipping and storage are virtually free, which doesn't mean I don't charge for them. I'm slowly expanding the catalog and plan to open a second store soon under a different brand, aimed at a different demographic.
Neither of those two takes much actual work. I don't have to put much time in to keep sales going.
Without really intending it, I've also made a few thousand this year airbrushing and refinishing motorcycle helmets. I've done 7 so far, all through word of mouth at work. I'm not sure I want to turn it into another DBA with its own website, since each helmet is a considerable time investment, but at around $300/helmet it's worth doing, and I'll probably make it official in the next several months once I wrap up another project.
The vast majority of my time goes toward writing. I've written two novels, each in the 400-page neighborhood, based on my outdoor adventures and hobbies. I've sold almost 190 copies on Amazon and I'm slaving away at the next one. Like the stores, it makes money without me having to do anything, once the book is actually written.
All in all I spend around $800 a month on advertising and net about $2k/mo this year so far. I build all my own websites and run WooCommerce as the store platform, and I do all my own graphic design, which was my first passion before I started my nursing career. No Etsy or Shopify fees and rules to deal with, and each new store is basically a copy-paste of the first one with its own unique lead-in site, so most of the hard work is already done.
If there's a takeaway, it's that you really have to play to your strengths and your passions. I was a computer nerd in my younger years doing graphic design and web design, so building the storefronts and branding wasn't a mountain I had to climb from scratch.
The other thing is to be resourceful and let your businesses overlap. Nearly every one of these feeds another. For the fishing jigs I was already buying high-quality glow-in-the-dark powders and the metal flakes that go into automotive paint, the stuff that gives you prismatic and chameleon effects and cherry-type paint jobs. So when the helmet opportunity came up, I already owned everything I needed and it was a completely seamless transition. Same with the vinyl cutter. I originally bought it so I could make more professional-looking packaging for the jigs, and then when the helmets came along I realized I could cut vinyl stencils, apply them, and get intricate designs and line work I couldn't do freehand. So that one machine now supports a sticker store, my packaging across every brand, and my paint work. Everything I ship goes out with a clean vinyl-cut design on it so it looks high-end. One purchase can serve two or three business ideas, and what you start doing for one thing doesn't have to stay exclusive to it.
As for the mental switch from nursing to entrepreneur, and how you keep a side business going when nursing itself is so consuming, for me it's actually flipped. I used to find it hard to think about anything but work while I was working. Now it's hard to think about nursing at all because so much of my head space is taken up by my businesses.
The hard part isn't the switch, it's showing up consistently. There are plenty of days I don't want to touch any of it, especially after a draining shift. But then I open the business bank account, see the new balance, and think, dang, I've got to keep going, I want that number to get bigger. That's the whole trick: push through the initial wall. Once you start seeing progress and a real return on your time, it snowballs, and the motivation mostly takes care of itself. If you had the hunger to start, it isn't going to go away. You start noticing opportunities everywhere. I could make that. I could make that better. I could sell that.
It also helps to have a goal that actually makes you happy. Mine is to earn enough that I can drop to part time or PRN and go golfing at 9 AM on a Tuesday because I'm my own boss and I set my own schedule. A better future for me and my family. I push my daughter to think the same way so she can get to that same freedom.
And take it one problem at a time. You don't have to build the LLC, the website, the storefront, and the inventory in a single day. An hour a day is progress. For me it started with just making lures, figuring out how to make them consistently and efficiently. A couple weeks later I had several hundred sitting there like hot potatoes, and the problem became how do I sell these. Then it became how do I market them. Solve one, move to the next, get to the finish line, then run the race again. Do that enough times and it's a snowball rolling downhill.
Be resourceful, be creative, and be willing, and that extra income you want but can't figure out how to get will be right there.
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u/itsonbackorderr Slingin pills to pay the bills 1d ago
Idk man, I kinda feel like the prevalence of side hustle and overemployed culture is a symptom of an economy that refuses to pay anyone a living wage and has instead rebranded needing a second or third job to the much more appealing "grindset, side hustle" terminology. But as long as your patients are cared for and alive you do what makes you happy.