Side Hustles You Can Use To Transition Out Of Your Day Job (And Into Full-time Audio)

Brian Hood (0:29)

Cute smile.

Chris Graham (0:30)

Go on, go on.

Brian Hood (0:31)

Wonderful personality, co-host, Mr. Chris Graham. Chris, how are you doing today, buddy?

Chris Graham (0:35)

I'm better now, thank you. I needed that.

How are you?

Brian Hood (0:39)

I'm doing pretty good, man. I just closed on a property that I had been building over the last year and a half, and it's been on the market for about six months. Finally sold, finally closed, everything's done. I'm out from under it, I feel so happy now. Weight off my shoulders.

Fun project, but I will not be building a new house anytime soon to sell.

Chris Graham (0:56)

That's awesome. Well, congratulations on getting an enormous check.

Brian Hood (1:01)

Yeah, so real estate has been my kind of side hustle here, and that brings us perfectly into the topic of this episode, and that is side hustles. What side hustles can you use while you're building your audio income?

What can you implement to supplement your income? Whenever things are getting slow in your studio, we actually put a Facebook discussion up about this, and we had a ton, a ton of comments, almost a hundred or over a hundred, I don't know. We had tons and tons and tons and tons of comments of people weighing in.

Some awesome ideas. We actually pulled some of those out for this episode to bring to you guys, and we have some of our own that we have that we think are gonna be things that are both bad and good, side hustles, and some that will help develop skills that are very important as you're building your studio business. So there's a lot packed into this episode today.

Chris Graham (1:42)

Totally.

Brian Hood (1:42)

And I think you guys and girls are getting a lot out of this today.

Chris Graham (1:45)

Yeah, so I think just to jump in right away, the initial hesitation I would have had listening to this episode if I were 10 years younger than I am now is I would have been like, what? Side hustle, oh man, you're selling out. You need to just go all in and you're terrible if you do anything other than audio to make a living.

And we just want to dispel that as bad. That's an awful idea that's ego based, not wisdom based.

Right now, there's a story that's been making the rounds in the news. It's been on every single news outlet that I've seen about this guy, Jeffrey Owens. Jeffrey Owens was Dr. Huxtable's son-in-law on The Cosby Show in the 80s.

Super famous, super recognizable guy. If you were watching TV in the 80s, you knew who this guy was, but his career has slowed down since The Huxtables, The Cosby Show. So he's still an actor. He's still all about it. He's still all in, but he got a side hustle to help make ends meet in between acting gigs. Because acting, as far as I can tell, is sort of similar to audio and music in that sometimes you've got a lot of work and sometimes you have a little bit of work. So what Owens did was he got a job working at Trader Joe's when one day somebody recognized him and took pictures of him without him knowing on their cell phone and posted it on the internet. All these new stories came out like, look how far they fall, you know, Jeffrey Owens, you know, from stardom to working at Trader Joe's, blah, blah, blah. And then, and this is awesome, there was a backlash that basically everybody jumped on of what the heck is this crap? I think they used the phrase career shaming. Jeffrey Owens, at that point, got so much press and so much publicity from it, I think he now has a reoccurring job on CSI. He was on all the news outlets. So this is a really kind of current events story, this episode is, of talking about having a side hustle to make your dream happen like my man, Jeffrey Owens.

So the question I kind of want to lead in here is, if it's not working for you in audio, the solution might be to stick with it, but it also might be to supplement with a side hustle and do something that you don't love in order to do something that you do love full-time someday. I have to lead with this question, are you passionate enough to do something you hate to eventually do something you love?

Brian Hood (4:03)

That's a great question, and when you look at Jeffrey Owens' story, he was clearly passionate enough to do the Trader Joe's thing, which is not the most prestigious job in the world. In order to supplement his income between acting gigs, it ultimately paid off because he got a lot of free publicity, he got a recurring spot on the show, and his acting career is probably gonna have a little bit of boost from that.