Advice, resources and getting started guide for home working

Turns out, the writing was the easy part. What came next was a 3-year stop-and-start journey.

What if a spare closet could turn into a farm, a warehouse, and 70 acres of land? That's roughly the path Kyle Beaver took. Kyle runs Ten Mile Mushrooms in rural Pennsylvania, along with Pro Grow Club, and he grows gourmet and medicinal mushrooms like oyster, lion's mane, and reishi. Before mushrooms, Kyle spent two years working state fairs in Pennsylvania, selling stuffed pretzels out of a food truck. Watching people drive 3 hours for a pretzel taught him what he wanted in his own business: something niche, something nobody nearby was doing, and something he could run in a very small space. A Google search for businesses you can run in a small space led him to a mushroom growing page from the UK. Almost 10 years later, that search has turned into a multi-six-figure operation.

Getting paid to eat at restaurants, tour apartments, and run your car through the wash 20 times in an afternoon? That's mystery shopping — a $2 billion industry most people have never heard of. Mercedes Eckert has been doing it for 13 years and has helped over 25,000 shoppers get started through her company, iShopAGP.com. Her personal best: $600 in a single day without getting out of the car.  She also runs ShopQuest, a free site where you can browse mystery shopper jobs in your city.

Last month I put out a call for listeners to share the most random ways they've made extra money, and the responses did not disappoint! Some side hustles start with a business plan. Others start with a stranger in a parking garage asking if you want to get paid to drink beer. That one actually happened to me in Atlanta. The woman worked for a market research company, and they needed taste-testers for a product that hadn't launched yet. I invited a couple of friends along, and we each made about $75 sampling what turned out to be Miller Chill. Later we lived near a place called the National Food Lab, so I went over and did a few more paid taste-testings.

Buy a boring business, they said. It’ll be easy. It’ll be fun. That’s the dream Andrea Palacio and her husband chased when they bought a landscaping company. The road got bumpy fast, but they still added around $300,000 in equity value in just a couple of years. Andrea Palacio runs AndreaPalacio.ai, where she helps other business owners put AI to work. But before that, she and her husband lived on a sailboat for 4 years while running an e-commerce business selling pet supplies on Amazon and Shopify. When that business stalled, they sold it and went looking for something new. They landed on a South Florida landscaping company, thinking it would be steady and mostly hands-off. Instead, almost everything went wrong at once.