The Edupreneur's Side Hustle Handbook

10 Successful Educators Share Their Top Tips

Lisa Dunnigan, Tosha Wright, Lisa Dunnigan, Tosha Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000047868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement primaire

Find out how you can use your talents as an educator to make extra money on the side! In this helpful book, top Instagram influencers share how they've had success with selling lesson plans, handouts, t-shirts, and more, while maintaining careers as teachers and school leaders. You'll hear from these inspiring educators:

• Lisa Dunnigan and Tosha Wright @thewrightstuffchics
• Jen Jones @hellojenjones
• Michelle Ferré @pocketfulofprimary
• Kisha Mitchell @bethelightinc
• Bryce Sizemore @theteachingtexan
• Kristen Donegan @easyteachingtools
• Cynthia Frias @followsocialone
• Kayse Morris @kaysemorris
• Eric Crouch @adventureswithmrc

If you've always dreamed of having a side hustle but weren't sure you had the time or the know-how, this is the book for you. Each chapter offers tons of practical tips to help you get started, along with humorous anecdotes and words of wisdom to keep you motivated on your journey.

1
Getting to Know The Wright Stuff Chics

Lisa Dunnigan and Tosha Wright

Meet Lisa:
At 18, I had twin girls, Tosha and Elise. Even though I was a single mom, I was determined to get a college degree. While working two jobs the entire time, I was able to achieve that in four and a half years. Tosha and Elise’s father was not in the picture very much, but our family was always there to help take care of them while I was working and attending classes. Ever since I was in first grade, I had wanted to be a teacher. I had an amazing student teacher. She mesmerized me, and she ignited a love for teaching in me. I was determined to be a successful teacher. My dad tried to talk me out of becoming a teacher; he said that I was not going to make any money. I told him that I was going to marry a rich man. Well, I married an educator! We had an awesome life and were able to give our girls an amazing life. We divorced after being married for 18 years. There are no regrets with my marriage and the life that we were able to have for Tosha and Elise. I taught seventh and fourth grade for seven years. God bless middle school teachers! Teaching fourth grade was my love for sure. I have been a school counselor, an assistant principal, and an elementary principal, and I have been a central office administrator over several federal programs for the last seven years. Having reached my 30-year mark, I will retire in February 2020 and will be able to focus on our brand and our non-profit, The Pink Santa Hat Movement, Inc. Being an educator has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my life. My desire is to continue to help other educators be successful in and out of the classroom.

Meet Tosha:

I never wanted to be a teacher, but isn’t it funny how God works? I attended the college of my dreams (seriously my dream since I was a little girl) and was determined to be anything but a teacher. I changed my major continuously. When I entered college, my major was accounting. I took it in high school and loved it, but I quickly learned that it was not a good idea for me. After about two years of going back and forth, I finally started to research ways that I could possibly be a teacher (imagine that) and still graduate on time. I was able to change my major going into my junior year. My classes were interesting and applicable. Once I graduated in 2005, I enrolled in a two-year alternative program to receive teacher certification while I taught. I can honestly say that I was born to be an educator. It is ingrained in me and brings me more joy than frustration. I taught kindergarten and first grade, and it has been such a learning experience. I learned so many things about myself. Being in the classroom was fulfilling, but I felt like I needed to reach teachers on another level. I was a curriculum coordinator and now as a school leader, my heart is in the school and in working with students, their families, and teachers to help improve education. I tried to fight it many times and in many different ways, but I know I am where I am supposed to be.

I knew from the beginning that my teaching salary was not going to be enough to provide me with the things that I had grown accustomed to. Honestly, that was one of the reasons that I did not want to become a teacher. But I knew there were many things I could do to supplement my salary. Since my first teaching job, I always worked a part-time job. Whether it was tutoring, working at an after-school program, working in a clothing store (where I never actually earned a check because I bought so many clothes), or working for the Census, these side jobs allowed me to take trips, pay off debt, and just enjoy life. It is not my goal to quit my job because of our side hustle but to enhance my life and my family’s life. I will tell you that it is very hard to balance it all—a full time job and being a wife, a mother, and a friend, and all while trying to stay healthy and take care of myself. My husband does more than his fair share at home, and he also does so much for our business—really anything that is asked of him. I know that I am doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing in life right now. I’m so grateful that I didn’t end up with what I thought I wanted.

Starting Our Brand

The Wright Stuff Chics, Inc., has opened many doors for our family. None of this would be possible without our loyal customers. We have some customers who bought our very first shirt and continue to buy our newest designs. Having a side hustle has been part of our family forever! Lisa always has to have one million balls in the air. That is how she functions, and Tosha got to watch all of it growing up, so it is also part of her DNA. Having a successful business is for sure not for the faint at heart, and it also takes lots of time, commitment, dedication, tears, and ups and downs. We started The Wright Stuff Chics, Inc., in December of 2016. Tosha’s twin sister, Elise, started a faith-based t-shirt line when she was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. After seeing how successful Elise’s business was, Lisa had an idea. We had previously run a very successful eBay shop with embroidery and gifts. We were a top seller store, but when Lisa got divorced, the business was sold. Lisa, Tosha, and Elise were on a three-way phone call where we bounced around several ideas and finally decided to get some cute and trendy teacher t-shirt designs made. We went back and forth on a name. Tosha had done birthday chalkboards, vinyl decals, and ornaments called The Wright Vinyl & Chalkboards. Elise actually came up with our name: The Wright Stuff. Using Tosha’s last name was an easy way to tie this in as a family business. We later had to add Chics because the Wright Stuff was taken. Our very first design was Queen of the Classroom, and it has been a very successful design that we have revamped a couple of times. We even have a Spanish version now! Even though Tosha lived in Pennsylvania, we decided to have the business in Georgia because we have more family members who could help us here. We started out just shipping from our dining room. We did this for over a year. We had designs in three of the four bedrooms. Lisa’s bedroom is where we packed the shirts, so we had the postage printer and all of the packing items there. All things Wright Stuff had taken over the entire house!

Once we knew that things were continuing to grow, we began to look at warehouse space. We needed a place to store the shirts and process orders. We ended up renting a storage-type unit near Lisa’s house. We were there for about a year before we found a much bigger space that we were able to design ourselves. Our current warehouse has a retail space up front, where we can host pop-up shops as well as sell to customers at special events. In the back is where the magic happens. We store our tees, mugs, and shipping materials, and we package and label each order by hand. We have a full-time office manager and several part-time employees who help us to keep everything going in the right direction.

Refining Our Processes

During our first big after-Christmas sale, we received over 1,000 orders. Tosha and her family had to go back home after visiting during the holidays. Lisa also had a lot going on, as her doctor found a polyp on her intestines that needed to be removed. The doctor took out several inches of her colon, so she could not do any heavy lifting. Also, during this time we did various designs using heat transfer vinyl. We had over 150 shirts to weed before they could get heat pressed. If you have ever done this, then you know how labor-intensive it is. During the process of printing out those shirts, Lisa decided that vinyl did not need to be part of our brand. It does not hold up, and screen printing is way more durable and long lasting. Also during this time, we had one screen printer who printed all our shirts. Lisa called him to let him know that we had gotten over 1,000 orders. The first words out of his mouth were that it would take three weeks to print all the shirts because there were several different designs. Three weeks was way too long to make people wait for a design. We decided to contact another printer as well, and we were able to get out all of the designs within two weeks. That was the start of something big in our lives.

After the sale, we realized we needed help—and not just from other family. We needed to invest in someone working for us part-time to fill orders, handle customer questions and emails, and just in general help with fulfillment. We also decided that we needed to get our name out there. If you look on social media, you will see that there are at least a dozen online stores that sell teacher tees. We knew we needed help with branding and exposure, so we put out an ad for a social media manager to help us become successful with our teacher tee business. We wanted someone who could run our social media accounts since we both were working full-time jobs and did not have the time and energy to devote to making posts. We interviewed several people via phone and their online portfolios. Our amazing social media manager, Cynthia of Social One Marketing, has grown our business tremendously. Recently, we started working with an ad specialist, Greg, who has done a great job getting our ad game on. He has already given us an awesome strategy to turn into a multi-million-dollar company.

Find the (W)Right People

We have also opened many doors for those who work with us.

It is important to find your people when it comes to starting a business. Find people who are loyal to you and your brand. We had no idea that our business would take off like it did. It was rough in the beginning because we had so many ideas but just the two of us to implement them. We have grown our business to two full-time employees and five part-time employees. Because Lisa and Tosha have always been supervisors on their jobs, the dynamics of managing adults has been the same even in our own business. We attribute our success to having great workers who always do their best to get the job done. Of course, there have been ups and downs in the last three years, but overall we have had great success.

It is important to find your people when it comes to starting a business. Find people who are loyal to you and your brand.

What we do might seem easy, but there is so much that goes into making a business successful. We could have given up long ago, especially when things did not go our way. We have incurred many obstacles that could have taken us out, but we continued to press on. We vend for various events around the country almost every weekend throughout the year. The worst experience we have had so far is when we had a driver who left from Atlanta and would head to the weekend destination a couple of days before the Saturday event. During this particular instance, the driver left on Wednesday and was headed to Connecticut, or so we thought … he ended up going to Arkansas, which was totally the wrong direction. Once he figured it out, he was 24 hours away from the correct location. The only thing for him to do was find the closest FedEx and ship the crucial items that we needed. Lisa was distraught because experience had told her that this was going to be an expensive mistake. The packages arrived in Connecticut for the show and everything worked out for the weekend. A week later we received the bill—over $10,000 in shipping costs. This experience taught us to make sure that the directions are printed out and that our travel person goes over the exact location with the driver before leaving our shop.

Although we have amazing employees who work hard daily helping our business thrive, we have learned the hard way that you cannot expect you from people. Let that sink in and really think about what that means. Yes, we employ others and trust that they will meet their job duties and expectations. But at the same time, as an owner of a company, you are way more invested than they will ever be. That is a hard lesson. We trusted people who said they could help grow our business but really just wanted to get paid and not show any results. Some people do not want to see you succeed. Over the years, this has been one of the hardest lessons to learn in our business.

Although we have amazing employees who work hard daily helping our business thrive, we have learned the hard way that you cannot expect you from people.

Oh, Inventory

Getting our inventory right has been one of the biggest obstacles, especially when we have sales. We deal with three to four different screen-printing companies at all times because we try our best to get out the orders within 15 days. This past summer, we had a grab bag sale where the customers were able to choose the three designs that they wanted. This was a major issue because our normal inventory could not be used. We tried our best to guess how many we needed. That was a disaster, to say the least. As we were packaging the orders, we would get down to the last two orders and need more shirts. Needless to say, the grab bag sales will never happen again. Many things in business are trial and error. Neither Tosha nor Lisa have business backgrounds. In the coming months, we are going to work with some inventory experts and get suggestions on what they think we should do. The good news is that we have lots of data that we can use in our Shopify history. We are going to improve our system. Amazon Prime’s two-day shipping has spoiled people! They want their items within two to three days. That is not possible for us. Hopefully one day we will be able to do it. Getting the basics of the business down is something we continue to strive for daily. We have so many popular designs that narrowing them down is a daunting task. There are some designs we have tried to stop producing, but then a teacher will post themselves in the design and we get emails wanting to purchase the design. It is hard to juggle all the moving parts. This is probably one of our biggest issues in our business. On one hand, we do not want a lot of inventory in the warehouse but on the other hand, not having the shirts to fill orders is a big issue as well. We are trying to find a logistics and fulfillment person who can help us with this major issue.

Did Someone Say Teachers Love Rae Dunn Mugs?

This might sound crazy, but God always sends these ideas to Lisa. One of her ideas was to create a “Teach Your Heart Out” mug with Rae Dunn. After some research, Lisa was able to speak to someone at the company. Within weeks, the sample was ordered. We knew that they entire process would take 120 days because the mugs are made in a factory in China. We decided that we would do a presale on the mugs and would make sure that everyone knew that the mugs would take time to be made. We knew that teachers loved Rae Dunn, but we had no idea that the mug was going to be so popular. We received so many emails and direct messages asking us whether the mugs were authentic Rae Dunn mugs. Rae Dunn even posted “real” on one of our posts. This totally helped to validate that the mug was real. We learned so much during this process. For the next Rae Dunn order, we will be getting a fulfillment company to mail out all of the orders for us. It took us a month to get the thousands of orders sent out. Also, it took a little while to get the shipping process perfected. Our fulfillment manager watched a ton of YouTube videos, and we visited FedEx and UPS to garner advice on how to best ship the mugs. We did finally master getting them to show up unbroken. The next order will be much smoother.

Teach Your Heart Out Conferences

Over the last 29 years, Lisa has attended thousands of conferences. So many years ago, she put hosting an engaging and inspirational teacher conference on her bucket list. She had hosted several successful church conferences and knew that hosting a teacher conference could be just as successful. The goal of the teacher conference was to ensure that all participants walked away with strategies that could be easily implemented in the classroom, all while inspiring educators to continue to give 110% in the classroom. Our kids deserve only the best, and educators have a huge responsibility to the kids they teach. Our first conference completely sold out after we added Gerry Brooks to the lineup. Gerry has since been at every conference as a keynote speaker. After the first conference, we changed the name from The Wright Stuff Chics, Inc., Conference to Teach Your Heart Out (TYHO). We also contacted Michelle Griffo of Target Teachers and Apples and ABC’s to help us with getting our TYHO speakers. The conferences have been very well-received, and we hope to continue to build a successful conference that has a vast impact on classrooms all over the world. Recently, we took TYHO on a cruise ship. We had our classes right on the ship, and we also visited a local school in the Bahamas, which totally warmed the hearts of the educators who were in attendance. It was great to see how other countries view and teach the curriculum. Our next cruise will set sail to the Western Caribbean. With TYHO, we ha...