Side hustle turned full time hustle
Let’s take a quick step back to February 2020…
I recently had left my 9-5 dream job (or so I had thought) to take on a short-term contract job during a transitional phase in my life. It was the beginning of February 2020 and my work situation was already a little chaotic.
Making the switch from a full-time exempt employee to an independent contractor was like drinking from a fire hose. Forming a business, learning to withhold and pay my taxes, filing for a business license, etc. was all very, very foreign to me.
And theeeennnn… you guessed it, COVID happened.
What turned into a 6-month contract gig turned into a much longer ordeal with no end in sight. The workload ebbed and flowed, and I, like many others, found myself with a bunch of free time on my hands.
Coincidentally, my now-husband’s family is friends with a couple who owned a small coffee roasting company in Eastern Washington. They were looking for someone to help them out with their social media. And I, being a Millennial and a habitual yes-woman, thought, “Sure! I can do that. Why not?”
So just like that, they became my first marketing client!
Although I came from the public policy world (aka I was a lobbyist), I did have a background in marketing also. I studied Agricultural Communications at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and competed on the National Agri-Marketing Conference (NAMA) Team.
When I graduated college, I was at a fork in the road choosing between public policy and marketing. I ultimately chose public policy so this, in many ways, felt like the beginning of finding my way back to marketing.
After working with the coffee roasting company, moving up to Eastern Washington One thing led to another and I was being connected with other small business in the Tri Cities area.