#45 : Share your expertise with an online business

 
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We’ve talked to several people on the show who have built businesses around skills and knowledge that would be easy to take for granted. Just because something is easy for you - like building a website, public speaking, or getting a job interview - doesn’t mean it’s easy for everyone else. So why not share your expertise and build a thriving business while you’re at it?

Shey Harms has been a computer programmer in the corporate world for the past 30 years. She’s had 5 different podcasts and created a few dozen websites for herself and clients. She is now focused on helping people who want to change the second half of their lives by teaching them the tech skills they need to start or grow an online business through her podcast and business academy.

In this episode, Shey and I talk about how she got her start in tech and how she’s built an awesome business by helping people. We discuss creating a business that fulfills a need, how she decided to help people learn much-needed tech skills, and what’s next in her business.

In this episode, we’re discussing…

  • How Shey has combined her experiences with tech and entrepreneurship to help others.

  • Why she decided to build a business around helping people in the second half of life launch their own online businesses.

  • How Shey balances a full-time day job and her growing online business.

  • Why it’s a great idea to work on something you know well and can teach easily - not necessarily something you’re super “passionate” about.

  • How Shey is planning to expand her business with a digital agency and more training programs.

Shey’s Top Tips:

  • You can build a great business around helping other people – there are tons of problems that people want help solving - learning new tech skills is just one example. If you love helping people, you don’t have to have a completely revolutionary idea or work on something you’re crazy passionate about. Helping people can be the reward!

  • Don’t let impostor syndrome stop you – when you’re an entrepreneur, it’s important to fail quickly and keep moving. Don’t be afraid to try new things and don’t let that voice in your head hold you back - your next amazing idea or offering might be right around the corner.

  • Build a business on things you know well – if you know something backward and forward, and it’s easy for you to talk about, you might want to start a business in that area. If it’s not immediately obvious to you what you should create, get yourself in a community that will support you and help identify what you’re great at.

Resources:

 

+ Read the transcript

What if you could be doing something smarter with your money that creates income right now? If you're an IT professional who is wanting to get ahead financially and enjoy greater freedom of choice. And if you wonder who else in tech is creating ways to make their money work for them? You want actionable ideas with honest pros and cons and no fluff. Welcome to The Richer Geek Podcast for helping IT professionals find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. I'm your host, Nicole Stohler and in this podcast, you'll hear from others who are already doing these things and learn how you can too.

Hey everyone, welcome back to The Richer Geek Podcast. In Episode 16. Tommy Griffith joined us to chat about the online business that he started using skills and knowledge from his day job. He was working for PayPal and Airbnb working in the SEO space and he worked to then develop courses and teach people how to do that for themselves. On Episode 41, Davis wind shared how he started teaching college students how to get management consulting jobs, basically leveraging the experience that he had and how he was able to get his management consulting job. What do both of these folks have in common? Well, they started businesses that are uniquely built around their skillset, knowledge and personalities. Today's episode continues the same theme. And it's meant to encourage you to think about what comes easy or natural to you, that you could leverage to teach and help others. As a side note here, I recently took a lift ride and my driver was talking about how he had been out of the workforce for essentially five years taking care of an elderly parents. And he was trying to jump back in and he's a sequel programmer, and he was having a tough time breaking back in because he'd been out for so long. And I was thinking about that. How could someone help others transition back in like if you're an HR person, what do you want to see? What are some things? How do you teach people if you're, if you're someone who helps upskill? Folks, if you train and mentor others, how can you leverage that to teach other people? You know, in that situation? How do they get back into the workforce? Today's guest Shay harms has been a computer programmer in the corporate world for the past 30 years. She said several different podcasts and she's created several different websites for both herself and clients. And so what she does now is she helps people who want to change the second half of their lives by teaching them tech skills that they need to start or grow their online business. I am very excited to welcome Shay to the show today. Shay. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. This is so exciting.

I'd love to share with the audience more about kind of what you do in tech, like what your experience and your overall background.

Sure. Okay, so I have been in the tech world now for - I hate to say it - 30 years. When I was in college way back in the day, I wasn't sure what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I took some computer classes because at the time computers were, you know, the up and coming thing. This is the late 1980s like 88. And I really liked playing around with the computer I had to work. And I just got really comfortable with this. I took some computer programming classes, and then I decided I was a minority at school, I felt really uncomfortable. I wasn't doing as good as I thought it would. So I switched to entrepreneurship. And I left the computer world behind temporarily. But I still liked playing with computers and so I got a job working at Help Desk. And that was like the spark that kind of lit the fire with my whole computer career the rest of it. I started off on the Help Desk I became a programmer shortly after and then found that that was really my space that I really enjoyed the puzzle of figuring out what computer problem was, you know, why is this code not working and dig into it, and whatnot. And over the past 30 years, I've just kept kind of stepping up my career along that journey. I've been a programmer, I've been a team lead. I've been a manager and a project manager. And now I'm back into the programming role, because that's what I love the most. I love looking at code. I like researching data. And that's kind of where I'm at today.

Well, and this is a perfect episode, because you're joining your two worlds together. So you talked about you started in technology a little bit but then said, No, I'm not really. I mean, there's not I'm outnumbered here into entrepreneurship, came back to technology, and now started entrepreneurship while working full time which is the perfect message or this podcast. So how did you get started with your company that your your other business outside of your tech career

Out of my day job? That's kind of funny, you know, back into 2000 I worked in the first before the.com bubble burst happened. I was in a dot com. And I enjoyed that atmosphere. And I thought, you know, someday I want to have my own online business. And so for the next couple of years, I kept racking my brain trying to figure out what the heck am I going to do? What problem can I saw, because that's what everybody always said, you got to solve some problem. And I think I was trying way too hard to try to figure out some problem to fix. And at the time, you know, websites were so new still in 2008. They weren't at the stage that they're at today. You know, everybody creates website today. But back then it seemed like it was a lot more effort. We didn't have WordPress to create something quickly. So I would have to create it myself, which wasn't an issue. I knew how to do that. But I just wasn't sure what to create. And so after spending many years of thinking, Okay, I love horses. So let me create a horse website and then I love water skiing and boating, let me create a boating website. And I would start blogs and then you know, it was like this long journey and the reason why I say all this is Because it was leading me down a path that I didn't understand at the time. In the beginning, I was just like, why can't I come up with this idea? Why am I struggling so hard to help people. But what I discovered after trial and error, and especially the past, since 2013, that's when I went to my first conference in the online space. And I started learning about podcasting and video and I really went full time in my thinking of how to create all this stuff. Well, a few years later, I had friends that are asking me tech questions all the time. Well, how do you edit a video? How do you start a podcast? How do you do this? And WordPress? Can you create my WordPress website for me? I started getting more and more questions like that. And one of my friends, she was like, why aren't you doing this as a business? I'm like, I don't know. It's, there's so many people already in that space, online business space, and it's not really my passion. You know, I want to do something about the lake life or traveling or something fun. And she's like that you're so good at this and we need you and I've heard that from heard so many times, and I finally decided to, okay, maybe I should look into this. And I started thinking about how can I help people with their technology problems. And what I heard from somebody else I knew she was at the time I was in my 40s. And she was close to 60. And we were talking about online business. And she goes, Well, Shay, it's easy for you because you know, computers, I didn't grow up with computers. And I thought, that's the people I need help. I need to help people who are maybe baby boomer ish, maybe a little younger. You know, when I was in high school, we had an Apple TV, I think, I learned how to do basic programming on it. And I wasn't a programmer at the time. So it didn't really matter to me, and I thought I was done with computers at that point. And that's why a lot of people were they may have been exposed to a computer in high school back in the 1980s and early 90s. But they didn't use them like the kids have today. And I thought that's my niche. Those are the people that I need to really focus on helping when it comes to having an online business because people want to have online business but they don't know why. Start, they don't know, like, how do I create a website? How do I create a podcast? So those are the types of things now that I started training with people. And once I realized that's kind of what my sweet spot was, I've just kept going with it ever since.

There is so much great information what you just shared. Okay, let me and I made notes here, because I want to go back to a few things. So first of all, I love that, you know, you worked in.com and you said, Gosh, I want to own I want someday to have an online business. So that's, that's cool. Kind of planted the seed. And then I love how you said, I'm passionate about horses. And bodines he started blogs, which I'm laughing because I love Reddit. And one of the Reddit subreddit groups that I like is called passive income. And everybody on there is advising everyone to start a blog, which is hilarious because it's not passive. It's a ton of creating content. And that's a little bit maybe of what you experienced. Without seeing any results for a really long time.

Exactly. And then you get burned out, you start creating a blog post, and you're like, why am I spending so much time creating this content? nobody's seen it anyway. And then well, then you gotta learn SEO, how do you make people find your website? So then what I kept doing was spending time researching how to do all the stuff I needed to do. But then I wasn't implementing the stuff I needed to do. I just kept going back into research mode. And I did that for like five years, it was just easier for me to learn all the skills than it was to actually spend the time put into practice.

Yeah, well, it's so much work so much work, especially if you're talking about SEO. Now, there's something else you said that I wrote down. And I love this because you talked about wanting to do something around your passion, right, versus the need and the problem that someone has, and I was thinking about that it was right in front of your face the entire time, and only as other people pointed out to you. I've had other people on the show. And really what we find is, it doesn't have to be your passion. is something you're good at and you know how to do. And then it funds your passion. So you can go do your passion. But as an example, I've had a franchise guy on the show, Kenny rose, and he talked about, Hey, you know, people who own laundromats is probably not their passion, but it funds their lifestyle. So to your point, right in front of you the need and the something that you were good at, and it took other people pointing this out. Okay, so how did you balance or how do you now balance managing this company helping your clients while also working full time?

Well, I wanted to add one more thing to what you just were talking about on the passion. The thing I discovered since I've been following this journey is the thing I do really love helping people. I really like being able to answer their questions and I didn't even know that until I was at a conference last year, somebody asked me if I would answer all the tech questions because they were busy helping the people with the business side of things. And that was like, that was the Moment. That's what changed everything for me because people were like, they were literally all waiting at a table for me to show up. And the people that are organizing the event are like, can you come into the room a little sooner because people are waiting for you over here. And I was like what you know? And so I went over there and I started talking to them. And they just had basic questions like they just want to know how to do some things in WordPress. I didn't know why the WordPress site wasn't working. So I fix it like oh my God, I've spent hours doing this thank you for fixing my problem in like five seconds. And that is passion. That is something that I have learned that sometimes you think that you're passionate about these different hobbies, but sometimes you don't realize how much you enjoy what you already know how to do so well that comes naturally to you. So to your next part about the How am I kind of healing transition, you know, it seems like the more work I have to do for the online business, the more focused I am overall with everything that's in my life. So my day job keeps me you know, really busy. I have a lot of programming work to do. Sometimes I have to work crazy hours. I I've been awake until one or two in the morning sometimes working on my day job because I know a client is waiting for a file to be sent to them. And I take my job very seriously. So when that happens, it's like, Okay, well, I've only got the weekend now to work on it. And I do very little work on the weekends for my day job. So that's really good. And you just kind of have to learn how to reshift your priorities and do a little bit of a juggling act from sometimes you know, my lunch hour has been my saving grace. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent my lunch hour I eat by myself. We have a cafeteria at work. And I take a little bit later lunch, there's not as many people there and I take my iPad, and I go up there and I start doing whatever work I can do on my iPad. So that when I get home, maybe then that's when I go work on editing a podcast episode or video or something like that. And my husband he works a lot of hours as well. So it's just the two of us were empty nesters now, and when you have that time available, you know I can stay up all night. I'm a programmer. That's what I do. I like staying up until one or two o'clock in the morning so I don't mind working on my online business stuff really late. Working on the weekends and when summertime comes though, weekends go back to the lake. I don't spend too much time doing the online business thing that point in time.

I don't blame you because you're you're in the Midwest, right? So you need to enjoy that weather when that happens. got ugly. Got it. Okay, so I have more questions about the business itself. And for my audience who's thinking about Hey, what do I know? And how could I help people with what I know? But before we go into that, you said something and it made me smile because you know, I'm in tech, but I have very little patience for probably where you shine which is to figure something out and to really get into the details. I hate that I want the answer now. So I open a ton of cases all the time. Like I am not shy about open a case with with the different software vendors I work with. internally with my company. I opened So my question is your business? Are you like the help desk? Or how do you how does this work? Because that would be my dream, just email you and you go figure it out with like all the different service providers that I work with, or how tell me how it works.

So right now what I do is I have a membership Academy where I'm teaching people how to do a lot of these skills themselves. So you know, I went through a full blown course on WordPress, and some of my friends that have joined the Academy. They were like, Wow, you've got a lot of information in here a lot of videos I'm like, Well, it's because I want to make sure you understand and I broke it down into small little pieces. So that it was like if you wanted to learn a specific skill and WordPress, you didn't have to watch a 30 minute long video to figure out how to do a five minute job, right? And I try to put it in a good order. So that's what I primarily do is I like to create courses that train people how to help themselves, but I have a community so in the community itself, that's where everybody asked the questions and I get questions all the time. Like, for instance, one gal already has online business. She's really successful and she joined because she wanted To be able to have that person that she can ask questions whenever something breaks. So she sent me a message and she's like, I have somebody that's trying to download my PDF out of school and she's having troubles opening this. And she's I don't even really understand this question. She's asking, do you have any advice? And so I kind of explained to her that a lot of different reasons why this might be happening and why the browser may not work. And I gave her a lot of examples on how to fix it. And she goes, Oh, my God, I think you just saved me, this customer. Thank you so much for doing this for me. And I get questions like that all the time. And that's, that's the kind of stuff I love to do a lot of stuff. I just know from experience. Sometimes I have to go research it, but I don't mind cuz I'm a good researcher. I think I think that's one of my strong suits. So I'll go out there and dig into Google and look at other examples. And sometimes I'll just go mess around my own site and try to figure out if somebody's having a WordPress issue, can I break it on my site and cause the same problem? I've also done the work where people are like, Can I hire you for a couple of hours because I have a lot of cleanup stuff on my website and my podcast or whatever. And so I've done that work. As well, and I just kind of go for whatever people need, I do coaching. So I coach people on how to do a lot of these steps like I want to get my business going, but I didn't know where to begin. And some people have like a WordPress site set up on WordPress. com, and they want to move it over to self hosted, they don't know where to begin with that process. So just it's kind of a gamut. It's not just WordPress, like I said, it's basically all these all my tech skills. And I'm constantly learning I've probably got five or six different video editing tools that I've been playing around with. And, you know, my, my people come to me like, well, I don't know how to start doing videos, I want to create videos for YouTube, what software should I use? And I have both a Mac and a PC. So I play with both and so I'm not necessarily helped us but I do have kind of a lot of those questions and answer sessions and I do live calls twice a month so that anytime people are stuck, they can come to me if they don't want to post it in the community.

There you go. That's kind of like a help desk live call. That's cool. And that's cool too, cuz you have a record. So if you think about the traditional you In case you have a problem, that's just an isolated piece, nobody's really helping you piece that together or having a full view of all the other tools that you're using. Because there are a lot when even just in the podcasting world, there's a lot of different tools that are being used. All right? So because I really want to help the audience think about this, this concept of what you're good at that maybe you're not, you don't realize other people need help with. And I think you had some great people in your life who came to you and that helped you really start to see that. What advice would you give others who are looking to get started sharing their knowledge and it could be in you know, any type of industry? Maybe, maybe it's about boating.

I have two perfect examples. So the first one is the woman I was talking about earlier, that was like pushing me pushing me pushing me she's like my best cheerleader. She's become a great friend. And the funny thing is, I just finally met her in person. past year, and we've been friends for four or five years online. But she has MS. She has, you know, has to deal with issues, especially with Ms. She had started a website about Ms. And she had a podcast and then she kind of put it aside. And she decided to work on a community thing. Local to her area and Virginia. And I kept asking her like, why are you not going back to Ms? Because I don't know, I don't really know how I'm going to expand on this. And at the time, memberships are becoming more front and center at least on the podcast I was listening to and I'm like, I really think you want to create a membership around this. I think people will love having you as their leader, somebody that can guide them because you deal with this stuff day in day out. I mean, there are days that she can't work, there are days that she's in her bed working on her computer. And she's like, well, maybe you know, so I kept kind of pushing her like she pushed me. And now a few years later after she's been going through this process, she's like, Oh my god, I can't believe how much my life has changed since then. She has made so many deals with different companies and who have asked Her to be part of their organization doing like there. She does a podcast for them. She's done their social media platforms for them all because she went back to doing her podcast but she had put on hold for a year or two she had it just sitting there wasn't do anything with it. And I convinced her to get it going again, she only podcast I think twice a month. But she's got this raving fan bases, people love her. And now she's branching off into a new area, which is helping these same people find remote work like what she's doing. And it's all because I told her to go back to her Ms. Something that she was dealing with. Now. It's not something that you're passionate about, but it's something she knows really well. And the other example is a good friend of mine is he's trying to build up his business on how to help other people that are in the trades business, how to be more successful. You know, he's been a carpenter for several years now. He's learned how to build a very successful type of business on his own and now he wants to teach other people and he's gone through I think it's called the pumpkin plan. The guy that wrote the book profit first and he's gone through all that process, so he has like this coaching thing he's putting together. But he's also somebody who's into hunting and fishing and you know, he can do all the mainly jobs around his house or whatever. And you know, there's some guys that don't know how to do that stuff. They weren't maybe weren't raised on how to do construction, or go hunting or camping. And so he's actually been talking about building a website around this mainly a camera when he calls it man camp or something. And it was like, you have to do this because this makes so much sense. You are somebody that already knows all this stuff. you're passionate talking about it. And I know a bunch of us kind of Haha, laugh about it, but he certainly has people interested. And I think if he would just launch it, he would have immediate members to that membership Academy because he knows this stuff. It's easy for him to talk about kind of like it is easy for me to talk about a lot of tech things. And some people they just have a hard time seeing it themselves. So you just kind of have to keep pushing them. Like I'm telling you this. This is your sweet spot, go for it.

Who tells you that? so that's the thing you... if you don't have people in your life, how do you - actually... I'm just trying to figure out how do you get that feedback? Like if you don't have people in your life who are doing that, because it's glaringly obvious to someone like you, for other people, but then it was obvious for the other people for you. But if What if you don't have value? What if your family is just doing their thing? And they never think about an online business? So they're not bringing any ideas to you? Where do you think you get that?

I think part of it is some of the communities that you can join, you know, if you have an inkling for having an online business of some sort, like, Oh, I sure would like to get out of my nine to five job and do something for myself, and you're not sure where to start? I think the best thing to do is go find communities where people are doing online business stuff. I mean, I have one and there's tons of other ones out there, you know, some that are geared just towards women, some that are geared towards men, some that have both sexes, and it doesn't matter. And I think when people start reading comments that people are saying And then they can share their viewpoint like, I want to do this, but I'm not sure where to begin. People will start asking them questions, and maybe that'll help spark something in the back of their brain like, Oh, yeah, I forgot that I've been quilting for fun for the last 30 years, you know, now my kids are grown. I didn't realize I could teach quilting to other women or, you know, maybe like I said, maybe there's some sort of fishing thing that some guy knows how to do really well. And he knows how to catch all the right bass at the right time with the right temperatures. Go teach it you know, there's lots of us would like to know how to fish better.

That's so good that the reality is that we all have skill sets and things that we know that we take for granted. And those skill sets can be used to build some type of, especially in today's world, some type of online business where you're helping others you're teaching others, whatever it is, I love. I love the fishing example. All right. What things would you have done differently as you build your business and why?

Oh, boy. That's a tough question. Because sometimes you think if I would have changed something, what I'd be where I'm at today. But I think really, I wish I would have started doing things faster. I put off creating my own membership Academy for a long time. I think a lot of it was self doubt, and imposter syndrome, which actually, I know it was because a few years back, I'd hired a coach, I worked with him for a while and I was going down this path of Okay, people telling me to do the tech thing. I should go out and build something and start teaching it. But the problem was, I felt like I was doing too much of the online business space. And I thought, Well, I haven't really created a business yet and the online business space, why would I want to teach it so the imposter syndrome really knocked me down and I decided I went back to him after I've been working with him for about three months going down that path. And I said, I really think I need to go back to my like, thing I need to make that happen, because that's what I know. That's what I'm comfortable with. And I think that took him by surprise. And he honestly I don't think he knew how to help me. Do that. I think it was like He knew how to help me build an online business that was in the online business space. But when I said I wanted to do something that was more about kind of travel, but more about people that are passionate about the lake life, he didn't know how to keep pushing me in that direction. And I think if I would have started doing either more with a lake life at that time, it might have turned into something fantastic with a membership of its own or, you know, I was creating ebooks at the time about how to winterize your boat again, imposter syndrome. I'm the woman that watches my husband do this all the time. I've asked tons of questions. I could winterizer but if I had to, but I haven't done it myself. So really, what is anybody gonna buy this ebook, I put it out there. So I have an E book that is completely done and just sitting there dusty on the shelves. And you know, I just think that you just really have to have that passion for something and go after it best you can.

Great advice. Good, really, really good advice. I think too. There might be in a little bit of what you talked about is sticking with something. So even though things have turned out really well, because you found that this is a needed niche. Perhaps the lake life would have been as well. Just sticking with it, which is hard to do, right? Because you don't see results immediately.

Just like a podcast, you can sit there and put out a podcast episode forever. And you get like two lessons one week and five lessons and next week and you're like, Is anybody paying attention to me anymore? But yeah, you learned so much by doing and that was something that people told me all the time, but I just didn't quite understand that. And I, you know, you hear an entrepreneurship world all the time, you need to fail fast. And I think I failed way too slow. But I've learned and now that I have started doing things, I mean, even though I'm a tech person, I have tech issues every single day and it drives me crazy when it happens to myself. So the other day I was working on creating this video interview I did recently and I could not get Adobe Premiere to work I kept getting errors and I was up until three in the morning trying to get this video uploaded to YouTube was so frustrating. And again, it's because I'm doing it, I'm actually doing something I'm learning by my mistakes and the more times that I have to work on a project doing videos, or podcasts or WordPress, or whatever it is, I'm learning and fixing. Same thing with building my courses out, you know, I, I didn't realize how long it would take to record all the videos, and create some maybe documents that go along with it and get everything uploaded into the course platform. And then you have to create the sales pages, and there's so many pieces that you don't know. And until you start doing the actual work, you're not going to know what problems you're going to run into. And I also found if you keep working and keep doing it, then pretty soon you don't think about yourself so much you stop thinking about the imposter syndrome or I'm not experienced enough or who's gonna buy this just by doing it itself and just keep going through the process. At the end. You're going to be like, Oh, I'm done and people are actually buying. So, why didn't I do this faster?

What are you looking to do next? Like what what comes next for your business?

Some exciting stuff. I'm very, very excited about where it's going right now. So I'm still going to keep the membership Academy going. But I'm actually starting a new side business, which is actually in perfect alignment with what I'm doing. So it kind of goes back to the Help Desk idea. I have lots of friends in India that I've just been building up contacts over the past several years. And one of the biggest complaints I hear from a lot of my Indian friends is they want a better job. They don't make much money in India, they want a better life for their family. Some of them are just like short, maybe $50 a month, which you're like, you're only short $50 Well, for them, that's a huge amount of money. And I'm like, you know, this makes perfect sense. I have people that want to learn some skills, they want to get into something to make more money. And I have a lot of entrepreneurial friends who need help. They need somebody to do the podcast editing or create a logo or create some show notes or whatever, you know, there's so many different tech things that can possibly do. And I started talking to some different people about it, and they were like, Oh, this is perfect, and they'd be willing to help kind of train these people. Little bit, if they knew that they could have somebody long term. So I'm actually creating an agency platform, where I'm going to be training these people to be virtual assistants for especially for online business people. So they're going to be trained up and the skills that I use in my online business you probably use in your online business. And because of from India, the rates aren't going to be astronomical, like what you would find in other places. And I'm going to make them get certified through my training, so that if somebody comes to my platform, they're going to see that these people are highly rated from whoever they've been certified. And they're going to, you know, they're going to have to be able to have a certain level of quality to the work before I'm even going to let them be part of my service platform then going to do so I'm really excited about that. And I actually have a different section of that it's going to be dovetailing into the US. And this kind of came from my friend with her helping these people that have MS or their chronic illnesses. I'm actually going to be helping people that want to have a full time job or they want to have a job so they can help control Maybe to their family, but they can't because of their illness or their disability, whatever keeps my home. So that's going to be my US based people. So I'm actually going to have to, I'm going to have an Indian based and I'm going to have the US base. So it's really exciting, and sometimes freaks me out. I start thinking about it too much, because it's like, Can I do this? This is like a huge, monumental thing. And people have been pushing me to an agency for a long time. And I kept pushing back like, No, I'm not ready for that. But now I'm ready. I've talked to some people that have encouraged me, I've had other businesses say I would hire if you would do this. So it's kind of like I got to do it now.

I think it makes perfect sense. So here's the reality of a few things. You can take an online course or join a membership site and watch videos on anything, right and it's, it's whether you relate to that person, a whole variety of reasons why you choose something. When you're busy, though, you don't want I personally do not want to take an online course for example, on editing my podcast, And so I have an editor who is awesome and does that and I never have to worry about it. And so the agency model that you're talking about makes a lot of sense, because you were talking about, okay, so I just said Help Desk. For me, I just want hey, here's my issue, go, go fix it. I do not want to watch any videos. I do not want to post in a Facebook group, right? Not for someone who's, you know, got a lot of other things going on and busy so that I love that you are heading down that model and also that you're you're helping people that, you know, either increase their income, or aren't able to, you know, physically work outside of the home and giving them an opportunity to elevate their skill set.

Yep. Yep. I think it's great. I'm really excited about it. And it was like one of those things where I was trying to help out somebody that I know that's looking for a US virtual assistant. And we had this conversation I told him Well, this was kind of what I was thinking about doing is kind of based off of what you're currently Doing your business model. And he was like, hey, let's get on a call and talk about this. So he and I started just chit chatting about it. And he had like a bajillion ideas for my brain. I was just like, Oh my gosh, this is so awesome. And he's like, so find me a virtual assistant like, okay, so I started thinking about it and went to talk to a few people. And I'm like, how am I going to find somebody? I mean, I'm pushing myself outside of my own comfort zone. 2020 is like a totally different year for me already, because I've been pushing myself so much. And I had this moment, my husband, I were driving back, we'd gone out to eat that night. I thought, Oh, my God, I know who I can help. I'm like, why didn't I think this before Kathy's got all these people over there that need help? They say that they've been raising their hand like, yeah, this is what we want to know. And so I talked to her about it, she thought it's a great idea. So it's, it's really cool how sometimes just these moments happen, and you're like, I know how I can help somebody. And it's not like helping somebody in a sense of how can I build a business with, you know, like, the typical what problems that people have, how can I solve them, but I guess in a way it still is because there's people that want a job and I'm going to help them. Find job and I think that's the best service I can provide to a lot of these people. And I agree there's a lot of people, a lot of my friends, like, Can you just tell me how to fix this? I don't want to learn. I don't wanna watch another video. Just tell me what I gotta do to fix it.

Yeah, I took a PR course. This is an example. And I know what to do to generate PR. It's a lot of work. Yeah, yeah. At the end of the day, I said, Okay, I understand a basis. And I could probably create a very systematic approach for someone to do that for me. But I do not have the cycles to do like recognizing No, I know how great and maybe there's value in that. But yes, an agency I love. I love that approach. So how can listeners get in touch with you or learn more?

Well, there's a couple places. Shay harms calm is my main website so people can go there. Shane homes.com. forward slash Academy is actually would take you into the membership that's currently on hold because I'm building up more content. But I do have a 20% off deal for that. And then inside of Facebook itself if people want to join the free community, they can listen to my podcast, which is second act Business Academy, and the community goes along with that podcast. So its second at Business Academy. It's one of the Facebook groups you can find. I think the actual name you can find it's like online tech tips for business is what it's actually called. We're inside of Facebook. But if you go to technic Business Academy, the group itself you'll find us.

Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us today.

Thank you, I had a lot of fun sharing it.

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ABOUT SHEY HARMS

Shey Harms has been a computer programmer in the corporate world for the past 30 years. She’s had 5 different podcasts and created a few dozen websites for herself and clients.  She is now focused on helping people who want to change the second half of their lives by teaching tech skills they need to start or grow an online business, through her podcast and business academy.

 
 
 
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