Is There Really a Way to Make Money Doing a Hobby?

We all have at least one hobby or passion project—whether it's baking, re-organizing the pantry, or gardening. Ten years ago, I started googling whether I could turn mine into a career, or at least a quick way to make some extra money.

I felt on the hook to produce some cash for my family, $18,000 to be precise. I'd been homeschooling my kids but had recently decided to stop, and I felt that sending the oldest two to private school was the best way to help them readjust to the school system. I took a preschool refund check for $450 and used it to start my first business.

To this day, that's the only seed money I've used to turn my passion for gardening into a seven-figure consulting business. I started out creating little gardens for myself in my backyard, and now I'm a published author, I've designed dozens of kitchen gardens, and I've trained hundreds of garden consultants all over the world to do what I do.

I talked to Donald Miller on the Business Made Simple podcast about my journey to monetize my hobby and turning my love for gardening into a full-blown garden consultant business. Want to learn how you can turn your hobby into a lucrative career? Keep reading for my tips on monetizing what you love.

(Listen to Episode #137: "Could You Turn Your Hobby Into a Career By Teaching Others?" on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.)

My Journey from Hobbyist to Professional Gardener

My background is in math and accounting, not horticulture or biology. When I had four kids in just four and a half years, my career came to an abrupt halt. As you can imagine, life was a whirlwind during that period.

Although I took on some contract work, I primarily focused on being a stay-at-home mom. I cherish being a mom and am grateful for the opportunity to stay home with my kids when they were young. However, I felt somewhat adrift. I had professional aspirations and missed working outside the home. I thrive on having a career, but there I was, juggling diapers and burnt grilled cheese sandwiches.

One day, my oldest daughter, then about four, asked me, "Mommy, when are we going to start our garden?"

Despite barely having time to brush my teeth, we started our first backyard garden in the summer of 2011. We made every possible mistake, but I found a daily refuge in the garden. It became a sanctuary where I could momentarily escape the endless chores and reconnect with a part of myself. Tending to the garden and harvesting vegetables for dinner provided a sense of normalcy and joy amid the chaos.

I like to tell clients the garden can be your getaway when you can't get away. It's right there outside your backdoor when your preschoolers are taking their nap and you need a moment of quiet.

When I turned 36, I decided I couldn't keep putting my career goals on pause. I enrolled my kids in school and started trying to figure out how I could re-engage myself in the professional world while still making lots of time for my family.

This is when I started my first business. My initial idea was to sell organic produce from my garden to my neighbors, but I quickly realized people didn't want to buy food from me. They wanted to learn how to grow it themselves. So I became a garden coach and began teaching clients and students how to start their own little garden like mine.

How Do You Go from Thinking You're Really Good at Something to Charging Money to Teach Others?

During our conversation, Donald Miller brought this up. It's the nagging doubt we all have, right? "Well, you know, I'm really good at making these little bracelets," he said, speaking for so many of us, "but who am I to actually sell them or do classes to teach other people to do them?"

How many amateur artists out there are horrified by the idea of charging for their paintings? How many amateur bakers would never dream of teaching classes?

How are you supposed to overcome that insecurity?

So many of us hold back from starting a consulting business or providing a service to someone because we live in a society built on certifications and regulations. Those things are necessary for medical doctors, pharmacists, home builders, and many other professions—don't get me wrong. But I'd estimate that about 90 percent of jobs in the world are better performed by people who are so passionate about what they do that they've dedicated themselves to discovering more and more. This is how I was with the garden. I became a student of the garden.

Even in the garden industry, there are things I cannot do unless I become a certified landscaper. I can't, for instance, draw up designs to landscape Donald Miller's yard because those have to be done by a landscape architect. There are many things related to the garden, however, that a landscape architect or designer might not even care to do. Like replant his raised-bed kitchen garden, which I can do, even as a self-taught gardener.

As Donald Miller says, an expert is just someone who knows more about a given subject than almost anybody else. The university system is very important, but there isn't a degree on how to become a kitchen garden consultant or a closet organizer.

Here's the thing: You don't actually need a ton of credentials to coach someone in something you're good at. Believing that we're unqualified because we're uncertified is what holds a lot of us back, even though there are people out there who need what we have.

If you feel dedicated to your hobby, if you're interested in teaching others how to get better at your hobby, then you're ready to consider monetizing your knowledge and experience.

Do You Like Telling Other People About Your Hobby?

My journey was fail, fail, fail, but even as I was screaming at the squirrels to stop stealing my tomatoes, there were enough wins to get me obsessed with gardening.

When we moved to Houston, my husband and I started doing a lot of research about how to make the garden work in Houston's warm, muggy climate. We built raised beds, we started with awesome soil, and we studied which plants would do well in each growing season. That fall, we planted some lettuce seeds given to us by a friend, and ended up harvesting a salad a day from the garden between October all the way to March, I kid you not. That was the first time I realized I was good at this.

As I relished the joy of success, I was already wondering if I could possibly start a business related to growing lettuce. I began evangelizing the salad garden to anyone who would listen. And this is the first indicator that you could potentially be successful in making the thing you love doing profitable.

It's possible to become a salesman for your hobby before you even have anything to sell. You're talking about it at dinner parties; you're telling your neighbors about it. There's an impulse in you to share it. You're not trying to sell it, but you believe in it so much that you can't stop bringing it up because you want other people to experience the same joy or stress relief that you're getting from this thing.

For me, I wanted to help everyone get the same results I was getting. I was putting seeds in the ground and eating from the resulting plants. How incredible is that?

When I first began offering consultations to help other people start their own garden, I charged $25 for an hour of my time. Even that felt like a big ask. I was embarrassed to ask people to spend $25 of their hard-earned cash to learn about gardening from me. After a couple months, I moved the price up to $100 for a consultation.

Here are my tips for going from being embarrassed to charge any money at all for your time to knowing that you're bringing value to your students and clients.

Tip #1: Create a System for What You Do

You start by getting really good at the thing you love doing. Then you break down how you do it into steps that you could teach to others. Test those steps out on your first clients to see if you really can pass components of your success along to the people you're working with.

This goes back to being dedicated to learning more about your hobby. If you keep learning and trying to get better and better, you'll continue cleaning up your system, making it tighter and tighter, until it's super easy to pass it along to other people so that they can find the same success.

Tip #2: Go as Niche Within Your Field as Possible

My "thing" as a garden consultant is beautiful and productive raised-bed kitchen gardens. The combination of the raised bed and trellis is not only a huge part of my aesthetic, it's also the foundation of my gardening system.

Before I really branded myself as a kitchen gardener, I would get people calling me to have me look at their dying oak tree or prune their shrubs. I'd politely respond: "No, that's not my thing." Over time, my business messaging became clearer, and people stopped calling me unless they were interested in a raised-bed kitchen garden.

I'm thankful I didn't just take every little job that came my way. I firmly believe that one of the things that contributed most to my success was going all in on raised-bed kitchen gardens.

Doing so allowed me to work on properties that were managed by the top landscaping firms in Houston. Clients were giving me 100 square feet on their $5 million-dollar estate to work with, even though I was a nobody with a three-year-old business. I landed a job for Johnny Carrabba, of the well-known Carrabba's restaurant in Houston, simply because his landscapers didn't want to do a kitchen garden for him. I was so niche they found me and recommended me to him. They didn't view me as a competitor.

My advice to you if you're considering trying to monetize your hobby is to go as niche within your field as you can, especially in the beginning. You don't have to stay there forever, but it can definitely help you carve out space for yourself in an industry that's already filled with professionals.

Tip #3: Have a Mission

Our mission at Gardenary is to make gardening ordinary again. We want it to be a small part of everyday life for everyone.

Donald Miller and his wife Betsy became clients this year. I got to come out to their incredible kitchen garden space, a formal potager, and help them plant for the upcoming growing seasons. Donald says they recently had four adults and six kids in the garden pulling carrots together and that they've been eating really well since starting the garden.

If I hadn't gone for my dream back in 2016, I wouldn't have gotten to help them with their garden in 2023. Here's Betsy Miller and me after pulling some carrots of our own from their garden.

Tip #4: Find a Small Group in Your Community to Help You Grow

The first email blast I did for my business went to everyone in my contact list—mostly homeschooling moms, people from my church, and neighbors. One of those contacts was a friend of a friend who lived in one of Houston's more affluent neighborhoods. This friend of a friend forwarded my email to three of her friends.

One of those friends was Jenny, the first stranger to visit my brand-new website and order a $25 consultation. She left me a little comment that said, "Nicole, can't wait to meet you! I've been wanting to have a garden for my kids, but I don't have a green thumb."

When I showed up for Jenny's consultation, it just so happened that three of her friends were leaving her house. On their way out, Jenny introduced us. I'm standing there holding a tub of homegrown lettuce so that Jenny, my new client, can taste the difference. Instead of thinking I was a total weirdo (or maybe in spite of), they asked me for my card. I ran to my minivan and came back with freshly minted cards.

Jenny and her three friends were my first four paying clients. I had never met any of them before. They were not part of any circle I would have been in. My company grossed $135,000 in the very first year, and I can trace every single dollar back to that moment on Jenny's doorstep.

Don't underestimate things like word of mouth, relationship building, and showing up.

If you're spreading the word about your new business based on a passion of yours, make sure your introductory email is extremely shareable. Have a beautiful image. Tell your story. You never know which contact will forward it and connect you to a small group within your community that will become your clients.

Tip #5: There Are Three Things You Can Offer When You're First Turning Your Hobby into a Business

Coaching/Consulting

Coaching is the easiest product to offer because you don't needs tons of equipment or a storefront or even a special certification. You can literally just walk into someone's space and start telling them what to do. You don't even have to bring notes; you tell them to take notes while you speak for the next hour.

My first consultations as a garden coach lasted one hour, and I charged $25 for them. I offered my services only locally so that I could hop into my minivan and drive to the clients' homes to meet with them. During that time, I'd look at their space, consider the sunlight, and take measurements before recommending where I'd put the garden. By the end of the first year, I was charging $100 for a consultation.

You can coach and consult on anything that you know how to do that others might want to learn how to do also.

Services

I turned my consultations into a service organically. What happened was I told my first four clients to build a raised bed here and fill it with this type of soil and then plant it with these types of plants. They looked at me and said, "Well, could you do that for me?" I was like, "You want to pay me to play in your yard. I'm in!"

I was not from the same socioeconomic level as those clients. I was from more of a DIY level, so it honestly shocked me that people were willing to pay someone to garden for them.

If you're reading this, there's something you know how to do that someone in the world will pay you to do for them.

I did everything myself at first. I built the raised beds, assembled the trellises, planted the plants. I installed gardens until it became second nature. I spent most of 2016 and 2017 creating systems for how I did things.

Once I knew exactly how to design the layout of the raised beds, how to plan based on our growing seasons, etc., I was ready to hire people to do some of these systems for me. I first hired people to set up and maintain the gardens, and eventually I hired other consultants, people to replace me.

Products

At some point, it's only natural for your services to lend themselves to creating products, as well. Many of the existing products in the garden industry were pretty cheesy when I started out. Too many little birds and gnomes and butterflies. My clients wanted more elegant, modern items. So I found a steelworker to make raised beds and trellises for me.

If you're a professional organizer, you could, for instance, create your own product line of boxes for garage storage systems. People are willing to pay you for those products because they want something that's guaranteed to work for them.

What Could the Future of Your Small Business Look Like?

Once you've built a successful coaching business, you can turn it into an education system. I took my garden setup and planting system and turned it into a course called Kitchen Garden Academy. Then on the business side, I put my entire business model into a box and created a certification program called Gardenary Consultant Certification. GCC has trained almost 900 gardeners how to do what I did.

Because I was building a personal platform as I marketed my business, I've also been able to write two books to go alongside my garden teaching methods.

Your progression might look a little different, but you can see how there can be progression from offering classes to building an entire educational system around the thing you love.

You Can Absolutely Turn Your Passion Into Your Profession, Even Part Time

I have loved all the trips I've gotten to take thanks to my small business. I've celebrated every little success along the way. But being a mom to four kids, I've realized my most valuable resource is my time. What's been most important to me has been turning my hobby into a career while also being in charge of my time. This was especially true back when my kids were in preschool and elementary school. All my business growth happened on a part-time basis, between the hours when my kids were at school.

My advice to you if you're considering offering your coaching to other people is that it's absolutely worth it to put yourself out there if for no other reason than to have time for the people you care about the most. This goes for anyone, but most of all you moms out there: I can't recommend going for it enough. It's going to be embarrassing at first, and your ego might get trampled on a bit, even a lot, but it will be worth every little thing you put into it. Because you'll get so many valuable moments of your time back with the people you care about the most.

I hope you're feeling inspired to see whether coaching could work for you.