How to Build a Business While Working Full Time (She Made $65K in 2 Hours a Day)
Michael made $65,000 last year. She did it in two hours a day, after she clocked out of her full-time job, with three kids, four dogs, and zero plans to quit the job she actually likes.
So if you have been telling yourself you cannot build a business while working full time, y’all, read that number one more time. $65,000 in a year. 15 to 20 hours a week. On top of a full-time job.
Michael is a Strategist Society member and a Meta ads strategist and manager who serves online coaches and course creators (plus a few local businesses). She is also an educator by trade, a former principal, and a mom to three almost-grown kids.
She did not have more time than you. She had less. What she had was an order of operations and someone to check her strategy.
Here is exactly how she built it.
Meet Michael: The “Expensive Jobby” That Turned Into Real Income
Michael started in the online world around 2018 with a literacy coaching and consulting business, which made sense, because education is her whole background.
The offer was good. She ran monthly workshops she was proud of. The problem was that almost nobody knew they existed.
Three people would register. Then five. Enough to keep her going, not enough to call it a business.
Her exact words: “I have a really expensive jobby right now.”
Read that again if you have ever poured money and hours into something that pays you in fun instead of dollars. It was not a product problem. It was a visibility problem.
She Learned Ads For Herself First
Michael found me through another coaching program, started listening to the Serve Scale Soar podcast, and got hooked on the income reports I published every single month in 2020, the year I documented going from $250,000 to $1.2 million with every profit and loss statement attached.
She joined Conversions for Clients to learn how to run ads for her own business. Not for clients. For her.
Then she filled her own workshops. Other educators started asking, “Hey, what are you doing? How are you doing this?” She ran ads for her husband’s barber shop and booked out his appointment book. She started helping other education consultants.
And somewhere in there she realized something most people miss: she loved doing work that had nothing to do with her day job.
That is not a small detail. If you work full time, the thing you build in the evening cannot feel like a second shift of the same exhausting work. Michael’s brain wanted something completely different at 5pm. Ads gave her that.
Marketing Minutes: The 45-Day Rule That Filled Her Pipeline
Here is the part that matters most if you want to know how to build a business while working full time.
When Michael got serious in August of 2024, she came back to the course and remembered me saying this on repeat: if you are really doing your marketing minutes, it takes about 30 to 45 days, some people 60, and you will start getting clients.
So she did them. And it landed almost exactly where I said it would.
Around the 45-day mark, people started replying to her DMs. People started booking calls. She got her first client in October 2024. Second one in December. Another in January. After that it was consistent.
She did not get lucky at day 45. She got consistent at day one.
Do Five, Not Fifteen
At one point, Michael was trying to do 15 marketing minutes a day. It was way too much for someone with a full-time job, and here is what I told her:
Do five. If you can get five, that is a win.
Five outreach touches you actually do beats fifteen you skip because you are exhausted. That is the whole thing. Consistency at a volume that fits your real life will always beat a heroic plan you abandon in week two.
Ask yourself right now: what number could you hit every single weekday without negotiating with yourself about it? Start there.
Referrals Are Wonderful. They Are Not a Strategy.
Michael let her marketing minutes drop once, back when referrals were rolling in and she was busy.
Then the dip came.
Her words: “Referrals are great, but they’re not always reliable.” So now marketing minutes are the very first thing she does when she sits down, every single day, no matter how full her client roster is.
I told her, and I will tell you: I do not care how busy you are, keep doing the marketing minutes, because you want the pipeline.
The Two-Hour Workday: Her Exact Order of Operations
Michael allots at least two hours every day after she gets off work. That is it. That is the whole business.
Here is the exact order she runs those two hours in:
- Marketing minutes first. Always. Before client work, before content, before anything.
- Client must-dos next. She asks, what has to get done for current clients this week? Then she does those things.
- Systematized client workflows. New ad client goes through this list. Ongoing client gets this strategy built. She planned it out once so she is not re-deciding every night.
- Her own marketing last. Content, service page, new offers, messaging.
Notice what is first and what is last. Most people do it backwards. They spend the whole two hours on client work, then fall into bed and wonder why the pipeline is dry in 60 days.
Plan For the Result, Not the To-Do List
This is the shift that changed Michael’s weeks.
She used to plan by asking, what is my to-do list this week? Now she asks, what result am I trying to get this week?
How many people am I reaching out to because of these marketing minutes? What does that look like for me?
A to-do list makes you busy. A result makes you money. Our goal is not to be busy, it is to be productive and efficient.
The Ugly Proposal Rule
Michael used an ugly proposal and an ugly Work With Me page for almost two full years while booking a ton of clients.
Two years. Ugly. Booked.
She is only now going back to make things look nicer, and that is exactly the right order.
The client does not care what your proposal looks like. They do not care about your invoice design. They do not care about your Work With Me page. All they care about is whether you can get them the result.
That stuff does not make you money. Messy action does. Michael takes messy action, I take messy action, and that is why we both get results.
Consuming More Information Will Not Make You Money
Real talk moment.
Consumption does not make you money. It does keep you safe though. You cannot get rejected or turned down while you are listening to another course.
But the second you start doing marketing minutes, or you raise your prices, all of it comes up, because now there is a chance of rejection, and your brain is trying to protect you.
Michael calls herself a big nerd who loves to read and research. She had to build a rule around it: I will read or listen every day, but what am I going to DO with that information? What action am I taking?
Your Brain Was Never Trained To Be Your Own Boss
Think about it. Your parents told you what to do. Then school told you what to do. Then maybe college, then a 9-to-5 where your boss saw your results and you got fired if you did not show up.
There was always someone holding the accountability.
Then you go off into entrepreneurship and the only person you answer to is you. And a lot of times we let ourselves off the hook.
That is not a character flaw. That is wiring. Which is why getting coaching, mentorship, or any real accountability structure immediately raises your odds of succeeding.
You Are Always Paying With Time or Money
In business you are paying with one of two currencies: time or money. You get to decide which one matters more to you.
For me, time wins every time. I will pay money to get the result faster. That is literally why I love ads, I can pay and get the result faster than someone posting content for eight months straight.
Coaching works the same way. Pay, actually do the work, get there faster.
Michael said everything she needed was inside Conversions for Clients, and she means it. But time is expensive, especially for her. What she did not have was hours to troubleshoot alone.
She wanted a thought partner. Someone she could say “here is my strategy, here is what I am thinking, what do you think” to. That is when she moved into Strategist Society.
Her line about it: “Sometimes you just have to pay to be in the right rooms. But not only that, when you pay, you pay attention.”
The Trainings She Actually Uses (Not the Ones She Collects)
Michael rarely turns her camera on. She hardly ever asks a question live. She watches every Q&A, every coaching call, every training, usually on the private podcast while she travels, and then she voxes me her list of questions at 1am.
The ones she named as game changers:
- The Strategy Octagon, because she needed confidence in her ad strategy, not more theory
- The SLO training (self-liquidating offers), the full funnel build, the client communication, all the templates. This one is everybody’s favorite because you can install it and sell it as a $3,000, $5,000, or $10,000 service
- The Champagne Year, the annual planning session where you name the end goal and reverse engineer it, so your goals still matter in March
- The 30-day content challenge, which she started last September and is still running on her own
Notice she does not consume everything. She watches the training when she needs the training. Then she takes the question to a human. That is the difference between a library and a business.
What Happens When You Stop Waiting To Feel Ready
Michael undercharged at the start, and she is honest about why.
In her head it was, “This isn’t my money. This is someone else’s money.” She wanted to spend her clients’ ad spend as wisely as she possibly could, so she priced small and stayed quiet.
She thought confidence would arrive first and the higher prices would follow. That is backwards, and it is the single most common trap I see.
What actually moved her: hearing what other people in the community were charging and the results they were getting. Getting on a Strategist Society call and saying, look, I need you to tell me this can work.
She is not scared to take action. She just needed belief installed. Once it was, the prices went up.
The Numbers She Closed the Year With
About $65,000 through HoneyBook (plus some PayPal invoices she has not even tallied yet).
When she told me, she said something like, “I know there are other people who made more than this, but I’m really proud of it considering I work full time and do this a couple hours a day.”
And I said what I will say to you: who the heck cares what everyone else is doing?
She graduated with a master’s degree in education and made more money running ads 15 to 20 hours a week than she did with that degree. Her full-time job is still there. Her benefits are still there. She is not leaving, and I have never once told her she should.
What Success Actually Looks Like Now
Michael took her daughter on a college visit recently.
A year or two ago, that trip would have been a spiral of how much is this going to cost, where are we staying, what can we not do. This time she bought her daughter the sweatshirt in the bookstore for pictures and did not think twice.
That is the win. Not the revenue screenshot. The sweatshirt.
Her definition of success going forward is time freedom, building this bigger and better, and maybe bringing her kids into it (one son already helps). Her exact framing: “I want it to support my life, and it’s not my life.”
Your Job Is Not the Reason You Have Not Started
Michael proved the excuse does not hold. Not because she is superhuman, but because she picked five marketing minutes, an ugly proposal, two hours a day, and a room full of people doing it with her.
If you see someone do it, it is possible for you.
Do the thing even when you do not want to do the thing. We would not tell our kids, “I do not feel like tucking you in tonight, so I am not going to.” Same energy applies here.
Ready to make your move?
If you are already at $10K months and you want that one-on-one thought partner (Voxer support, private podcast, and the exact trainings Michael credits, including the SLO training and The Champagne Year planning session), head to thestrategistsociety.com and apply for a call. We only take a few people a month when we have spots.
If you are just getting your business off the ground and you want to learn how to run ads, build systems, and price your services, grab my free training on the three elements of a successful freelance ad management business. That is where Conversions for Clients lives too.
You have two hours. That is enough. Now go do the dang thing.
Heard something you loved here? This came straight from a Student Spotlight episode of the Serve Scale Soar podcast. Come listen, then go serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve.
** This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you if you use one of the links to purchase. This helps keep the podcast going and I only share products I have used, tested, and love.”
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Meet Brandi
Brandi Mowles is the host of the Serve Scale Soar® podcast which is a podcast dedicated to helping service-based entrepreneurs scale their online business to five-figure months so they can soar into six-figure years. Brandi is a wife, mom and in less than one year, created a six-figure business. Now she is spilling all her secrets so you can too.
