Latest / The Side Hustle Career Podcast with Fexingo: Second Income, Freelancing While Employed / How a School Librarian Built a 6000 Monthly Side Hustle in Research
Transcript
- Lucas: Last week I was reading a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how more small businesses and startups are outsourcing research tasks — literature reviews, competitor landscapes, even basic data gathering — to freelancers who never set foot in a corporate office. Luna: And the group that's capitalizing on this, surprisingly, is school librarians. Lucas: Exactly. I talked to a librarian named Carla who works at a public high school in Ohio. She started a side hustle about eighteen months ago, and she's now bringing in around six thousand dollars a month doing research for small business owners and consulting firms. Luna: Six thousand — that's not pocket change. How does she find the time, though? She works full-time at a school. Lucas: She told me she treats it like a second shift. She starts at five AM, does an hour of research before her kids wake up, then another hour in the evening. Weekends she puts in maybe four to six hours total. The key, she said, is that she's not starting from scratch — she already knows databases, search strings, how to evaluate sources. That's her library training. Luna: So she's not learning a new skill. She's repackaging an existing one. Lucas: Right. And that's the angle for today. Most people think a side hustle means learning coding or graphic design or something they saw on TikTok. But there's a real market for what you might call 'thinking work' — research, analysis, synthesis. And librarians are uniquely positioned for it. Luna: What does she actually deliver? Like, what's the end product? Lucas: She does three types of projects. One is a literature review — a client wants to know what academic studies say about, say, the impact of remote work on team cohesion. She'll search databases like JSTOR and ProQuest, summarize ten to fifteen papers, and deliver a five-page document with key findings and citations. That runs about three hundred dollars. Luna: Three hundred for a lit review. Who's paying that? Lucas: Consulting firms, mostly. Small to midsize ones that don't have a research department. They win a proposal and need to sound authoritative on a topic fast. Carla has a regular client — a boutique HR consulting firm — that sends her two or three lit reviews a month. Luna: What's the second type? Lucas: Market research summaries. A small business owner wants to know who the competitors are in a given city, what they charge, what their online reviews say. Carla will compile a spreadsheet with maybe fifteen competitors, pricing tiers, Yelp ratings, service descriptions. That's usually five hundred dollars, and it takes her three to four hours. Luna: And type three? Lucas: Competitive analysis of a company's digital presence. She'll look at a client's website, then benchmark it against three competitors — SEO keywords, site speed, social media engagement. She uses tools like SEMrush and Screaming Frog, which she learned through library association webinars. That's seven hundred to a thousand per project. Luna: So the pricing scales with the complexity. Lit review is fastest, competitive analysis takes longer. Lucas: Exactly. And she's transparent about timelines — typically five to seven business days. She says that's part of her value proposition: reliable turnaround. Clients know they'll get it by Friday. Luna: How did she get her first clients? She's a school librarian in Ohio, not exactly a networking hub for consultants. Lucas: She started on LinkedIn. She updated her headline to say 'Research Consultant for Small Businesses' and began commenting on posts from consulting firm owners. She'd add a relevant source or a data point. Then she sent about twenty personalized connection requests with a note: 'I help firms like yours with quick, reliable research — here's a sample lit review I did on employee retention.' One of those turned into her first retainer client. Luna: A sample. So she created a spec project. Lucas: Yes. And she used Zotero to manage her citations, which is free. She also set up a simple website using Carrd — cost her nineteen dollars a year — that lists her services with flat-rate pricing. No hourly billing. Clients know upfront what they're paying. Luna: That's smart. Hourly billing can scare people off because they don't know the total. Flat rate feels safer. Lucas: That pricing model is actually one of the reasons she's been able to scale to six thousand a month. She averages about twelve to fifteen projects a month, and the flat rate means she can batch similar work together. If she gets three lit review requests in one week, she can research all three topics in a single sitting and then write each report separately. Luna: There's an efficiency gain there. The research phase is the same muscle, just different subjects. Lucas: Right. And she's strict about her time. She doesn't take calls during the school day. All communication is email, and she has an autoresponder that says she replies within twenty-four hours. That sets expectations early. Luna: What about the legal side? If she's doing research for a consulting firm that's billing a client, is there any liability? Lucas: She has a simple contract from a template she found on the American Library Association website — believe it or not, they have a resource for librarians who do freelance work. It disclaims that her research is for informational purposes and not legal or financial advice. She also carries a professional liability policy through an organization called the Freelancers Union — it's about three hundred dollars a year. Luna: That's a great data point. A lot of people skip the insurance, but it's actually affordable. Lucas: And it gives clients confidence. She says a few of her bigger clients asked for proof of insurance before they'd hire her. So she's covered, and it's deductible as a business expense. Luna: If someone listening wants to try this — maybe they're a grad student, a retired academic, or a librarian like Carla — what's the first step? Lucas: Pick a niche within research. Don't say 'I do research.' Say 'I do literature reviews for HR consultants' or 'I do competitive analysis for local coffee shops.' Carla started with HR because she had a background in organizational psychology from a master's she did years ago. That specificity is why her first LinkedIn outreach worked. Luna: So identify an industry you already know something about, even if it's just from reading or personal interest. Lucas: Exactly. Then create one sample deliverable — a real, three-page lit review on a topic in that niche. Post it on your website or LinkedIn. Then start engaging with people in that niche: comment on their posts, share relevant articles, and eventually send a connection request with a specific value proposition. Luna: You know, I think a lot of people underestimate how much research work is out there. Every time a small business owner Googles something, they're doing research — but they're not good at it. They don't know how to use advanced search operators, they don't know databases. That's the gap Carla fills. Lucas: If we've helped you think through a career move or decision, honestly, if today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Listener support is what keeps this show ad-free and independent. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to say this kind of content matters. And it genuinely helps us keep doing deep dives like this. Lucas: So Carla's story is also about mindset. She told me she spent years thinking her librarian skills were 'just what she did for work' — that they weren't marketable outside a school. But once she reframed it as 'I help people make better decisions with better information,' everything clicked. Luna: That reframing is everything. It's not about 'I'm a librarian.' It's about 'I offer research clarity.' Lucas: And she's not alone. There's a small but growing community of 'info pros' on a platform called Freelance Library — it's a job board and forum. They share rates, tools, and client horror stories. Carla says it helped her figure out pricing early on. Luna: What's the biggest challenge she faces now? Lucas: Scaling without burning out. She caps herself at fifteen projects a month because any more and she'd have to sacrifice sleep or family time. She's considering raising her prices by twenty percent this fall to see if she can maintain income with fewer projects. That's a classic freelancer dilemma. Luna: Right. Six thousand a month is great, but if she can make the same amount with ten projects instead of fifteen, she frees up time. Lucas: That's the next stage of her business. But for now, she's proof that you don't need a new degree or a flashy tech skill to build a meaningful side hustle. You just need a skill that someone else finds valuable — and the confidence to ask for money for it. Luna: And maybe a free account on Google Scholar. Lucas: And that. I'm Lucas. Luna: I'm Luna. See you next time.