Latest / The Side Hustle Career Podcast with Fexingo: Second Income, Freelancing While Employed / How a Night Auditor Built a 20K Monthly Side Hustle in Hotel Revenue Management
Transcript
- Lucas: So Luna, I want to start with a number that's been stuck in my head all week: twenty thousand dollars a month. That's what a night auditor in Austin is making from a side hustle he built entirely during his overnight shifts. Luna: Twenty grand a month? And he's still working as a night auditor? That's not a side hustle, that's a whole second career. Lucas: Exactly, and that's the part I find fascinating, because the job itself pays maybe forty-five thousand a year. But the skills he picked up on the clock turned into a consulting business that's now dwarfing his salary. Luna: Before we go deep, I have to say: if tonight's episode helps you see your own night shift or quiet hours differently, that's exactly the kind of value we want to keep bringing you. And the way we keep this show ad-free is listener support, so if you found this helpful, you can buy us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, and it genuinely helps us keep doing these deep dives. No pressure, but if you get something out of the show, that's where you can show it. Luna: Alright, back to Dale. How did he get from front desk to revenue consultant? Lucas: So the story starts about three years ago. Dale was working the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift at a 300-room business hotel in downtown Austin. Most nights, after the late check-ins and the audit paperwork, he had maybe four hours of quiet time. He started listening to industry podcasts and reading hotel revenue management blogs. Then he started pulling his own hotel's data. Luna: He had access to that data just from working there? That's a pretty big advantage. Lucas: It is, and he told me he was careful about it. He didn't take anything out of the building. He used the property management system at work, but he'd write down nothing. He would just observe patterns and then recreate them in his own spreadsheet when he got home. So he built a Google Sheets dashboard with arrival patterns, cancellation rates, average daily rate, and revenue per available room. Luna: So he's essentially teaching himself the metrics that revenue managers use every day. Lucas: Right, and that's exactly the set of KPIs that any hotel manager cares about. He started tracking those for his own property, and after a few months he noticed something: the hotel was underpricing rooms on weekday nights when big conferences were in town. He brought that to his general manager with a simple chart showing the missed revenue. The GM was impressed enough to let him adjust rates one week as a test, and it worked. That got him noticed. Luna: Did he get a raise or a promotion out of that? Lucas: No, and that's interesting. He got a small bonus, but what he really got was a portfolio piece and a reputation. A local boutique hotel owner heard about him through the GM and asked if he could take a look at their pricing strategy. That's when the side hustle started taking off. Luna: So his first client came from a referral, not from a cold pitch. That's a useful detail. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's actually the model he's used ever since. He doesn't cold call hotels. He positions himself as someone who already works in the industry, who understands the operational side. He tells them, 'I've been where you are, I know what your night audit looks like, and I can show you where your rates are wrong.' Luna: I love that. It's a trust advantage. But let's talk about the money. How does a consultant like him actually charge for something like this? Lucas: Good question. Early on he was charging a flat fee, like five hundred dollars for a one-time rate review. But he quickly realized that a one-off review doesn't create sustained value. So he moved to a monthly retainer model, usually two to three thousand dollars a month per hotel, for ongoing monitoring and quarterly strategy sessions. He's got four retainers now, which is where the twenty grand comes from. Luna: And that means he's not just crunching numbers once. He's continuously watching the data. That's a long-term relationship. Lucas: Exactly, and it's sticky. Once you're embedded in their revenue cycle, they don't want to switch. And the work itself is very doable on his schedule. He does the monitoring during his night shifts. He sends short weekly emails. He does a monthly call, sometimes from the hotel office if it's a slow night. Luna: So the night shift is actually a perfect incubator for this. He's being paid to be there and he's using that time to build his business. Lucas: That's the insight I want people to take away. He didn't need to quit his job to start. He used the downtime that most people waste on Netflix. But let's be real, not every night shift has that kind of downtime. He told me that some nights he's lucky to get an hour of quiet. But he also said that the scarcity of time forced him to be efficient. He built his whole dashboard in Google Sheets, no fancy software, just formulas and pivot tables. Luna: That's a great point. You don't need a Bloomberg terminal to do revenue management. You just need to understand the business and have a way to track the numbers. Lucas: And there's a specific skill that he says sets him apart: competitive rate shopping. He taught himself how to systematically check what other hotels were charging on the same nights, using booking sites and direct channels. He built a simple rating system for his own property against its comp set, and he does that weekly for his clients. Luna: So he's not just looking at his own hotel's historical data, he's looking at what the market is doing in real time. Lucas: Yes, and that's the part that makes him valuable. Any hotel can look at its own past performance. But having someone who consistently benchmarks against the competition is rare, especially for smaller hotels that can't afford a full-time revenue manager. Luna: And that's his niche, right? Boutique hotels that are too small for a full-time revenue person. Lucas: Exactly. He focuses on properties with between fifty and two hundred rooms. They can't justify a six-figure salary for a revenue manager, but they can afford a couple thousand a month for a consultant. And they get huge value because he's essentially giving them the same expertise that the big chains have. Luna: I'm curious about the actual skills. If someone listening wants to start this kind of side hustle, what should they learn first? Lucas: Dale says the most important thing is to understand the three key metrics: occupancy rate, average daily rate, and revenue per available room. You need to know how those interact. For example, you can raise your average daily rate and lose occupancy, but if the revenue per available room goes up, you're actually better off. Understanding that trade-off is the core of revenue management. Luna: That's a classic lesson, but it's the kind of thing that's obvious once you see it and invisible before. Lucas: Right. And then you need to learn how to use data tools. He recommends starting with Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. You can do almost everything you need with pivot tables and basic formulas. There are also some affordable software options now, but he says don't buy anything until you've got a client and you know what they need. Luna: How did he actually approach his first client? Was he nervous? Lucas: He said he was terrified. He didn't have a hospitality degree. He was a night auditor. But he had something more important: he had a proof point. He showed the hotel owner the dashboard he'd built for his own property and the email from his GM praising his work. That was his case study. He also offered a free two-week trial, which is a great strategy for a first client. Luna: A free trial, that seems risky. But if you're confident in the value, it's a smart way to get in the door. Lucas: It worked for him. He did a two-week analysis of their rates and gave them a one-page summary. The hotel owner saw an obvious gap in their weekend pricing and asked Dale to implement the changes. After that, it was a paid engagement. Luna: So the free trial didn't last long. That's a good story to hear because it shows you have to prove value before you can charge. Lucas: And that's the pattern for most successful side hustles, I think. You can't just ask for money upfront. You have to show that you can solve a problem. Once you've done that, the money conversation gets a lot easier. Luna: What about the ethics of doing this on company time? He's using his employer's data, even if it's just patterns. Does that worry you? Lucas: He was very careful about that. He never took any proprietary data. He says he only used what he could remember, and he never shared specific numbers with clients. He also picked up most of his skills on his own time. The night shift just gave him the space to think and study. So it's not a gray area in his case, but it could be for others. I'd say the rule is: if you're using your employer's specific data or creating something that competes with your employer, that's a problem. But learning skills that make you better at your job is never wrong. Luna: That's a helpful distinction. And it sounds like his side hustle actually made him better at his day job too. Lucas: It did. He's now the go-to person in his hotel for any revenue question. He's basically a de facto revenue manager, but without the title or the salary. But he's okay with that because he's building something bigger on the side. And he's already thinking about what comes next: maybe a small software product for revenue management, or teaching an online course. Luna: So what's the one thing you hope our listeners take away from Dale's story? Lucas: That you don't need a fancy title or a big budget to start a consulting side hustle. You need curiosity, a willingness to learn the metrics of your industry, and the discipline to spend your quiet hours on something that builds your future. Dale had all three, and he turned a night shift into a second income stream that's approaching his full-time salary. Luna: And that's the thing that gets me: he's not a genius, he's just persistent. He put in the hours when nobody was watching. Lucas: Yeah, and that's something we can all do, regardless of where we work. Thanks for listening, and if you know someone who works a night shift, send them this episode. They might be sitting on a goldmine of downtime.