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Troy: Alright hello and welcome. The date is February 5 and you’re listening to the 47th episode of Big Rig Banter. I’m your co-host Troy Diffenderfer.
Lenay: And I’m your favorite co-host, Lenay Ruhl.
Troy: Lenay, how are you doing today?
Lenay: I’m good Troy, how are you?
Troy: I’m doing pretty good. I want to jump right into our episode pretty quick. We have a really cool interview coming up and our topic today is side hustles. Lenay, do you have any side hustles going on or have you done side hustles, or can you at least explain to maybe some of our listeners what a side hustle is?
Lenay: Um… ok let me think how to answer that. First, yes, I’ve done some side hustles. Side hustles are…
Troy: Legal side hustles?
Lenay: Yes, well, yes all of mine have been legal.
Troy: Ok.
Lenay: Side hustles are jobs that you do on the side to make money aside from your main income. So, for example, for me, I’m a creative person. I’ve always done content writing on the side to earn additional income. Sometimes I work at a local farmers market, at a stand there, to make a little money on the side. So, those are some of my side hustles. What about you?
Troy: I think my biggest side hustle, and I’m going to use this for a free plug, is the fiction writing that I do. In the last year I published two works of fiction, which you can graciously get on Amazon. Just Google my name or search my name up on Amazon. You’ll find those. That’s probably my biggest side hustle. I’ve done some freelance marketing and some freelance writing, like you have, in the past… and I do sports betting, and I’d like to think I win more than I lose. I don’ t know if that’s a side hustle – I mean, I can’t convince Lyd that it’s a side hustle…
Lenay: (Laughing) Is it a side hustle or is it called gambling addiction? We won’t even open that.
Troy: Yeah let’s not talk about that. But we actually have a fellow podcaster and a truck driver on for today’s interview. I’m really excited to talk to Tony Merkel. He hosts a podcast called The Confessionals and an upcoming podcast called Hammer Lane Legends, and his podcast is his side hustle. So, during the day he’s doing trucking, and he’s been making a profit from his podcast for the last couple years.
Lenay: That’s really cool. I’m excited to hear about him, but in the meantime, do you guys listening have a side hustle? Let us know on Twitter using #BigRigBanter.
Troy: But yeah, let’s jump into Tony’s interview and hear how his side hustle’s going.
Troy: Alright, I’m here with Tony Merkel from the podcasts, Hammer Lane Legends and The Confessionals podcast. Tony how are you doing?
Tony: Doing great Troy, how are you doing?
Troy: Good. So, you know this episode is all about side hustles. We’re talking about different ways truckers can maybe make some additional income. We’ve talked about Uber and Lyft or other ways like that in one of our blogs, but you’ve been making some money podcasting and kind of turned a hobby into definitely something that you’re pulling in some money for. So which came first, trucking or podcasting?
Tony: Truck driving did. I got my CDL when I was 21 or 22, something like that. I toyed around with a bunch of different possible career moves in my 20s and then I got up there pushing 30 and I was like, I need to settle into something. I called my dad up one day, he’s a truck driver, and I said dad, I need to start driving truck and so he recommended me for the company he works for, and I’ve been driving trailer in Ohio as an LTL carrier for I think seven or eight years now.
Troy: So, are you back home every night usually or are you out for longer periods of time?
Tony: Yeah I’m home every day. I pedal freight during the day. There’s two different shifts that hit Ohio, so I know a lot of LTL carriers are very similar but with Pitt-Ohio, they run their lines strictly at night. That’s what my dad does. He drives line haul at night and he just goes from terminal to terminal and then the guys during the day, like me, we actually make the deliveries and pick up freight and then bring it back to the terminal. The line haul guys can take it out, so I drive during the day and I’m home every day. I just never know what I’m going to be hauling. You know, it depends on how that day goes.
Troy: So, then what got you into podcasting?
Tony: I’ve always been an entrepreneur. In my early 20s, mid 20s, and late 20s, I was always trying to find something to do entrepreneurial no matter what I was doing as a full-time job. What happened is I was driving for Pitt-Ohio and my wife worked at a college and she was just having the worst time there. She was there for like 7 or 8 years, something like that, and it got to the point where she was coming home every day and she was crying because it wasn’t the greatest environment. I was getting frustrated with her work situation for her, and we were also at the same time planning on starting a family soon. We always said that when we started a family, we were going to have her stay home with the kids and all the money-making duties will be on me. And, so, I just looked at her the one night. It was a Friday night, and we were rebidding at work, and so I had the opportunity to pick something that would give me more hours. I just looked at her one night and i just said, “quit your job.” She looked at me and she’s like, “I can’t.” And I’m like, “Trust me, quit your job. We’ll start the family, and I’ll figure it out.” So, she quits her job and I rebid at work and I started making more hours which equals more money. The writing was on the wall that wasn’t going to be able to sustain the household for two people, let alone three or four, and so I started thinking and trying to figure out what to do, as far as what I could do for extra income. I actually tried something before podcasting, which was, I started a mobile auto repair company called MARS, which was just for mobile auto repair services. I would actually make appointments with people and I would hustle through my day trying to get out of work so I could get to the customers in time to work on their car in their driveway. The whole idea was that you could stay at home and watch Saturday morning football with your kids and family and I’ll be working on your car in the driveway or garage. So that was… it’s still a great idea, it just being a truck driver, it just did not work with the schedule. That’s when I realized I needed to find something that I could do on the side but on my own time. I had a friend who kind of inspired the idea of podcasting. I already had the studio equipment from, in my younger days I did music stuff, and then I knew I could hold conversations with people, and I put the two together and ta da, I’m a podcaster!
Troy: So how long into the podcasting did you start making money and was that first money making podcast The Confessionals?
Tony: So, I started The Confessionals on January 19 2017 and the first year of The Confessionals I didn’t make any money at all, but I had the vision for it and I knew that this was probably the best opportunity that I had to create a side income on my own schedule being a truck driver. And so I came home every day… it didn’t matter what time it was, from work, I kissed my wife before the kid came along, I ate dinner and I would go up in the studio, which I made my third bedroom into a studio, and I would work on the podcast stuff. Sometimes I didn’t even know what I was working on. I just knew that I had to be in a creative environment to find something to do. I would sit down at the computer and I would find how you build a podcast, and the whole first year I treated it like a job. I still do. I treat it like a job. Even though I wasn’t making money, I put a lot of hours in without making any money whatsoever, but then as you build up the audience base and more people were listening, more opportunities were there for advertising. People will pay extra for extra content if they love your show. And so, I started doing patron at first and then I moved to some membership strictly on my website. I think I started making money the second year. Probably two three four months into the second year I started making money through the patron, but it was a lot of hustle and growing to get there. You know, hindsight is 2020. It was 100 percent worth it.
Troy: That’s what I was going to say. It sounds like you’ve been side hustling from day one. What are maybe some other side hustles you’d recommend? I know we’ve mentioned a handful for truckers whether it’s, you know, Uber or selling something they may have created on Esty or something like that, or you know, YouTubing. I mean, there’s definitely tons of side hustles for truckers out there, even ones that you know might be on the road the majority of the time.
Tony: Yeah and that’s the thing. One thing that people, whether you’re a trucker or not, you have to understand is that it’s 2020, and there’s no reason why you don’t have a side hustle going if you want. Because 20, 30 years ago it was a lot harder to do things as a trucker to make extra income, but now with technology, you’re really limitless as to what you can do. I think a lot of times truckers, we tend to feel, you know, because it becomes very mundane, we know what we’re doing and it becomes very vanilla. The thrill of, “Hey I’m a trucker; it kind of fades after a while and you forget that what you do is very unique and very difficult. A lot of people that aren’t truckers glamorize the industry, in a sense, that they’re like wow you’re a trucker, you drive those things, wow that’s impressive. They get very impressed with the idea of it. So just taking that, you can surely turn a YouTube channel, where you literally just get a couple cameras and you set them up in your truck – one facing you, one facing the road, one maybe clipped to your mirror and facing behind you, on both sides. Let’s just say you have four cameras, one facing the road, two on both sides facing behind you or something, one facing you, and you just document your life out on the road. You get all that footage and you just learn how to chop it up. There are free programs. I run with Mac and I have free programs with that but I’m sure PC is the same. There are free programs where you can actually upload your video footage, chop it up, edit it down into a 15 – 20-minute thing, and put it out there for the world to see. Join Facebook groups that are trucker groups and you just drop the link to your YouTube video in there and. You know, you just keep working on the crap and when you first start you get a few hits and that’s it and you’re like, oh man it’s not taking off. But consistency – and that’s what one of the biggest things that people have to understand is that you have to be consistent with that side hustle. The audience needs to know when you’re going to drop something new. So, whether you do a new video every week, every two weeks, or once a day, the audience wants to know when to expect you. The more consistent you are, the more they’re going to come back but also the more consistent you are the better you’re going to get. The quality of your stuff is going to get better. All of a sudden, you’re going to realize, hey, you know, I’m chopping these videos up but the audio’s not that great. How do I fix that? And you start figuring out, you look into the audio stuff, you learn how to fix your audio, and all of the sudden you have a YouTube channel that is documenting your life as a trucker and it has, you know, 500 or 1000 people following you. You’re excited but it just keeps growing and growing, because this kind of stuff, once you get it going, it gets a life of its own. It gets its own momentum. It’s like a snowball going down the hill and eventually you’re going to get to the point where you couldn’t stop it if you wanted to. It’s just taking those first few steps of actually going out there and doing something, finding something that you’re interested in, and then pursuing it. Especially when you have no idea what the outcome is going to be; that’s one of the hardest things to get through; is the idea that, hey when I punch in at my job, whether I’m punching in or getting in my truck and driving across the country, I know what the end game is. I know if I work 10 hours a day, I make this much money. I know if I drive this many mile today, I make this much money. When you’re doing a side hustle and building something from the ground up, you’re not guaranteed anything. That can be kind of scary and deterring for people, but I’m telling you, if you’re even thinking about doing a side hustle, in today’s day and age, now is the best time to do it than ever before. You have the best chance of actually building something on the side today than you ever did in human history. It’s that easy. It’s just taking the step and doing it. The technology side of things is there, and even if you have certain things you make on the side… like I have one guy and he makes throwing knives. He’s a blacksmith, and he makes throwing knives at his house, and what he does now is he takes the throwing knives, he posts them on Instagram. He started getting a following, and he started selling things.
Troy: Nice
Tony: It’s just a matter of taking something that you enjoy doing and pursuing it, especially in the beginning when you don’t see that light at the end of the tunnel.
Troy: So, when you get this snowball rolling and your side hustle up and running, how do you manage your work life balance with not only your work, obviously, but with the side hustle as well?
Tony: Yeah and that’s difficult. It really is difficult. Initially it takes a lot of dedication and perseverance to know that hey, I just put in a 14-hour day at work in and I’m maxed out on my hours. I’m tired. Yet I gotta do something on the side, you know, I gotta build something, and so you gotta force yourself to put in even more time on something else where you’re treating it like a job even though you’re not even going to make money at it yet. Then on top of it, you have this family life. A lot of guys are married or have kids, and especially with the kids thing, it can get hard, especially once that snow ball gets going and stuff and you really have some momentum going… it requires more of your attention. For me personally, my wife has been very supportive in the side hustle, even through my failures – I’ve tried a lot of different things. In my 20s I started a cleaning service company. I joined the Amway company in my early, early 20s, just trying to do something. I did the mobile auto repair services. I’ve done a lot of different things, and she supported me through all of it. This last one, which was the podcasting industry, she was a little hesitant because we’d been through a lot as far as me doing side hustles that failed. I told her, I said, “listen, if this doesn’t work, if this doesn’t hit, I’ll just give it up. I’ll just stick to pure dedication to driving itself.” She’s like, ok she’ll take that. And then it started growing, and it started taking a lot of time because it was growing. For me, what I did was I included my wife in on the project. I told her, I was like, “listen, you’re staying at home. I’m out on the road driving, and we’re getting emails coming in with people’s experiences…” because my podcast, my first podcast, is a paranormal podcast, where people share their paranormal experiences with me. It’s a story telling podcast. I didn’t have time to run through these emails, schedule everything, and so she started doing that for me. I included her in the process so she didn’t feel like she was on the outside looking in, and just seeing her husband disappear into an office for the night talking to complete strangers. It became something that she was helping with the process and actually initiating the process of me talking to these people. She is now very involved with what I do, and she essentially works for the podcast. That’s huge. And then with kids and stuff, it still breaks my heart every time I gotta go in the studio. Like, this past weekend I spent a lot of time in the studio. I mean, probably about 10 – 12 hours, between the two shows, and you know my kid’s not in here because he’s too loud. He’s young. But it’s a matter of, when I’m around him, engaging with him, and letting him know daddy loves him, and when I come upstairs, I say the same thing to him that I do when I’m going to drive my truck every morning. I say, “alright buddy, daddy’s going to work,” so he knows that I’m not going upstairs just to play around and get away from him. I’m actually going to work, to do something. So, he can identify in his little mind that daddy’s going to work and that’s how I kind of balance it out and stuff. It may not be the perfect system, but it’s working for me.
Troy: So, if you could, would you make your side hustle your full-time job? I know we were talking earlier; I know you have plans to expand some things and if you want to keep them under wraps, I totally respect that. Is that something you would love to do maybe just do podcasts full time?
Tony: Oh yeah, 100 percent. When I first started this, it wasn’t even an option to even fathom. I mean, you could dream about it, oh man how cool would it be if I just woke up every day and sat down in my studio, and that was my job, to podcast. It wasn’t a reality. Now it’s becoming more and more a reality that if I just keep going the way I’m going, it’s eventually going to happen, and that is now a goal of mine. Because truckers know that we spend a lot of time away from home. Whether you’re an LTL guy like me, putting in 12-14 hours a day, or you’re an over the road guy, both drivers have to make sacrifices when it comes to family. I don’t know one driver out there that says that he doesn’t want to be around his kids more. The idea of me doing something like this full-time and having a very flexible schedule where when my kid gets older and he has a basketball game, I can just say, “ok I’ll be there,” because I can be. That’s very attractive to me and being more engaged with his development as a young man. So yeah, making podcasting a full-time gig is definitely now on the table as a goal of mine, and the way I’m doing that is obviously putting my first podcast, The Confessional, to bigger and better levels. I’m constantly working on it. Before we did this interview, I was working on it. Then what I started doing was, I started thinking, you know, there’s a lot of other things I can do with podcasting. So, we did. We’re starting Hammer Lane Legends, which is a trucker podcast, me and my dad are doing it together. I’m pretty good at talking with people and having conversations, and I learned that from my dad. When I was a kid growing up, we would sit at the table and talk. That’s what we did. We didn’t sit around the TV watching TV, we talked as a family. So, holding conversation is something that I’m good at, and he is as well. So, we actually this past weekend did our first set of interviews for Hammer Lane Legends, and I can’t tell ya how smooth it was. Our chemistry from the dinner table transitioned right behind the microphone.
Troy: Awesome
Tony: And it was fantastic, and so we got that going, and now my wife is going to be launching her own podcast, which is kind of similar to what I’ve been doing with the paranormal type stuff. Only what she’s doing is she’s taking written thriller, scary type stories, and she’s going to narrate them and act them out behind the microphone. I’ll produce the audio and produce it, so it sounds very engaging, and then we’re going to call that “The Hour After Midnight.” So, very busy, launching a lot of new podcasts this year, but I very much believe that we get one shot at this life, and I don’t like living with regrets. Every second that goes by, we can’t get back and we gotta stop acting like tomorrow’s guaranteed to us. So, I live in the moment and I truly pursue life to the fullest that I possibly can. And if I fail at it, I’m ok with it because I know I at least tried. The idea of not trying and never knowing if I would have done good or bad, that is something I can’t live with and it scares me to be honest with you.
Troy: Awesome Tony, I love and respect that passion and you know you’re really setting a great example of being a side hustler and things like that. Before we wrap things up, is there anything else you’d like to add?
Tony: Yeah, just go ahead and right now the only website I have active is TheConfessionalsPodcast.com, so if you’re out there and you’re listening to this, and you think that maybe, hey it’d be kind of interesting to hear people’s paranormal, scary type stories that they actually personally went through, you can go ahead and check it out, or any podcast players, just look The Confessionals up. Hammer Legends is looking to come out soon. We have more interviews scheduled. We’re trying to drop it late February, early March, is the shot for that. We actually have an interview with an Ice Road trucker, from the TV show, that we’re doing in two weeks from now, so that should be pretty entertaining stories that he has. Hammer Lane Legends is essentially trucker’s coming on, talking shop, and sharing wild experiences that they’ve had from the road. And it’s not just truckers. We’ll have police officers on, EMTs, people who drive for a living, coming on and just sharing what it’s like doing what they do and what are the wild and crazy experiences they’ve been through.
Troy: Awesome, well thank you and once again that’s Tony Merkel from Hammer Lane Legends and The Confessionals podcast. Tony, thank you so much.
Tony: Awesome Troy, thank you.
Troy: Alright and a big thanks to Tony for that interview. Make sure to check out The Confessionals podcast as well as Hammer Lane Legends when it comes out. And if you’re still interested in some more side hustle options, we did write a blog on AllTruckJobs.com going over some other side hustle options that we think you might be interested in.
Lenay: Yeah and don’t forget that this podcast is brought to you by AllTruckJobs.com. If you are interested, we do have sponsorship opportunities for Big Rig Banter, so shoot us an email and we can get you some of that information.
Troy: Yeah, and again we always ask for you to leave a review wherever you are listening to this. We really appreciate any feedback you guys can provide. But I think that about wraps it up Lenay.
Lenay: Sounds good, I think so.
Troy: Alright I’m your cohost Troy Diffenderfer
Lenay: And I’m your favorite cohost, Lenay Ruhl
Troy: And this is Big Rig Banter
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