Ten Hours a Week

People will tell you a continuing education business is passive income. You probably do not believe that, and you are right not to. You have seen what a side business does to somebody's evenings. If that is what this is, you do not have room for it.

Here is what usually gets skipped. It is a second job, about ten hours a week, for about four months. Then it starts replacing the first one.

The months you work twice

I had a client, a family medicine physician, who came to me about eighteen months ago. He was seeing fifteen to twenty patients a day in a corporate primary care office, paid on production, and finishing his notes at home. He had about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of student loans and was earning three to four hundred thousand a year, so nothing was wrong on paper. He told me the walls were closing in.

He kept the job and built the business around it. Four months to make the course itself, the slides, the recordings and the quizzes, and to get a website up. He also started publishing articles and videos in that time, so that people would already know who he was when the course went on sale.

That took him about ten hours a week. When people ask me what to budget, I tell them a hundred and twenty focused hours. Some do it in eighty because they already have material written. A complicated build runs to a hundred and sixty.

None of it paid him anything while he was doing it. That is the real cost, and I would rather you hear it from me now than find it out in month two. For four months, you are working two jobs.

About where the ten hours come from. They are two weekday evenings and a weekend morning, and they are not spare hours, because nobody has ten spare hours. You take them from something. It is worth deciding in advance what that something is, because people who do not decide end up taking it out of sleep. Some weeks he put in five. Some weeks fifteen. I have written out what those four months actually produce if you want the week-by-week version.

The physician told me afterward that there was never going to be a good moment, no point where life slowed down and made room for it. It was a decision, not a circumstance.

Before you decide he is not you

He was earning three to four hundred thousand a year, which gave him room to spend four months on something that paid nothing. You may not have that room, and I would rather say so than pretend the two situations are the same.

I did not have it either. I am a nurse practitioner. I was working urgent care and the emergency department, trading hours for dollars the way you are now, and I built mine around the shifts. Money in the bank makes those four months easier. It is not what makes the business work. What makes it work is that you know something other people in your profession will pay to learn, and that has nothing to do with what you earn.

Why this one can replace the job

Here is what separates those four months from every other side job you have watched somebody take.

Clinical income stops when you stop. Every dollar he earned in that office needed a patient in front of him. If he did not go in, he did not get paid. Do that for twenty years and you have twenty years of pay for twenty years of work, and nothing at the end still earning.

A recorded course keeps earning. He made it once and it has been selling ever since, including during the shifts he still works. The second copy costs him nothing to produce, and neither does the four hundredth. The work he did in those four months went on paying him after he stopped doing it, and no amount of clinical training will ever do that.

The demand holds up too. Licenses renew on a cycle, so the clinicians who bought from him last year need education again this year, and new ones finish training every year and arrive needing what the people before them needed. He is not chasing something that can go out of fashion.

That is what people are reaching for when they say passive, and I still think it is the wrong word. I have made the case for a better one here. The short version is that your income stops depending on your hours.

What it turned into

He launched in month five. Before I tell you what it did, here is the number I give people who ask what to expect: ten to thirty thousand a month is what a good CE business looks like. When someone asks whether they will build a million-dollar one, my honest answer is that they probably will not.

His did better than that. Three days after launch, he had earned more than a month of sixty-hour weeks in the clinic paid him. That is the number I would hold onto. It is the one that told him it worked. His first year came to eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is well past anything I would have told him to plan for, and I am still telling you to plan for the range instead of for his year.

Then his schedule, which is what you actually asked about. Building it took about ten hours a week. Running it takes him ten to fifteen, and that figure holds whether a business like this is making twenty thousand a month or a hundred. The hours stop climbing with the income.

So he stopped working full time

He left corporate primary care. He works four to six shifts a month now, because he wants to, and he opened a small cash-pay practice so he can keep doing the medicine he enjoys. The student loans are paid off. So is his mortgage.

Count the jobs. He gave up sixty-hour weeks he could not refuse for ten to fifteen hours he chooses, and the ten to fifteen pay considerably better. He is not working two jobs. He is working one, and seeing patients when he feels like it.

The part that never goes away

Ten to fifteen hours a week is a floor, not a stage you pass through. You stop working two jobs, but you never stop working entirely. There are student questions, a course that needs updating when the guidance changes, marketing that has to keep running, and if you ignore it completely for a year it decays. That is the standing cost. Next to a clinical schedule it is a small one.

The bigger risk is earlier, and I should say it plainly. Some of these do not work. I have sat across from people with a genuinely good idea and no market for it — maybe not then, maybe there had been one a few years before, but not when they wanted to sell it. Four months is a real thing to lose. Anyone who tells you the risk is zero is selling you something.

Back to the question

You asked whether this turns into a second job. It does, for about four months, in the hours around the job you already have.

Then it stops being the second one. The question worth sitting with is not whether those four months are hard, because they are. It is whether anything else in front of you ends with your clinical schedule becoming optional. Twenty more years of shifts will not.