This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Six-Figure Side Hustle series, where people with lucrative side hustles break down the routines and habits they’ve used to make money on top of their full-time jobs. Got a story to tell? Let us know! Email us at AskMakeIt@cnbc.com.

Megan Walsh grew up listening to the sound of her mom’s Singer sewing machine, thudding against Halloween costume fabric.

It’s one of Walsh’s favorite childhood memories, giving her an appreciation for the way handmade things smell, feel and resonate with people, she says. And it inspired the part-time endoscopy nurse’s lucrative side hustle, which she launched from her living room in Manahawkin, New Jersey.

Walsh, a lifelong crafter, opened her Etsy shop MegansMenagerie in 2009. Last year, the shop — which currently specializes in plant-themed wall decor — brought in more than $121,400 in revenue last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Through September, it’s on track to bring in over six figures for the third consecutive year.

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The shop isn’t always popular. Sometimes, Walsh finds a type of craft that sells well, and revenue jumps. In 2012, for example, she found success selling chevron scarves — sewn with the same Singer machine — and made enough to buy a then-new Dodge Journey SUV, she says.

Other times, the shop is simply a place for her to offload her art and get a little help paying everyday bills. The side hustle has helped cover monthly student loan payments, a used car for one of her daughters, vacations and a vow renewal ceremony, says Walsh.

Since Walsh began selling wall decor in 2021, she’s pocketed roughly $60,000 per year from her side hustle, she estimates — close to what she makes annually as a part-time nurse. She works about 12 to 24 hours per week on her shop and 24 to 32 hours at a hospital, she says. If her Etsy income falters, she can pick up more nursing hours, she adds.

Here, Walsh discusses juggling her side hustle with her nursing job, avoiding burnout and why she’s happy with a side hustle isn’t guaranteed to make money forever.

CNBC Make It: Is your side hustle success replicable?

Walsh: Definitely. I just think it takes a lot of drive [to run a side hustle]. It’s not easy, and you need to find the right balance between hustle and happiness.

I’ve found things that I’ve enjoyed creating, made a little money, then the trends have gone away. Then, I fall into something else. Everyone wants to make money, but you can’t be so overcome with busyness that you miss your entire life.

Is balancing a side hustle with your nursing career difficult? Do you have any strategies for avoiding burnout?

Yeah. I’m a multi-tasker, and I love to do all these things all the time. If I feel like I’m doing too much, I know I have to give something up. I was a forensic nurse [helping sexual assault survivors] for years, but I stopped [after the Etsy shop took off in 2021] because I felt like there weren’t enough hours in the day.  

If you’re burning yourself out, you’re going to miss your whole life. Every single day, I wake up and set an intention — usually in my head, sometimes in my journal — for the amount of work I’m going to do, and I don’t push past that.

My littlest is in fourth grade, and he just had his first school play, so it was a lot of running around and late pickups on top of the normal homework, shower, dinner routine. On days like that, I know that I’m not going to get a lot done, so I plan a day where I can either work ahead or catch up when my kids aren’t around.

I set boundaries and cut back when I need to. Sundays are a family-only day.

Your side hustle’s sales history is full of peaks and valleys. If plant-themed wall decor stopped being popular tomorrow, would you start looking for the next trendy craft?

No. This shop has kept me very, very busy for years, and I welcome the slowdown. My husband tells me I’m a workaholic, but actually, I just like to ride things out while they’re hot. The planning is tough sometimes, and I don’t know what my next thing is going to be.

I’ve always just made things I like, and starting making them because it was something I enjoyed. I’ll never stop making things. It’s what keeps me grounded.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Elena Bonvicini didn’t set out to start a multimillion-dollar denim brand worn by the likes of Taylor Swift, Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner. She just liked thrift shopping. 

Every summer as a teen, the Southern California native would go to Wisconsin to see her grandparents. She’d visit thrift stores in the area and rifle through the denim selection, searching for Levi’s that she could fashion into cutoff shorts for herself and her friends.

Originally, it wasn’t supposed to be a business. Bonvicini had fun making the cutoffs and, as she told CNBC Make It, “always loved having things that no one else had.” But that changed when she was back at high school and someone asked about her shorts. 

“I got stopped by a girl who was two grades below me and she was like, ‘Oh my gosh, where’d you get those shorts?‘” Bonvicini, now 25, explains. “And I said ‘Oh, I made them!’ And she was like ‘Can I buy a pair? Can you make me a pair?’” 

Bonvicini had never sold clothing before, so she relied on her best “guesstimation” to set the price for her first sale at $30. More girls started asking Bonvicini about the pants, and the young designer realized that she had a business on her hands. 

Bonvicini was soon selling hundreds of reworked vintage pants to classmates from her high school and other schools in the area. Every Friday, she would set up shop in her gym locker room and sell jeans for $10 each. 

“I would lay them all on the locker room floor and the girls would come and have a try-on party,” she says. “This was before Depop or Poshmark, so it was kind of a new idea to be upcycling and buying clothes from the thrift store and making them cute.”

Even charging her friends and classmates just $10 or $30 for a pair of jeans, Bonvicini turned a nice profit. 

“In the Midwest I was buying [the jeans] for 50 cents. In some places, you could buy a trash bag filled with anything for $8. I could probably fit 20 pairs of jeans into one bag,” she says. “There was a huge profit margin there.” 

When shorts were out of season she asked her mother for a sewing machine so she could try her hand at taking vintage boy’s jeans and turning them into something she and her teenaged customers could wear. Her mom agreed to get her a $300 machine on one condition: they would go to their local Joann Fabrics for sewing lessons. 

By the time she was approaching her high school graduation, Bonvicini was determined to grow her brand. She created an Etsy account the day she turned 18 and set out to use social media to help turn EB Denim into the next big thing.

Early on, Bonvicini knew that her best bet to get more eyes on her designs would be to get popular people wearing them.

“I decided that I wanted to reach out to people I thought were cool on Instagram, message them, find their email,” she says. “I didn’t care if they posted it or not. I just wanted them to have my design.” 

The gifting strategy paid off. The teen founder was shocked to not only hear back from influencers and style icons like Chiara Ferragni and Danielle Bernstein, but also see them post themselves in her clothes. 

“She’s like the Kylie Jenner of Italy,” she said of Ferragni. “I didn’t expect for her to DM me back. I reached out to every single email that I found, and her assistant ended up replying.” 

The exposure proved to be an immediate boon to her business. 

“I started seeing traffic coming through our website and an immediate return on investment,” she says. “It was just immediate sales. That’s when I really knew that I actually had something.” 

At college, Bonvicini worked diligently to expand EB Denim. She hired an assistant to help her ship orders that came through her website. Her weekends would be spent acquiring hundreds of pairs of jeans at the Melrose Trading Post or Rose Bowl Flea Market and building relationships with suppliers. 

She added several new designs for reimagined Levi’s, upped her inventory and kept gifting jeans to celebrities and influencers. She also continued selling to classmates — this time, to sorority sisters at USC. Gone were the $10 jeans. Now, she was charging $220 for her more refined product. 

“I would do trunk shows at my sorority house and I would invite all the girls,” she said. “I did this thing where if they posted on their Instagram story they would get 10% off at checkout. So every single girl was posting it, putting it on their feed.” 

Bonvicini acquired each pair of jeans for around $20 and spent $14 reworking them before washing them in her home washing machine. To keep up with so much demand, Bonvicini had hired seamstresses to tailor the jeans to her specifications. On her best day, she says she sold $12,000 worth of pants in just a few hours. 

With momentum building behind her brand, she took her profits and reinvested them into her company by hiring a PR agency to help her with influencer outreach. 

“I wasn’t looking for it to be a money-making machine,” she says. “I always knew that in order for it to grow into this vision of what it could be, I needed to put everything I could back into it.” 

“There was a huge world of people I didn’t have access to and couldn’t get a hold of,” the 25-year-old adds. “Why are these people going to respond to a 19-year-old? I got really lucky at the beginning. [My firm] got me on Kylie Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Gigi Hadid, Bella Hadid.” 

This exposure also got EB Denim into high-end retailers like REVOLVE and Selfridges. By the time she was a junior, she says EB Denim was bringing in over $1 million in revenue and had a small handful of employees and interns. The brand was doing so well, in fact, that she was debating leaving USC altogether. 

“I wanted to drop out,” she says, “but my mom was like ‘You better stay your a– in school!’”

Instead, she focused her studies and tried to apply everything she learned to her business. 

“Any time we had an entrepreneurship assignment, I would make it about my brand,” she says. “It made me think about everything in a more professional and sophisticated lens, which I think really helped me in so many ways.” 

EB Denim continued to grow over the next few years, adding dresses, t-shirts and jackets to its offerings. It continued to be a favorite of influencers and tastemakers.

Everything came to a head after the 2023 Video Music Awards. 

Bonvicini team had been notified by Taylor Swift’s stylist that the pop star would be wearing one of EB Denim’s items, but they didn’t know which one or when. Then, while she was out at a Fashion Week party, Bonvicini phone started to buzz.

“I remember looking at my phone at three in the morning and someone had sent me a picture of Taylor Swift walking out of a VMAs after party wearing the dress,” she says. “I was like ‘Oh, that’s so cool.’” 

“Then the next morning I woke up so hung over and saw [so many] Shopify notifications,” Bovincini continues. “Mind you, this dress is like $500. I was stunned.”

Thanks to the heads up, the brand had press releases ready to send out to outlets as EB Denim was featured in countless articles and roundups chronicling Swift’s style.

EB Denim is on track to bring in $3 million in revenue this year, a far cry from its $30 start. Despite her success, Bovincini sometimes has a hard time believing how far she’s come.

“I have imposter syndrome,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t think I even now feel like a businesswoman.”

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I didn’t think about leaving the U.S. to live somewhere else until very recently. 

My father is from Jamaica, so I have always felt a connection to the island, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally visited for the first time. 

I was struck by the joy I felt surrounded by the culture, the food, and so many family members and new friends. This spring, I made the leap and moved with my two youngest kids to Negril, Jamaica.

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Back in the States, I was often ill and had very high blood pressure. Over the last several months, to my surprise and delight, following the example of the vibrant older folks in my community, my stress has lifted and I am so much healthier. 

Overall, I feel like I have a better chance of longevity here. 

Here are the biggest lessons I have learned from the senior citizens in my community:

One of my neighbors, in his mid-to-late 60s, can do a backflip and often climbs trees to pick fruit. He is just one example of the vibrant senior citizens in my area. 

Many people wash their clothes by hand, as I have started to, and hang them on the line. People devote a lot of time to tending their gardens.  

I spend almost all day outside working. I’ve tried doing that in the States, but as soon as the season changes, I go back in and may or may not come out again.

But thanks to the temperate year-round weather here, my veranda “office” is always open.

In hindsight, I feel like the dependence on cars in the U.S. made it harder for me to enjoy nature and the company of other people. 

In North Carolina, so many things are drive-thru, from pharmacies to fast food. By virtue of how my town was designed, everyone was reliant on a vehicle. In the U.S., I drove everywhere, including to take my daughter to daycare, even though it was just up the street.

In my community in Negril, most people walk and use public transportation, especially seniors, to get around and do their errands.

I walk much more since I got here, and I’ll stroll to the store most days. Jamaica is also very hilly and mountainous, so you regularly have to go up inclines. It’s been so positive for my health.

The food here is fantastic, especially the produce. Fruit trees are everywhere, and there is such a variety of fresh vegetables. 

To me, the food in Jamaica tastes different from the food in the U.S. It is not super processed, or overly salty or sweet. I don’t eat traditional fast food here, although there are restaurants that serve it. I prefer to go to a skilled local vendor and try some of their wares. 

You don’t have to go far to find someone selling delicious, healthy and inexpensive food, whether it is freshly caught fish, porridge, lovely cold coconuts, or some of my favorite dishes like jerk chicken, brown stew, bully beef and beef patties.

You will frequently see people, especially older folks, talking, playing dominoes or Ludi, and laughing together. When people aren’t feeling well, neighbors will share their favorite herbal remedies. 

We are often invited to neighborhood gatherings, even as newcomers. On a Sunday, for example, people might go to church, relax, go to the river, do some “bush cooking” — preparing and serving delicious meals outside. It’s a very laid-back atmosphere, and I felt welcome right away. 

I rarely saw anyone in my neighborhood in the States. I knew only about four of my neighbors on the street and I lived in that house for seven years. I would see people in passing and wave, but then we would just go back to our lives. 

It’s odd not to know or talk to your neighbors here. Every time I see a neighbor in Jamaica, we sit and chat. 

I didn’t realize how high-stress and individualistic the culture could be in the United States until we left. I was on autopilot all day, every day.

The pace of island life forced me to slow down, start paying attention to how I felt, and challenged my beliefs of what life should be. Moving shook up my routine, removed me from daily stressors, and allowed me to create a new reality. 

Small changes definitely add up, and getting out of my comfort zone helped me make these new habits stick, for the better.

Tiffany Grant is a financial educator, writer, podcaster and coach. Before she was an entrepreneur, Tiffany was an HR professional. She is the founder and host of ″Money Talk with Tiff,” an Accredited Financial Counselor and holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Want to earn more money at work? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Negotiate a Higher Salary. Expert instructors will teach you the skills you need to get a bigger paycheck, including how to prepare and build your confidence, what to do and say, and how to craft a counteroffer. Sign up today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through Nov. 26, 2024.

Just a few weeks ago, Hannah Chea spent most of her week sitting in front of a computer for work.

These days, you can find her shucking oysters for partygoers at lavish events and entertaining them with fun facts about the chilled mollusks.

Chea, 24, was let go from her job as a data analytics engineer at Paramount in September after a year of worrying that the layoff was coming.

“I fully expected this layoff,” Chea, who lives in San Francisco, tells CNBC Make It. She says she and many colleagues had been on edge since the company began downsizing in late 2023. While losing your job is never a great experience, Chea chooses to focus on the handful of positives that have come from the situation.

For one, she says she’s relieved she was let go from her team rather than other colleagues with more financial strains: “I’m glad to hear that it wasn’t anyone else on my team who had families or were starting a family or had just bought a house.”

Chea had one week to wrap up her work and left with four weeks of severance pay. And she has another fallback to pad her bank accounts: A part-time gig she picked up a year ago as a “mobile oyster shucker.”

Chea found the oyster-shucking gig a year ago while scrolling on Instagram, filled out a form, and had a conversation with the owner of Oysters XO, a catering company with outposts around the U.S. Once on-board, she learned how to properly shuck oysters as well as share fun facts about them with party guests. (Her favorite is that oyster farms can help clean the ocean, and that shells can be recycled to help shore up eroding coastlines.)

In the last year, Chea says she’s worked one or two events per month, with each gig involving two to three hours of shucking oysters for party guests and entertaining them with lively conversation. One gig took her to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl in February.

“I really like the novelty of it,” Chea says. “I think it’s crazy to say I only do oyster shucking — in heels. I think I’m a very extroverted person. I really wanted break the monotony of my remote tech job [and] just staring at a computer all day.”

Now that she’s without a day job, Chea hopes to spend more time shucking for events and helping grow Oyster XO’s presence in the Bay Area, especially ahead of the busy holiday season.

Chea declined to share how much she makes shucking oysters, but says that it’s generally “more than I thought it would be, and it definitely surprised me, which is also why I keep shucking.”

“It is for luxury events” like big corporate parties, weddings and other big gatherings, she adds.

So far, Chea’s shucking earnings aren’t enough to cover her rent, let alone recover her previous six-figure tech salary. That being said, she feels she’s in “a lucky place.” In the time she thought a layoff was coming, she lived frugally and saved up roughly a year’s worth of living expenses.

As such, “I’m not in a rush to find a new tech job,” Chea says. “I’ve been taking this time to just think about my life and what’s next,” she says. “I do feel very happy to have relief from the stress and worries about my job. I think that was such a big stressor, working in tech.”

Looking ahead, she’s happy to explore turning her former part-time job into her full-time pursuit.

“At least right now, I’m very happy to be in the situation to have freedom to explore,” she says. “I didn’t allow myself the freedom to really explore before.”

“I know that it is not necessarily the same for a lot of other folks out there,” Chea says of her post-layoff circumstances and optimism.

Ever since she’s posted about her experience on social media, “I’ve seen so many comments of like, ‘Oh, she’s not crying and sitting at home,’” she says. “I think I just happen to be in a lucky position to [explore] and set myself up for the success of this transition.”

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When Todd Graves looks at resumes, one trend stands out to him: the prevalence of job-hopping.

Graves, 52, is the billionaire CEO and co-founder of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, a restaurant chain with more than 800 locations across the U.S., its territories and the Middle East. His No. 1 red flag when hiring new corporate employees is a resume that shows frequent job changes every two to three years, he says.

“I question that, because it’s like, ‘Are you in it just for you?’” Graves tells CNBC Make It.

Job-hopping can make an applicant come across as someone who’s on a “quest for titles,” says Graves. Such people also tend to use language during interviews that they think the hiring manager wants to hear, rather than giving authentic answers, he notes — which you can catch by looking for inconsistencies in candidates’ responses across multiple interviews.

“When they’re more into title and control versus teamwork, it’s a huge red flag for me,” says Graves.

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When Graves conducts job interviews, he tries to gauge each candidate’s level of passion for the brand — and hires people who he thinks will be “intrinsically motivated” to work at Raising Cane’s. He says he’s noticed a “huge correlation to success” for employees when they care about what happens to their colleagues, team and organization as a whole — rather than focusing solely on their own career growth.

“That goes down to our cashiers and fry cooks in our restaurants,” says Graves.

Job-hopping has become relatively common, especially amid a tight labor market in recent years. Some career experts say the corporate stigma against job-hopping is outdated, as long as your resume doesn’t show an excessive track record of it.

But Graves isn’t alone in expressing concerns about candidates who frequently change jobs. Over a third of hiring managers surveyed by LinkedIn over the summer said they would be hesitant to pursue a candidate with a pattern of short stints in different jobs.

Hiring managers might be thinking, “if you were only there for nine months, maybe you’ll only be here for nine months,” LinkedIn career expert Drew McCaskill told Make It in August.

Career experts typically recommend against mentioning your current or former jobs unless your interviewer specifically asks you about them. The summary section on a resume or the “About” section of your LinkedIn profile may be an appropriate place to explain your career experiences, McCaskill said.

If an interviewer does ask about your career choices, you should be ready with a succinct explanation that focuses on the future and the value you can add to a new job. Talk about what you’ve gained through each of your past experiences, and how that makes you a fit for the role want now, said McCaskill.

Don’t give hiring managers a reason to think you’ve done anything wrong, McCaskill said: “Don’t make apologies for it.”

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