This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Ditching the Degree series, where women who have built six-figure careers without a bachelor’s degree reveal the secrets of their success. Got a story to tell? Let us know! Email us at AskMakeIt@cnbc.com.

Bridgette Tena has one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. She says she couldn’t be happier. 

The 51-year-old is a roofer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, part of the less than 10% of women working in construction in the U.S.

Roofers face the second highest rate of fatal work injuries among all occupations, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Roofing is also one of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S., with nearly 15,000 jobs expected to be added each year over the next decade. 

“Working in this field is hard, don’t get me wrong, but it’s beyond rewarding,” Tena tells CNBC Make It. “It’s the coolest job ever. I love what I do.”

Tena started building and repairing roofs as a side hustle four years ago to supplement her real estate broker income and learn more about the construction side of the housing market. 

She launched her own roofing business, B. Barela Construction, in February 2021. 

Last year, B. Barela Construction brought in about $180,000 in revenue, and the business is on track to surpass $200,000 in revenue for 2024, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. 

Her combined income from running B. Barela Construction and working in real estate is more than $70,000 (she declined to share her exact salary). 

Ahead of her fourth year in business, Tena says she hopes to scale the business into a full-time career. 

Here’s how Tena found a job she loves and built a business bringing in six figures— without a bachelor’s degree: 

Tena jokes that she was “destined” to work in construction as her uncle and grandfather were both general contractors. “It’s something that was always tugging at my heart, but it took me years to finally chase that dream and follow that career path,” she says. 

She attended Santa Fe Community College on and off between 1995 and 2002, waffling between entering business, law or real estate, but never finishing her bachelor’s degree. 

After leaving college, Tena worked as a receptionist in a local realtor’s office in Santa Fe and obtained both her realtor and real estate broker licenses. 

Realtors are licensed to help people buy, sell, and rent real estate and must work for a sponsoring broker or brokerage firm, while brokers have additional training and can work independently or hire other real estate agents to work for them.

Tena worked as a broker for more than a decade but didn’t find the career fulfilling on its own; she soon realized that she “belonged outside, not in an office.” 

But the reason she didn’t start working in construction sooner, she says, is because “it’s such a man’s world.” 

“I never saw someone who looked like me working in the field, and as a woman, it was scary and intimidating to get into that kind of work on your own,” Tena adds. 

Tena started apprenticing with a general contractor on construction projects in 2016.

She was inspired to take the leap and obtain her general contractor (construction) license with the state of New Mexico during the pandemic lockdown of 2020 when demand for real estate slowed and she suddenly had more free time. It only took her a few weeks to finish the certification.

In New Mexico, prospective general contractors must pass a trade-specific exam and show they’ve completed at least two years of work experience with a licensed contractor in the state to obtain the certification.

Tena spent most of the lockdown drafting a business and marketing plan, practicing installation and repair techniques on a shed in her backyard and researching names for her roofing business.

She officially launched B. Barela Construction in February 2021, less than a year after obtaining her license. The name pays homage to Tena’s grandfather, Lino Barela, who inspired her to pursue a career in roofing and construction.

Since then, Tena has pursued several specialized licenses to expand her business’ offerings. In 2023, she attended a free two-week GAF Roofing Academy training program in Denver, Colorado which was held exclusively for women.

Through the program, Tena received a roofing certificate that covers shingle installation and roof coating, among other skills. 

The requirements to become a roofer vary state by state in the U.S., but most states will require roofers to have a local license and complete an apprenticeship or on-the-job training. 

The start-up costs to becoming a roofer including training, licensing and equipment can range anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 or more, Tena says, adding that she spent about $20,000 of her personal savings to launch her roofing business. 

That initial investment, however, can pay off, as more experienced roofing contractors earn upwards of $100,000 in the U.S., per ZipRecruiter’s estimates. 

Tena adds that running your own roofing business has an even greater earning potential, as you can set your prices and take on more customers. She says there’s high demand now for roofers due to backlogs brought on during the pandemic and supply chain issues.

It didn’t take Tena long to drum up business, she says, as she’s a Santa Fe local and has a wide network of builders, construction foremen, and other potential customers from working in real estate for so many years. 

Tena says that on a typical weekday, she works from 6 a.m. until 4 p.m., but is also on call during the evenings and weekends for emergency repairs, whether it’s a leaky ceiling or crumbling drywall. 

“We’re always rushing around with our ladders,” Tena says. For Tena, a typical day on the job involves climbing up a slender ladder and working on top of commercial buildings and homes that are 8, sometimes 30 feet high.

Once she’s up there, she and her team might remove old roofs, install new shingles or repair holes. Because she’s up so high, and working with hazardous materials including saws and nail guns, Tena wears a hard hat, thick leather gloves, a safety harness and other protective equipment to minimize injury.

She works with four full-time employees and close to a dozen contractors, many of whom are women — her mother and daughter have often joined her to help on bigger jobs. 

“There was one customer when we showed up with an all-women crew, who looked at us and said, ‘Where are the roofers?’ and I told him, ‘We are’ and he was like, ‘No, the men,’” Tena recalls. “That was brutal, but I told the girls we have to let stuff roll off our back, that creating an inclusive environment for women in construction starts with us.” 

Roofing might not be a popular career choice among young professionals but it’s an “underrated” field that can provide a lot of stability and fulfillment, Tena says. 

“People are always going to need a roof over their heads, so roofers are always going to be in demand,” she adds. “You’re not just working; you’re protecting what’s most important to people — their homes. It’s hard to find that kind of fulfillment in many jobs.”

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When Peter Cancro bought Mike’s Subs as a 17-year-old with a $125,000 loan from his football coach, he wasn’t even old enough to legally slice cold cuts at the Point Pleasant, New Jersey, sandwich joint.

The shop, which he ended up renaming Jersey Mike’s Subs, has since made him a billionaire.

On Tuesday, private equity giant Blackstone announced that it had entered into an agreement to buy a majority of Cancro’s company. The deal reportedly valued Jersey Mike’s Subs at around $8 billion including debt, bumping Cancro’s net worth to estimated $7.5 billion, according to Bloomberg.

In 1975, however, he was just a senior in high school who didn’t want to go into business. He had plans to study law and political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The night his mom suggested he buy the business he’d been working at since he was 14, he laughed, Cancro told Forbes in August.

When he thought about it more, though, “the light switch went off,” he said. He called the restaurant owner the next day and the owner told Cancro he had a week to find $125,000, Cancro told “The Jedburgh Podcast” in 2021.

“It was something I really wanted to do,” Cancro, now 67, told Forbes. “At that age, you don’t think you can fail.”

By the end of the week, he had secured the loan, worth nearly $750,000 in today’s dollars, from a former football coach who happened to be a banker. Cancro became the sole owner of Mike’s Subs before even graduating from high school.

Nearly 50 years later, the chain has just under 3,000 locations worldwide. In 2023, the company brought in $3.3 billion in sales and has had an average annual sales growth of about 20% since 2019, according to food service consulting firm Technomic.

The company’s growth hasn’t come without challenges. In 1991, four years after the company began franchising, the company struggled to secure the cash to pay its bills due to a series of bank failures in the Northeast, Cancro told “The Jedburgh Podcast.” He had to fire all of his corporate staff, including his brother.

“It was a tough time: 1991 [was] my toughest recession, even beyond 2008,” Cancro said, adding that he thought about taking the company public or selling some of his stake but didn’t. In 1994, he said, the situation improved, and the chain expanded into North Carolina soon after.

In 2006, the company flatlined again, largely due to the dot-com bubble burst in 2002, he said. At the same time, his stores were starting to show their age, so he made a risky decision to give the stores a face lift. “I said, ‘I’ll put everything on the table,’ and we paid for the retrofits,” he said on the podcast. “It was only like $15 million total, but it was all the money in the world back then.”

By 2007, he said, the company was back on an upwards trajectory.

These days, only 1% of people who apply to own a Jersey Mike’s franchise are approved, the company told Forbes. Opening a store front will run you anywhere from $200,000 to up to $1.3 million. That said, the returns can be well worth the investment: traditional locations bring in an average of $1.2 million a year in sales, according to the company’s website.

Cancro will retain a minority but “significant” equity stake in Jersey Mike’s and continue to lead the company as CEO following the completion of the acquisition, which is expected early next year, according to the press release. Blackstone’s portfolio of franchisors includes Hilton Hotels and Tropical Smoothie Café.

“We believe we are still in the early innings of Jersey Mike’s growth story,” Cancro said in the release.

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The oceans in and around Japan are believed to contain roughly 1,500 kinds of seaweed, which have long been a staple of Japanese cuisine. Depending on the region and the climate, you can find many different tastes and textures. 

I’m a nutritionist from Nara, Japan, and seaweed is one of the most nostalgic foods for me. Ever since I was small, I’ve eaten it every day. 

My late mom was a big fan of it. In addition to being a tasty and versatile ingredient in many dishes, she said that seaweed helped keep her hair healthy and strong. My grandfather always had some chewy kombu candy on hand, and he would give it to me as a treat whenever I saw him. 

The most lively and robust elders in my life, my 99-year-old aunt (she will be 100 in January!) and my in-laws who are 95 and 88, swear by a daily bowl of miso soup with wakame seaweed.

My very first cooking instructor still teaches at 86. The majority of her recipes include some type of seaweed. 

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At any given time, I will have, at a minimum, my top priority six seaweeds in my pantry: kombu, wakame, nori, hijiki, kanten and aonori. Bonus points if I can get some red tosaka seaweed. 

Seaweed is a food that I will happily eat throughout my life. Here’s why:

When I first moved to the US in 1994, like tofu and matcha, seaweed was hard to come by. Our luggage was filled with dried kombu or wakame whenever we returned from visiting Japan. Now, I can find everything I need at a local Asian market or even Whole Foods. 

Seaweed is convenient and easy to add to so many daily dishes. Most are shelf stable, often requiring little or no preparation. 

I just need to soak it for about 10 minutes, wipe with a paper towel, wrap (for hand rolled sushi, for example), or sprinkle some flakes in. It has a delicious umami flavor, and it enhances other ingredients without needing to add extra salt, sweetener, or fat.

Though it varies by type of seaweed, the plant has been found to be high in both soluble and insoluble fiber, which can help with digestion, weight management and overall gut health. 

Seaweed has iron, iodine, potassium, calcium, magnesium and polyphenols — naturally occurring compounds in plants that can help fight inflammation and illness, and manage blood sugar levels. 

It contains all 9 amino acids, and Omega-3 fatty acids. The latter in particular is helpful for boosting hearth health and cell growth. Seaweed is another source of plant-based protein.

Seaweed is quite sustainable. It requires little or no land, fuel or pesticide usage to grow, it naturally occurs in oceans, and it can help reduce carbon emissions.

It is great for making vegan and kosher safe dishes for my family and friends. For example, if I wanted to substitute gelatin in my cooking, I’ll use kanten seaweed to make savory and sweet vegan jello with azuki (red bean) paste, citrus fruits, pumpkin, edamame and cucumber.

I make my signature healthy miso soup with dashi broth, dried shiitake mushrooms, tofu, seasonal veggies, kombu and wakame seaweed. 

Hijiki and arame seaweed are the star ingredients in my ohitashi (steamed vegetable salad). When I boil dry noodles, I will always add wakame or hijiki at the end, before I drain the pot.

My typical breakfast is seaweed wrapped multi-grain rice, natto (fermented soybeans), nukazuke (pickled vegetables) topped with nori seaweed flakes. Every time, I say out loud, “Oishi, arigato,” which means, “So delicious, thank you very much!” It makes the experience so much richer. 

I cannot tell you how many rice balls with kombu and nori I have made for my son and his tennis teammates when he was growing up. One of my signature dishes for my family and community is a cucumber, wakame and tosaka salad with miso vinegar dressing and natto on top.

Eating seaweed makes me feel healthier and transports me to an ocean haven. That is why I love eating it everyday. 

Michiko Tomioka, MBA, RDN, is a certified nutritionist and longevity expert. Born and raised in Nara, Japan, her approach focuses on a plant-based diet. She has worked in nutritional roles at substance recovery centers, charter schools and food banks. Follow her on Instagram @michian_rd. 

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.

When you’re doing a job interview, whether virtual or in person, you’ll want to follow the appropriate etiquette.

“You want to make sure that you’re making good eye contact,” says Emily Levine, executive vice president at recruitment firm Career Group Companies, “that you’re reading the room in terms of when it’s appropriate to speak, when it’s appropriate and time to ask questions.”

Levine has interviewed “thousands and thousands of people” in her career, she says, often for A-list celebrities looking for personal assistants or chiefs of staff.

Here are Levine’s best tips for avoiding her top red flags in a job interview.

To begin with, you’ll want to make sure you arrive at an appropriate time, especially if you’re there in person.

Arrive too late, and you risk missing part of your interview, wasting your interviewers’ time and making a bad impression. But “if you show up too early, it’s also too eager and might make the interviewer feel rushed,” says Levine. Ten minutes early is the “perfect” time to walk into your interviewer’s office.

“I recommend making sure that you are parked 15 to 20 minutes early in the building” as a precaution, says Levine. That will ensure you have enough time to find the suite or office number but that you’re not there long before the interview starts.

Presentation is also key.

If you’re online or in person, “don’t chew gum, don’t have your sunglasses on your head” during the interview, says Levine. These are too casual and unprofessional.

If you’re in person only, make sure you don’t come in “smelling like cigarette smoke or wearing too much perfume,” she says. A lot of people are sensitive to smell and you want to make sure it’s not uncomfortable for them to be in the same room.

You want to leave “an impression based on your experience, not the way that you’re dressed or you smell,” she says.

Finally, regardless of your professional past, be strategic about how you talk about it.  

Avoid bad-mouthing previous employers, for example, or “divulging too much information that’s proprietary or confidential,” says Levine. Especially in her line of work, some of her clients make their employees sign non-disclosure agreements. When candidates tell her they’ve signed an NDA but still proceed to divulge confidential information about a previous employer, it’s a red flag.

Regardless of how private your employer was, spilling secrets gives the impression that if your interviewer hired you and shared proprietary information, in the future, you “would most likely do the same” with them, says Levine.

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. Start today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through Nov. 26, 2024.

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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.

Alexandra Rutkay rejoiced when her son became 18 months old. She could finally ditch her diaper bag and pull her neglected designer purses back out of her closet.

But as her family of three headed to dinner in New York in August 2021, she realized she couldn’t shove wet wipes, snacks and an emergency pull-up into her sleek Saint Laurent crossbody. “I was so mad about it,” says Rutkay, now 41. “I thought, ‘There has to be something better for us moms. Everything is so frumpy and stupid and nothing is cute.’”

Rutkay is a full-time makeup artist who sometimes works up to 16-hour days on movie and television sets. Her side hustle, Citymouse, sells cross-body diaper bags with changeable straps. It launched in June 2022, and has brought in nearly $600,000 in revenue so far this year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

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At first, Rutkay didn’t tell her husband David about Citymouse, because her previous side hustle attempts weren’t always successful, she says. Now, he is the company’s only full-time employee, taking a pay cut to run its operations, logistics and customer service. Collectively, the pair plan to pay themselves about $150,000 from the startup this year, Rutkay notes.

Rutkay herself spends 40 hours per week working on Citymouse — on top of her day job — because once she starts a project, she can’t let it go, she says. She’s also more driven to build wealth, and eventually pass it onto her son, after a health scare: In 2020, she was diagnosed with a soft tissue sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, in her right thigh.

After surgery and chemotherapy, Rutkay was deemed cancer-free in 2021. “Not to be morbid, but if I had died before [my son] even got to know me, what would I have left him?” she says.

Here, Rutkay discusses how other people can follow her path, what she’d change if she could start over again and the most overrated business advice she’s ever heard.

CNBC Make It: Is your side hustle replicable?  

Rutkay: Yes and no. I think creating a business that fills a need is the best possible way to grow and sustain a brand — a lot of people can do that. But it takes a lot of luck for your project to fill that specific need at the right time.

Consistency [of effort] is everything. I treated my past side hustles like hobbies, not businesses.  

Knowing when to pivot is also important. When I started Citymouse, I took a six-week course with a spiritual life coach and realized I felt very badly about my previously failed [side hustles]. She reminded me that knowing when to walk away is actually a superpower.

How do you determine when it’s time to walk away from a side hustle that isn’t working?

I think the world just tells you. If you’re doing everything in your power to get your product or service out there through marketing, and people aren’t responding to it, that’s obviously a sign.

After I had a baby in February 2020, I had this idea to make a pizza-themed baby milestone blanket. I invested about $6,000 from my previous Etsy shop, found a manufacturer overseas and launched it through Amazon FBA’s program.

That was my genius idea, and it was the biggest financial mistake I’ve ever made. I didn’t spend money on advertising because I thought if I made a listing with strong SEO, people would magically find it. That was absolutely not the case. Then, Amazon started charging me all these other fees.

I started panicking and liquidated the company four months after it started.

If you could go back in time and change the way you launched Citymouse, what would you have done to help it succeed faster?

I always thought I was my ideal customer, so I originally positioned Citymouse like a luxury brand for other city moms. It turns out, suburban moms who want to leave their giant diaper bags in the trunk of their cars also need a smaller bag for day-to-day errands like grocery shopping and Target runs.

There is a big difference between this and anything else I’ve ever made. I’m so passionate about Citymouse, and that’s because there’s an emotional element to it — for me and for other moms. I think finding that emotional element and figuring out how to make people feel something with your product, that’s how you hit gold in business.

What’s the most overrated business advice you’ve ever heard?

I know people say this out of the goodness of their hearts, but I cannot stand when you say you have an idea, and someone says, “You should go on Shark Tank.”

You do not need outside investments to grow a profitable business. In fact, I would go as far to say, “Don’t do that.” I think there’s such beauty and underrated power in bootstrapping your company. You have full say on everything, you’re making the decisions yourself. It’s empowering.

That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to [selling equity in your company] forever. In my wildest dreams, in the next five to seven years, I sell Citymouse and I start doing else. I know people say not to start a company with the intention to sell, but I know myself. I’m a serial starter. I’ll probably want to pivot to a different line, a different product, a different industry, eventually.

But it would be nice to exit on top.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Rutkay didn’t initially tell her husband about CItymouse because her previous side hustle attempts hadn’t always succeeded.

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