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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Jenny Lei looked at the towering stack of cardboard boxes in her Hoboken, New Jersey, apartment. She’d spent $30,000 on handbags and needed a new strategy to sell them.

An unemployed UX designer, Lei had taken it upon herself to create the perfect work bag. She spent months designing a prototype before ordering a production run. Four weeks later, she’d only sold 20 totes.

“My plan failed spectacularly,” says Lei. “I couldn’t afford to not make it work. [A lot] of my savings were sitting in boxes in my living room.”

Today, Lei is the 28-year-old CEO and founder of Freja, a New York-based company that sells work totes, shoulder purses and travel accessories. The 4-year-old startup brought in more than $9 million in revenue over the last 12 months, including $2 million in profit, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

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Lei is Freja’s only full-time employee, alongside five contract workers. She credits her company’s growth — not easy, in the highly competitive fashion industry — to cultivating loyal customers, drawing them in with minimalistic bag designs and a public commitment to environmental sustainability.

“From the beginning, I thought, ‘Does the world even need another handbag brand?’ Not really, if I’m going to do things the way that everyone else has,” Lei says. “But I thought if I could do it in a way that felt really good to me, and would resonate with a certain group of people … it was worth the try, right?”

Here’s how Lei turned hundreds of unsold bags into a profitable luxury handbag company, despite her lack of fashion experience.

In February 2019, Lei was a soon-to-be-unemployed graduate student at Cornell University preparing for a job interview in New York. She tried pairing three different work bags with her outfit, and none of them worked. One was too small. Another didn’t offer enough interior organization.

It was like “when your apartment is messy and you can’t think straight,” Lei says. “What I wear is a big part of my confidence … It felt like I went in on the wrong foot, when I was already nervous.”

After the interview, Lei sat in Bryant Park and sketched out a structured bag with interior compartments for her laptop and portfolio, and a strap long enough to fit over a winter coat. She dipped into her savings — $300,000, gained from a purse dropshipping side hustle she ran during graduate school — to order a $2,000 prototype from a sample maker in Brooklyn.

The result “looked like a kindergartener’s art project,” says Lei. So when she visited her parents in Guangzhou, China, that summer, she toured factories that specialized in vegan leather. She chose the factory that was the most communicative and transparent about its working conditions, she says.

“As a Chinese person, I wanted Freja to kind of be my way of showing the world this is what ‘Made in China’ can look like,” says Lei.

She ordered an initial run of 300 bags, created a website, started a marketing campaign to collect potential customers’ email addresses and wrote blog posts about Freja’s values and practices. Sales flopped: It took Lei a year to offload her inventory, she says.

Feeling financially pressured, Lei doubled down — ordering a second run of inventory, which featured a second bag design, and investing more into a harder social media advertising push.

“It was really, really slow for the first two years,” says Lei.

In 2022, Lei finally sold enough bags — largely through social media ads — to bring in $1.7 million in annual revenue. She spent that money, along with two loans from Shopify, on a broader array of bag designs, hoping to expand her target audience beyond environmentally conscious working women.

The results were near-immediate. Freja brought in $5.3 million last year, becoming cash-flow positive enough to pay off both Shopify loans. The company is on track to finish 2024 with $12 million in annual revenue this year, says Lei.

Yet within the context of the $22.8 billion global luxury handbag market, Freja barely registers as a competitor. LMVH, which owns designer labels like Louis Vuitton, Dior, Celine and Loewe, made $16.85 billion in U.S. dollars in net profit last year. Other established brands, like Sandy Liang and Alaia, sell stylistically similar bags as Freja, too.

The steep competition means that merely surviving is a best-case scenario for most niche fashion brands, says Katie Weir, a consumer and luxury industry strategist at Deloitte. Staying relevant over time “is really, really hard, particularly in this space,” she says.

Startups that stick around constantly evolve to keep up with fashion trends and consumer desires, Weir notes. Lei hopes to achieve that by hosting events to build customer loyalty, becoming a small-business mentor to other young women and using a growing array of bag styles to capture a wider audience.

“One thing I kept telling myself was, ‘No one is born a designer,’ but I can become one in a couple of years if I give it a go,” says Lei. “I think now maybe this year I can start calling myself a designer … I think we’ve hit a stride.”

Conversions from EUR to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 EUR to 1.05612 USD on November 19, 2024. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

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In 2007, I made what seemed like a risky decision and dropped out of college despite owing about $50,000 in student loans. 

Fast forward to today, and I run a thriving business that generates about $18,000 a month in passive income — according to my calculations from a recent month’s deposits — while working just four hours a day.

Building passive income isn’t about finding a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s about creating valuable content and products that continue generating revenue long after the initial work is done.

Everyone starts somewhere. I began with a college dropout’s determination and a love for creating videos. My journey from there to successful entrepreneur and coach taught me valuable lessons about building sustainable passive income. 

Here are my top four tips for anyone looking to start their own passive income journey.

Many aspiring entrepreneurs get caught up in the excitement of “scaling” their business before they’ve proven a single successful business model. I fell into this trap early on after listening to many thought leaders talk about diversifying your revenue. It’s a recipe for distraction and mediocrity.

My own breakthrough came when I decided to focus entirely on one revenue stream until it worked.

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I began with a social media marketing agency and nailed that process before I started on my first passive income idea — a course. The course wouldn’t have been possible if not for the work I’d done in my agency to learn the material well enough to teach it.

I gleaned invaluable lessons about:

• What my audience truly wanted
• How to create and market digital products
• How to set the right pricing strategy
• How to automate delivery and support

Only after I had a proven, profitable system did I consider expanding into other revenue streams. This patient, methodical approach meant each new venture had a stronger foundation built on real experience and success.

So don’t rush to diversify. Take the time to work through the challenges of creating your first successful revenue stream. The skills and insights you gain will make you much better at launching and growing any future income streams.

My best business decisions came from listening to my audience. When my community repeatedly asked for a book about video content strategy, I wrote the book “Vlog Like a Boss.” When readers wanted more morning routine guidance, I created “Good Morning, Good Life.”

These products weren’t just random ideas — they were direct responses to market demand. “Good Morning, Good Life” later inspired a paper planner, which added another significant revenue stream to my business.

Your audience will tell you what they want to buy. Your job is to listen and deliver.

The secret to working only four hours a day isn’t working less — it’s working smart. Each video I create takes about two hours total: one hour for preparation and one hour for filming. But once published, it continues earning indefinitely.

I’ve created more than 1,000 videos about productivity and brand-building. While that sounds overwhelming, it’s the result of consistent, systematic content creation over time. Each piece of content serves as a building block in my passive income architecture.

For example, one video I made last year is called “How To Plan a Productive September (That You Actually Look Forward To!)” It has brought in more than $1,100 in ad revenue to date, and it also promotes one of my most successful, high-profit-margin passive income products, the “Good Morning, Good Life” digital planner. 

This video continues to drive sales and ad revenue more than a year after publication. It’s not just content — it’s a systematic sales engine.

Despite dropping out of college, I never stopped learning. Every stage of my business required new skills:

• Video editing for YouTube
• Writing for books
• Product development for planners
• The ability to stay motivated for persevering through it all

While you can learn many things through trial and error, getting guidance from smart people can accelerate your progress significantly. That’s why I invest in myself and hire coaches in my life and for my business that continue to make me better. 

Coaching my own clients in turn is one of the most fulfilling things I do. I love showing people how to skip all the mistakes I made and go straight for the blueprint that builds a business they love.

Amy Landino is a personal brand coach and the award-winning creator of AmyTV on YouTube. She is an instructor in CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online. Follow her on Instagram.

Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s online course How to Earn Passive Income Online to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

Darien Craig and Brandon Echols have known each other since they were 6 years old in small-town Hayden, Alabama. They attended the same high school and even dropped out of college in tandem, they said on Friday’s episode of ABC’s “Shark Tank.”

During that episode, the pair hit another milestone together: agreeing to an investment offer for their jointly owned business. Craig and Echols co-own Y’all Sweet Tea, which Craig founded in 2021 — after getting fired from his previous job, he wrote on his company’s website.

“The week I got fired, I had $7 to my name,” wrote Craig. “With the last paycheck I received, I used the $300 from that check to purchase the first jars, sugar, and tea that would eventually catapult this idea.”

Y’all sells its tea direct-to-consumer and in roughly 600 grocery store locations, mostly across the southeastern United States, Echols said on “Shark Tank.” It brought in $4 million in revenue, including nearly $800,000 in profit, last year, he added.

Those numbers included a detail that the show’s investor judges found particularly interesting: Y’all added flavored teas to its lineup last year, and sold 10,000 units of its first flavor, “Georgia Peach,” in just 35 minutes, Craig said. The first eight of those minutes were responsible for $100,000 in sales, he noted.

“When you’re dropping that amount in that short period on your own site, that’s rare,” Kevin O’Leary said. Barbara Corcoran chimed in: “Do you know how few entrepreneurs can make that claim?”

“That is beautiful. That is like beauty,” Mark Cuban added.

Craig and Echols asked the investors for $500,000, in exchange for a 5% equity stake in their company. Guest investor Rashaun Williams, a venture capitalist and minority-stake owner of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, quickly offered them $500,000 for 10%.

“I’ll let you figure out if you want to go to Walmart, if you want to stay direct-to-consumer, or what balance of both,” said Williams. “You don’t need me to tell you how to run this business … I think you guys are a rocket ship.”

Cuban and Corcoran bowed out. Y’all was a better fit for Williams’ investment style, Cuban said: Craig and Echols noted that they hoped to eventually find an exit for their company, and a professional VC investor could help them grow enough to get acquired or go public.

But O’Leary wanted in. He proposed a joint offer with Williams — $500,000 for 20% of Y’all, which the two investors would split down the middle.

Not to be outdone, Lori Greiner added another joint offer with Williams to the table: $500,000 for 15% of Y’all. O’Leary promptly lowered his offer to match.

Craig asked if any of the investors would chip in another $250,000. They declined, with Williams saying Y’all could always raise more money in the future. After quickly deliberating, Craig and Echols accepted Greiner and Williams’ joint offer — prioritizing the combination of Williams’ VC knowledge and Greiner’s retail experience over the stronger financial terms of Williams’ solo proposal.

The quartet officially inked the deal at Greiner and Williams’ proposed terms after the show’s taping, Craig confirmed to CNBC Make It.

“Rashaun is an awesome businessman and Lori has so much experience in retail,” Echols said on the show. “It couldn’t have been a better deal.”

This story has been updated to include Craig’s post-taping confirmation of the investment deal.

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”

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 November 26, 2024.

Mental strength isn’t a nice-to-have in today’s world. It’s a must-have in the face of adversity and distraction. 

A key opportunity lies in everyday scenarios that often go wrong, eroding your mental strength versus building it up. I’m talking about how well — or how poorly — you handle criticism.

Don’t underestimate the negative impact that landing in the “poorly” column here can have on your life and career. There are all too many opportunities for criticism to throw us into a downward spiral that can be tough to pull out of.

“Bad” events, emotions, information, and feedback are more influential than “good” ones, research shows. Events involving negative emotions, for example, are four times more likely to be remembered than those involving positive emotions.

But criticism isn’t what makes us weaker. Avoiding it is.

So if you want to become mentally stronger — a topic I cover in depth in my recent book, “The Mentally Strong Leader” — you have to learn to handle criticism well. Here are four ways to do just that.

The truth is, not everyone should get a seat at the table.

Your boss, your boss’s boss, and your life partner should probably all get a chance to offer you feedback and expect that you’ll thoughtfully consider it. But your second cousin who loves to monologue at you during family gatherings about how you should do your job, despite having no context or experience in your field? Not so much. 

DON’T MISS: The ultimate guide to negotiating a higher salary

The point is, you don’t have to default to accepting feedback from anyone and everyone who wants to share it.

Decide who it makes sense to truly listen to and take seriously.

It’s not about minimizing your emotions, it’s about managing them.

Of course, that can be hard, because criticism can sting. In fact, neuroscience research shows that the brain registers social rejection in the same region it does physical pain. That’s why criticism can feel like a gut punch at times. 

But you can work to regulate your emotions. For example, say you receive some criticism that doesn’t feel great. In response, you can feel your thoughts starting to race and your emotions starting to surge.

In that moment, get out of your head and into your body.

Take a breath and focus on that breath. Name what you’re feeling so that the emotions lose some of their hold over you.

Then you can listen and ask questions to fully understand the feedback. 

You can’t change the words spoken to you, but you can control what you choose to do with them. You don’t have to act on your first thought as that criticism rolls over you. You can pick your second or third.

Mentally strong people manage their emotions so they can respond with intention.

It’s helpful to look at criticism through a lens of empowerment versus one of deflation. 

When theater critic Albert Williams articulated his philosophy around why he does what he does, he explained that it’s about creating better art with an eye toward the future. It’s not to be cruel, or to save audiences from spending hard-earned money on a bad show.

Try to reframe feedback guided by the belief that your critic’s intent is, similarly, to help you achieve an improved outcome or a better version of you. 

Here are two other reframes. As you receive and process criticism, remind yourself:

• It’s better to be judged than ignored. Sure, maybe some of the judgment being passed on you doesn’t feel fair. But judgment comes from having something worth passing judgment on — otherwise you’d be ignored.
• The idea is to seek improvement, not approval. Not everyone has to agree with you, or to think everything you do is flawless. If the person offering feedback truly wants you to get better, and you do too, you can work toward that goal together.

Picture a strainer for a moment. Now imagine criticism you receive as flowing through that strainer.

You don’t have to ingest and retain every piece of that criticism. You can listen, sift through it all, let the parts that aren’t helpful pass right through, and focus on the remaining, helpful “nuggets.”

Say someone gives you feedback on a presentation. Perhaps, as you sift through the criticism, you find that, while it’s all well-intended, some of it isn’t relevant or helpful because it lacks understanding of the context that informed the conclusions and strategies you described.

But there are a few nuggets to keep, like how you can be more concise or use more visually engaging slides in your presentation. 

Use your metaphorical strainer to help you filter out what’s irrelevant and focus on what will make you better.

Scott Mautz is a popular speaker, trainer, and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He’s a former senior executive of Procter & Gamble, where he ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar businesses. He is the author of ”The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors.” Follow him on LinkedIn.

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. Pre-register now and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through Nov. 26, 2024.