Last year, Helena Faustin nearly doubled her annual income — all thanks to a side hustle.
In her day job, the 35-year-old is a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) nurse living in Freeport, New York, making $105,000 per year in salary. In her off hours, she's spent the past four years running That Nurse Can Cook, a food blog where she details recipes and posts cooking videos.
Initially, it cost Faustin about $700 in groceries, ring lights and other production materials to launch That Nurse Can Cook. Last year, the side hustle brought in $117,000 from YouTube revenue, brand partnerships and e-cookbook sales, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Faustin, who plans, films, edits and promotes all of her content herself, brought in more than $25,000 from That Nurse Can Cook in June 2021 alone.
Helena Faustin runs her popular food blog That Nurse Can Cook out of her home's kitchen in Freeport, New York.CNBC Make It
But the monetary value is far from the>Inherited intuition
Initially, Faustin inherited a love for cooking from her mother, a Jamaican immigrant who taught Faustin how to make meals like ackee and saltfish in their family kitchen in Brooklyn, New York.
When Faustin was nine, her mother sent her to neighborhood markets where she learned to distinguish and bring home different ingredients. At age 15, Faustin says, she started more closely observing her mother in kitchen, then asking to join in.
"[My mom] didn't always have the patience to teach," Faustin says. "[Jamaicans] cook off of instinct, so I would say, 'How much garlic powder should I put in?' And she would literally look at me and say, 'Use your judgement.'"
Faustin never imagined her family recipes would become lucrative. Instead of pursuing her culinary passions, she went to school, got good grades and became a NICU nurse.
"Anyone out there who is a first-generation American and are born to parents who are immigrants, we were always raised to crave stability," Faustin says. "They always taught us to go to college and get a degree. So for me, I couldn't envision a career in cooking."
Depsite the success of her side hustle, Faustin still works as a NICU nurse in New York and says nursing is part of her identity.CNBC Make It
Learning the business
Nursing did bring stability: Over the years, Faustin's annual salary has risen as high as $126,000. The food blog idea came from her personal life. In 2018, she started posting photos of her Jamaican-style dishes>Maintaining momentum
Faustin says her side hustle helped her be more present in family life while improving her mental health. But running a business while maintaining a full-time job comes at a price: her free time.
"When I first started this side hustle, I legit was so passionate about seeing my dreams come true that I did not stop," she says. "I literally worked every single day that I was not working at the hospital."
When she's not on her feet at work or at home, she's emailing, researching and grocery shopping – which, at roughly $600 per month, is one of her business's only expenses. There are days where her content doesn't perform as well through social media algorithms as she hopes. She says she wants to hire an employee to delegate tasks that take her away from content creation.
Faustin says it took trial and error to figure out how to connect with her audience. As That Nurse Can Cook gained attention, she invested in new equipment to enhance the quality of her content.CNBC Make It
Faustin also still has long workdays as a nurse, but the success of That Nurse Can Cook has allowed her to cut back on hospital shifts. She currently works eight 12-hour shifts per month, down from a previous high of 13 such shifts.
She doesn't envision quitting nursing anytime soon, she says. But one day, she hopes, That Nurse Can Cook will offer her the stability to choose between the two roles.
"You do not have to either sit behind a computer or work a traditional nine-to-five in order to have the life that you want," Faustin says. "If you have a talent, harness that talent, learn as much as you can from it and monetize that thing."
