Rachel Rodgers is the CEO of Hello Seven, a personal finance and investing community geared toward helping women become millionaires. In her latest Audible Original, Six-Figure Side Hustle, she helps listeners explore avenues to expand their wealth outside of their day jobs, with an emphasis on reinvesting side-hustle earnings to help build passive income over time. Throughout the audiobook Rodgers showcases the transformative power of her approach by featuring interviews with a range of individuals such as single mothers and minimum-wage earners who are often excluded from other personal finance advice. Here, Rodgers shares how she hopes her strategies will impact women, and provides a sneak peek into a few surprising moments from her impactful new listen.

Rachael Xerri: Rachel, you recently published We Should All Be Millionaires and the Audible Original Plan Your Year like a Millionaire, and I hear you have another one in the works as well! How does Six-Figure Side Hustle build on your other works?

Rachel Rodgers: I wrote Six-Figure Side Hustle to teach people how to start a side business that puts $100k in your pocket this year—and every year. Here’s the reality of the world we live in today:

  • 90 percent of the world’s millionaires are men. Only 10 percent are women. A minuscule fraction of that are women of color.

  • Women are three times more likely than men to live in poverty during retirement.

  • On average, the net worth of a typical white family ($170,000) is 10 times greater than that of a Black family ($17,000).

In my first book, We Should All Be Millionaires, I educate my readers on these frustrating statistics. I tell them, “We have to close the wealth gap—and change starts with you.”

Over 200,000 people read We Should All Be Millionaires and got fired up by this message. I got hundreds of DMs from people saying, “I want to change my financial situation. I want to build generational wealth for my family. Where do I start? What’s the first move?”

The first move is to start a side hustle. Bring extra cash in the door and use this additional income to buy assets, invest, and build wealth over time. Becoming an entrepreneur is step one. That’s how you begin your climb to the summit of Millionaire Mountain.

Was there a moment or message in your audiobook that surprised you—or that you think will surprise listeners?

There’s undeniable power in stories. Especially stories about people who beat the odds and built wealth in spite of all the obstacles stacked against them. Those are the kinds of stories you’ll find in Six-Figure Side Hustle.

I tell a story about a woman who used to be a bus driver making minimum wage. She wanted to start her own business, but her husband did not support her vision and told her it would never work. She divorced him, got the business going, and recently purchased her first piece of real estate.

There’s another story about a mom who started a side hustle to earn extra money for her son’s autism treatment. Now it’s her full-time business and she recently hit $800,000 in sales. She’s been able to quit her job, work from home, and her son is receiving the care he needs.

All of these stories illustrate the power of having a side hustle. Once you’re making more money, you have more options in life.

[The audiobook] will inspire you to ask yourself, “If they can do it, why not me?” And, to take that question one step further, “Why not all of us?”

Listeners will be surprised (and delighted) by how diverse the stories are. This isn’t a book packed with stories about white cisgender straight men who graduated from Stanford and started a tech company. You’ll find stories about BIPOC entrepreneurs, queer folks, working parents, people living with disabilities—people starting all kinds of creative, interesting side hustles and making serious money doing it.

Six-Figure Side Hustle will inspire you to ask yourself, “If they can do it, why not me?” And, to take that question one step further, “Why not all of us?”

Starting a side hustle can be intimidating! What’s one simple step that listeners can take today to start?

The simplest step of all is to buy the audiobook and start listening!

Then, start thinking about your top strengths. What is your zone of genius? Are you a natural connector and your superpower is bringing people together? Are you incredible at turning messy spaces into tidy, organized sanctuaries?

You may not realize it (yet) but you have valuable skills that people need—skills that will make you a big pile of money.

What are you working on next?

Where do I start! My team at Hello Seven (my real-life six-figure side hustle-turned-full-time business) is hosting ROI: The Millionaire Summit (roi.helloseven.co). ROI is an out-of-this-world conference with diverse speakers and attendees from around the world. Our mission is to teach people how to build a successful business and generational wealth. Our tagline is, “Millionaires don’t dream. They plan.” Check it out!

And I just launched a podcast with my friend Nathan Barry at ConvertKit called Billion Dollar Creator. Content creators know how to get people’s attention, but they’re not always making as much money as they could. On this show, we explain how to turn attention into wealth. And we interview wildly successful entrepreneurs who’ve built billion dollar brands and find out exactly how they did it.