Side Hustle Feature: Ginny Gaunt, Poppins C&PM

After celebrating a year of sobriety, Ginny Gaunt began drinking again last April.

Her husband had just suffered a severe, life-altering accident. While at his job as a groundworker, where he dug out construction sites to prepare for new foundations and pipes, a manhole suddenly collapsed. He fell unconscious into a deep well full of water for almost an hour before help arrived.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United Kingdom, and Gaunt found herself simultaneously juggling the lockdowns, raising her young children, and making 80-mile round trips to the hospital to visit her husband, who was ill for months after his workplace accident.

“I didn’t really have any help with the kids and stuff like that, and couldn’t take the kids to the hospital…it was all just a frickin’ nightmare,” she reflected. “All of a sudden, I was the sole breadwinner and I was juggling with the lockdowns and that kind of thing, and keeping up with all of the requirements and regulations of working during COVID.”

The family had no consistent financial help from the government for her husband’s accident because the salary he’d earned as a groundworker was higher than the maximum cap to qualify for income assistance in England. Fortunately, with the COVID-19 support packages, Gaunt and her husband were able to put their mortgage on hold for a couple of months, providing some much-need relief as Gaunt desperately tried to find a way to bring in some income for her family.

After having her second child several years ago, Gaunt began a venture as a lifestyle assistant offering services such as cleaning, child and pet care, errand running, dinner party help, cooking, and any other miscellaneous tasks that she thought people might outsource.

Prior to his illness, her husband had earned a very comfortable wage, so that Gaunt never had to worry much about her earnings. She’d started a few business endeavors in her past, including working with horses and a failed attempt at drop shipping. Two weeks before the beginning of the pandemic, Gaunt had just signed the lease for a coin-operated launderette located in a shopping center in an effort to expand her sources of income. She was renting from a big, reputable supermarket chain, so she had no worries about the quality assurance until she realized that she hadn’t seen the building’s gas safety records. The landlords were unable to provide them upon request.

“So, I got a company out to check the place over and they shut it down like, with immediate effect, because it was super dangerous,” Gaunt said. “They were like, I can’t believe that these gas tumble dryers haven’t blown up this entire supermarket.” The landlords refused to pay the 12,000 British pounds required to bring the launderette back under compliance.

“Basically, I ended up in a situation where I had this business that had been closed for pretty much the entire time that I’d had it and was going to have to close down permanently, because there was no way I was finding 12,000 pounds from up my ass, ‘scuse my French,” Gaunt said. The landlords refused to wipe her rent, even after the launderette shut down, and Gaunt is still paying off the rent on her lease that would have been due.

“That was all going on in the background, hence me hitting the bottle,” Gaunt laughed. “Obviously, it wasn’t going to do any good at all to sit and panic, so I thought, well…maybe this COVID thing could be giving us a good opportunity in the cleaning industry.”

After having her second child several years ago, Gaunt began a venture as a lifestyle assistant offering services such as cleaning, child and pet care, errand running, dinner party help, cooking, and any other miscellaneous tasks that she thought people might outsource. “Nobody was interested in any of those amazing things that I could do like everybody just wanted a cleaner,” she laughed. “So that’s how my cleaning business was born.” The business officially opened in 2017, but Gaunt began hiring staff to run the business, eventually becoming very hands-off and less involved in the day-to-day details. Sensing an opportunity with the coronavirus pandemic, Gaunt decided to step back into heading her cleaning business and expand operations to deal with any cleaning needs the pandemic provided.

“So, not to be defeated, I took some specialist COVID cleaning training, hospital-grade cleaning, and that kind of thing,” she said. She spent a hefty amount of money on training, equipment, chemicals and PPE, becoming qualified to offer “fogging”, a specific cleaning method.

“I thought, this is great, this is going to turn a negative into a positive, we’re going to get loads of cleans for places that have had COVID, and…it was just crickets like I couldn’t get any work,” she said. “So, I started to despair somewhat. I had been sober for a year at that point and fell off the wagon spectacularly, and so it was all just difficult and stressful.”

Despite the meager work coming in, Gaunt was reluctant to lay off any of her employees. “I would say integrity is my middle name, and I like to be really really fair. Probably what I should’ve done is just laid off the girls working for me, but I didn’t want to do that, so the work that we did have coming in, I made sure was shared equally around them and I sat there taking nothing. I wanted to make sure that they could put food on their tables, but also that I was treating them fairly and that they’d want to come back when things were better.”

In Nov. 2020, Gaunt saw a comment about affiliate marketing in a side hustle group on Facebook that piqued her interest. She was apprehensive at first, believing it to be the same as an MLM, but learned that it was a new advertising model where affiliates earn money by promoting products from other companies. She committed to an expensive introductory course, before realizing that the course focused on Facebook ads, which require a very hefty upfront investment.

“I wasn’t drunk when I spoke to the [sales rep], but I wonder how much all of the drinkings was clouding my judgment because the call was just painfully bad, but instead…I was ending up paying him $2,800 for this course,” Gaunt said. “So, more despair. I was still drinking, at this point, I was drinking really heavily again. My husband was home, but out of work.” Gaunt’s cleaning business ran into more trouble when some builders who’d hired her to clean up a new development refused to pay afterward for her services. She’d been relying on those payments to provide a massive lifeline for her business.

Once her digital coaching business is successfully running, Gaunt plans to gift him her cleaning business so that he can finally leave the day job he’s felt trapped in.

At this point, Gaunt was drinking every day. On the weekends, she’d start by midday, only stopping when it was time for bed. By Christmas, Gaunt finally determined that she’d had enough. “I decided that I would get myself together, stop drinking, clear my head and make a plan.”

In January of this year, Gaunt quit drinking cold turkey, giving herself a much-needed few weeks to flush the toxins out of her system and gain clarity. Even though her first attempt at affiliate marketing had not succeeded, something about the concept had resonated with her, and she reached out to a mentor who had attended the affiliate marketing program with her. He began giving her private coaching, leading to her specialization in high ticket affiliate marketing, a niche of marketing goods and services which cost thousands of dollars. The commission earned on each sale starts at 30 percent and can go all the way to 75 percent. Gaunt’s success with high ticket affiliate marketing has finally given her the side income she needs to begin paying off her debts. Even more importantly, it’s given her a powerful and much-welcomed change in mindset.

“Basically, I’d taken my foot off the gas and my eye off the ball with my cleaning business…the business was in trouble, and that was in March,” said Gaunt. That month, her business only pulled in 1,000 pounds in profits. “But I applied all the stuff that I learned for affiliate marketing back to my cleaning business, and I’ve just had a 10k month.” In a mere four months, Gaunt has increased the profits made by her cleaning business tenfold.

Now, Gaunt has compiled all the knowledge about her side hustle journey—all of her successes, failures, and the lessons she’s learned along the way—and has packaged it into a digital training program for people who are interested in starting their own cleaning business. Although she hopes that she can eventually market this into another source of income, for now, Gaunt has been offering her lessons for free, even organizing free zoom calls to teach anybody interested in working for themselves.

Above all, Gaunt’s overarching philosophy is simple. “I’m a huge believer in make more, give more.” Her biggest goal for this year is to keep the promise she made to her brother to help him find financial freedom for his own family. Once her digital coaching business is successfully running, Gaunt plans to gift him her cleaning business so that he can finally leave the day job he’s felt trapped in.

“I love giving back. It’s what life’s all about, as far as I’m concerned,” she concluded.

Check out Poppins Cleaning & Property Management here.