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 [email protected].
At age 10, Jenny Woo got really good at reading nonverbal social cues.
It was out of necessity: She emigrated from China to Houston, and didn’t speak English. She connected with her peers largely through what she now defines as emotional intelligence, or EQ — watching their body language and listening to the tones of their voices to learn what excited, inspired and angered them.
In the decades that followed, Woo turned her EQ skills into a career at corporations like Deloitte and Cisco, training managers how to better communicate. She spent some time helping run her kids’ Montessori school in Southern California.
While working on her master’s degree at Harvard University in 2018, she spent $1,000 from her savings to launch Mind Brain Emotion, which sells EQ-focused card games on Amazon. Last year, the side hustle brought in $1.71 million on Amazon, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Woo estimates 40% of that revenue is profit.
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Between the side hustle and her three other current revenue streams — lecturing at the University of California Irvine, running an online EQ course and freelance business consulting — she works anywhere from three to 30 hours per week, she says. Her workload depends on the season, and her multiple income streams allow her to go completely offline when her three children are home.
“The mission has always been to make knowledge, skills, competence, mindsets and attitudes accessible … for really everybody to enjoy,” says Woo, 42. “But being able to support my kids … is also a true metric of success to me.”
Here, Woo discusses how she set up her side hustle, why she chooses to run it alone and her…
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