We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Quinn Edwards a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Quinn, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
I think being successful takes a lot of determination. You are always going to come up against people who don’t believe in you or people who think that you should be doing something else with your life. This can be friends, family, or random strangers you meet at a networking event. A lot of those negative comments come from a place of fear. Fear of the unknown and doing something outside of the norm. There is this cultural myth that if you leave a “good job” and pursue a passion, that you will not be successful. There can be some truth in that if you aren’t willing to make sacrifices but, at the end of the day, if you believe in yourself and what you are doing, you will be successful. I wear a watch that has a metal plate on it with the Maya Angelou quote, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” This is my daily reminder that even though times can be tough, you just have to push through and keep on going. Giving up is not an option.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My business is called Quinn Edwards Design and I am a course creator. I took a very long, circuitous route to get to where I am today.
When I was an undergrad, I studied marine science and anthropology. I was awarded two National Science Foundation grants to conduct research in California and Oregon. The project in Oregon was part of a larger project being conducted by NOAA. I thought I was going to pursue a life studying the world’s oceans but life had other plans. I graduated in 2008 during the height of the economic downturn and it was really difficult finding a job in a lab without an advanced degree. I didn’t want to pursue a PhD at the time so I took a job in a chemical lab testing explosives. Needless to say, that was a high stress job and I knew I didn’t want to stay in that industry. My mother was a high school teacher and she suggested that I start substitute teaching to see if I liked it. It was a totally different world from the lab and it was a nice pivot. I eventually went back to school and got my master’s degree in teaching. I moved to Massachusetts and started my career teaching middle school math and science. After several years in the classroom, I was starting to feel really burned out. I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher for the next 20 years with the level of burnout I was experiencing. Then Covid hit. I moved back to New Jersey to be closer to my family and to teach 6th grade science. In the back of my mind I was working on a plan to get out of the classroom.
One day, I came across Hannah Dixon’s “5 Day VA Challenge” program and was immediately interested. I signed up for the challenge and purchased the course shortly after. It took me a few months to go through the course material but I knew I had found something that was truly special. I started my VA business, Smiling Squirrel Virtual Solutions, a few months later. I then started to take on clients as a side hustle while I was still teaching. That business grew and I was eventually able to leave the classroom.
A few months later, after talking to a friend who is also a freelancer, I decided that I wanted to get back to my teaching roots and offer course creation services to online coaches. That was when Quinn Edwards Design was born. I now offer full-service course creation services which includes everything from creating the course outline, to designing and building slide decks, to developing workbooks and pdfs. When I work with clients, I don’t try to write everything for them. They are the experts, I am merely the conduit through which their course is being created. I take their energy and ideas and create a course that reflects them.
There are a lot of larger course creation agencies out there but what sets me apart is my unique perspective. I put myself in the learner’s shoes and I think about what would be the most engaging way to present this information that will actually get me to finish the course. I also think about how to present the material in a way that someone who knows nothing about the topic will understand. Which is something I had to do everyday as a teacher. If I can take concepts like atoms, molecules, and the periodic table and teach it to 12 year olds, then I can work with coaches to take their expertise and break it down in a way that is understandable for adults. Yes, there is a difference between teaching kids and teaching adults, but it is not a far leap and those skills are completely transferable. You are simply approaching it from a different perspective with a different audience in mind. This is essentially instructional design work but not in a corporate setting.
When working with clients, I always ask what the end goal is for someone who is taking their course. What is the transformation they want the person to have at the end of the course. I always keep the purpose and end goal in mind. At the end of the day, they are selling the course to make money but it also has to be something that will actually help someone make a transformation or learn a new skill.
There are a lot of statistics out there about online course completion rates and most of them are pretty bleak. I’m sure we have all purchased online courses in the past and didn’t finish them. I know I am guilty of that. What I found was that the content was either not sequenced in a way that was easy to follow or the materials were just dull and not presented in an engaging fashion. Or that the workbooks were pretty useless and didn’t have anything to do with helping to achieve a goal or outcome. They just looked pretty. The best courses are the ones that get straight to the point and cut out all the fluff. Longer doesn’t always mean it is better.
Since my business is just me, I really get to know the client and their content and the course ends up being an extension of themselves, not some generic, cookie cutter course that has been sterilized and all the personality taken out of it. I talk to my clients frequently throughout the process to make sure as much as their personality is infused in the course as possible. If you are a coach selling a course, people are buying the course for you based on how they are already interacting with your content. I tell people all the time that there is probably already a course out there about what you want to create a course on. That’s just the nature of the online world we live in right now. But that shouldn’t be a deterrent. There could be hundreds of courses out there about one subject but people who buy your course buy it for you and your personality. Something about you resonates with them. And that’s what I bring out with the clients I work with. Don’t try to be someone else. Be you!
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
I was a full-time 6th grade science teacher when I started my first side hustle, working as a virtual assistant. My first client was someone who needed tech help during their Zoom meetings. Since I taught during the pandemic, I was a Zoom pro and we hit it off right away. Then, they gave me more responsibilities and I ended up working on their newsletter for the next year and a half. It was the first time in my career that I felt like the work I was doing was making me happy and boosting my mental health and not draining it. I love being creative and doing design work. They knew I was a teacher, and a researcher before that, so they asked me to create some corporate presentations for them. Those projects gave me the confidence to start offering course creation services and pivoting my entire business from virtual assistant work to course creation and graphic design. I will always be grateful that they trusted in me and my skill set to work on those projects with them.
Before I pivoted to course creation, I worked as a virtual assistant my last year in the classroom, working anywhere from 2-4 hours after school and sometimes on the weekend. It was difficult at times but I was focused on making the transition out of the classroom by the end of the school year so I knew that working 10+ hours a day was only temporary. When the school year ended, I decided it was time to go all-in on my virtual assistant business. I spent a total of twelve years teaching middle school science and math. Teaching was fun, but I was really burned out and I knew I was ready for a change. I continued doing virtual assistant work for several more months before I decided to pivot my business and offer course creation services.
The key milestone that really cemented my pivot to offering course creation services was a conversation I had with a friend who was also a virtual assistant at the time. We were both talking about how we wanted to be more creative in our freelancing work. We were discussing an idea that she had to create a course, she asked if I would be interested in working with her on it. She knew I was a teacher and curriculum writer so the work came naturally to me. Then, I had that light bulb moment– what if I could use my background knowledge from teaching and curriculum writing to create courses for coaches. It was a no-brainer. I know how to distill complex information down into understandable lessons and how to sequence content to build up understanding and boost learning. The leap from classroom teacher to instructional design and course creation wasn’t a big one for me since I had probably more experience than most with writing curriculum. I was lucky enough to work in districts where there was a lot of curriculum that needed to be rewritten to adhere to the new science standards and with a broad scientific background in marine science and chemistry, it wasn’t hard for me to step into those roles. Now, I help coaches take their ideas and turn them into courses. Some people were born to be painters or writers or nurses. I was born to teach and by creating courses, I get to do that as my job and it is so rewarding.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
For me, the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is taking a vague idea that someone has and making it a tangible object. I recently spoke to someone that had an idea for a course and she said that I was the first person she spoke to about it and I asked her questions that she wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. We were both so giddy and excited at the end of the call because we saw the beginnings of how that idea was slowly coming to life as a course. I worked with someone else who wanted a course that helps women start their freelancing journey. Now, these women are taking control of their income and stepping into their own as business owners. Some of their transformations have been truly remarkable. Again, that course started with a conversation about how she wanted to help women like herself become freelancers.
Being able to work with different coaches with different areas of expertise has really opened my eyes to how vast our collective knowledge base is as a society. Taking a conversation and turning it into a course outline is no small feat but I really enjoy getting into the weeds and fleshing out someone’s ideas and turning it into a concrete plan. It is similar to playing music. As a musician, you have all these musical notes, chords, and guitar riffs swirling around in your head but then you sit down and turn it into a song. It is the same with course creation. You take all these different, small ideas and piece them together into an expansive course.
A lot of people have ideas for courses but they don’t help anyone if they only live inside your head. When you take those ideas and turn them into engaging videos, slide decks, and workbooks, you create this concrete object that has the ability to change someone’s life. There’s something really magical about that and I’m glad I get to be a part of it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.quinnedwardsdesign.com/
- Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/quinn-z-edwards
Image Credits
All images were taken by me. The graphics were created by me.