Discussing the Gig Economy: An Interview with Brett Helling

I’m Shane Barker with the Marketing Growth Podcast today, and we have Brett Helling here with Gig Worker. I’m really excited to have him talk about starting, building, and growing websites. He’ll also share what made him enter the gig economy industry and how the gig market is going to evolve during the coming years. Before we hear from Brett, let me tell you that my team and I can help you grow your website traffic, generate more leads for your business, and drive conversions with SEO, content marketing, and CRO services. If you need help with anything related to sales and marketing, connect with me through shanebarker.com—that’s S, H, A, N, E, B, A, R, K, E, R.com. Brett, thank you so much for being on the podcast, my friend.

Yeah, it was—you know, we were really interested in talking about this space because we kind of see the potential and where things are going with it, and the fact that you’re a thought leader in the space, and you wrote your book—which I’ll go into a little later—I felt very honored that you’d be able to be on the podcast. So here we are today, and I’m excited. The way that we usually start the podcast is, for us, we always like to get to know the guest a little bit. So I like to ask some questions about your background and where you grew up to set the foundation a little bit. So I think we’ll just start there. Where did you grow up, man?

Gotcha. So, are you older than your twin brother? How much older? Four minutes. Four minutes is big. So you can now say you’re the big brother, huh? That’s it. Could have been the other way around, so thank goodness you were on top there—that’s funny. So did you— and I don’t know if your brother’s gonna listen to this podcast—if you can even tell me the answer to this—but when you sold him the house, did you make some money off of him?

Oh, come on! Gotta make some cash, bro. Jeez Louise!

No, I think that’s awesome. No, it’s family, man. It keeps them close to the neighborhood. At the end of the day, you’re the older brother, so you got to take care of the younger brother. But just think about it—if you were four minutes and one second later, he might have bought that house and given it to you. I don’t know—it’s not like we can change history at this point. It is what it is. But that’s interesting. So, any other interesting facts growing up, other than you guys having twins, everything between the brothers and the dogs and everything?

Yeah, that’s awesome. I’ll tell you, I’ve always been jealous of people with very large families and family reunions and stuff. My family is close—my mom literally lives a mile and a half from me; I see her probably three times a week. I see my dad at least once a month, always talking on the phone. I’m very much a family person too, so I totally get that. I might one day leave Sacramento just to get out and see other places and live there for maybe six months at a time, but I’ll always come back to Sacramento. It’s just my hub with friends and family. I don’t mind leaving for a little bit, but there’s always something that pulls me back, so I get that 100%. And you currently live in Omaha, right now? Correct?

Yeah, I and do you guys have him? And this is, you know, I’m sure you guys are loving this. A lot of people from California, a lot of people move to Omaha, Nebraska. Have you heard anything about that?

I know that. I mean, a lot of people in California are parting ways with California for whatever reason. I love California. I think there’s some, like any state, some good things and bad things. But I did hear a lot of people—Austin, Colorado, I have some friends that moved to Nebraska, and I’ve got some friends in Nashville as well. So there have been a few cities that have jumped on my radar, and that gives me an excuse to go visit people and then realize, “Hey, is that a city I want to live in for six months?” I’m kind of looking forward to that. I’m glad that everybody spread out and now I can go visit them. That gives me an excuse to go out there. So that’s awesome. Exactly. Where did you go? Did you go to college also in Nebraska?

Yeah, that’s awesome. But I think what’s interesting about that is I always ask about majors because sometimes people have a major that has nothing to do with what they do today. I was always intrigued about what that journey is. Your journey is not too surprising, in a sense—because you did marketing, jumped into this space, and jumped into entrepreneurship. Exactly what you were doing in college is what you’re doing today. I think that’s awesome. It’s not that the journey was necessarily direct, because I’m sure you had some ups and downs of working for somebody and doing some stuff, but your major is exactly one of the things very close to what you’re doing today. So I love that. And then, what was your first job out of college?

Awesome, awesome. So it sounds like you got a family business—your dad’s an entrepreneur. It sounds like you’re kind of falling in line with that, saying, “Hey, looks like dad was doing some big things, got into IT events.” Not a bad thing to get into. Now, I know COVID probably slowed that down a little bit, but things are probably heating back up here pretty soon, I imagine?

Yeah, that’s awesome. I know, right now it’s like the minute things are opening up—I just have seen concerts selling out within minutes, and there’s gonna be a lot more live events, so I’m excited about that. I’m sure your dad’s back in the saddle and making things happen. That’s good news there.

So what I want to talk about is the gig economy, right? I think that’s really important. It sounds like you’ve had a lot of side hustles and gigs in the things you’ve done, and that’s probably the reason why you wrote the book and started the websites you have. So tell us about your professional journey—from being a rideshare driver to a gig economy expert. What was the transition like? Give us—I want to hear that story.

That’s awesome. And so that was in give us what was so, what was right about, I mean, I mean, you’re still still around, right? You still got it still live site.

That’s awesome. And then I’m curious of like, how do you how you’re monetizing it?

Yeah, that’s good. I used to get—I didn’t have to pay for Uber for years because of that. I did tons of that back in the day with just referrals, and it was like I didn’t have to pay for anything. It was awesome. I did a lot of those. The referral, the affiliate type stuff is an awesome business model if you can drive the traffic right out—that’s obviously the key there.

You’re the number one guy in the nation. They’re like, “Just give him a car or something” at that point. I mean, Jesus, just have somebody personally drive Brett around. Why are we even messing around any longer? That’s awesome. So I want to talk a little bit about the gig economy, right? When did you come up with the idea of doing gigworker.com?

I love that. So you’re down there in the water, you don’t have that much oxygen in your tank. You look up, and you have this crazy idea: “Hey, I’m doing this for ridesharing—why don’t I do this for gig workers?” And then all of a sudden, it all comes to fruition. Who knew you want to just give yourself less oxygen, folks, and go into water as deep as you can? That’s when ideas can happen. This is where it happened for Brett, so that’s awesome, man. I love that because really what you’re focusing on is the worker side of it, right? Instead of the consumer side, you’re looking at the people who are going to be in that position—either as gig workers or in the rideshare situation—and what information they’re going to be looking up to understand how to do things and do them better. And so you offer that type of content, all done through keywords, content, and search intent that people are looking for online.

I love it, man. There’s so many things I want to talk about with the driving of traffic and everything going on. But I definitely want to talk to you about the gig economy, because I think that’s something people might not fully understand. You being an expert in it, I want to talk to you more about that. With the gig economy, how do you think it’s going to change over the next few years? I mean, there’s obviously a lot of things changing. How do you think the gig economy is going to be affected?

Yeah, I’m with you. I think COVID—while a lot of bad stuff happened, some really interesting things happened as well. Obviously, nobody wants to see casualties, but it did accelerate the necessity to pivot—if you have an online business, or if you don’t, you have to get online. I’ve been doing tons of work for the SBA. I jumped in with them because I knew tons of businesses were going to be affected. They were going to have to transition online, and they had no idea how to do that. We’re talking about small businesses, which are the lifeline of the United States, so I felt that was my responsibility.

The reason I’m telling you that is, I think that’s the fact that everyone’s online now, and you seem to have a knack for looking at things from a different angle. You’re focusing on the people who are going to be working in that space and taking advantage of it by building a website around that. It’s a reverse situation compared to how other people create websites around marketing or something similar, but it’s just interesting how you did it. I think it’s your mindset, and you probably have less competition there as well. You become that neutral third party that talks about the upsides, how to do it, and how to educate yourself on the gig economy and your own side hustle.

I love the fact that you put that together. You seem to be ahead of your time—you saw the opportunity, built the site, and then, not that you thought COVID was going to happen, but you couldn’t have been in a better place for people to start looking up this kind of stuff, like, “Hey, I want to start my own business, or I want to start a side hustle.” And you seem to be the king of side hustles, so you’ve got a lot of good stuff going on. I appreciate that about you, man.

Yeah, I’m with you. When it comes to outsourcing and team, my team’s all remote and has been international since the beginning for this business, for my marketing side of things. And I love it. It couldn’t be better when it comes to hiring people, because you can find people in their specialty—who cares where they’re at. With software and everything, you can keep everybody on the same page. It’s just very easy to do. When COVID hit for us, it was nothing—we didn’t have to get out of our offices. I had an office here in Sacramento, but there was nothing we had to leave, and we based our thing off that gig worker model. All my people are full time now, but they start off as projects, and if things go well, we bring them on full time.

So thanks, listeners. I hope you’ve learned how effective outsourcing work has become and how leveraging the gig economy can be a cost-effective solution for your business, especially in the post-pandemic world. On my next episode, Brett will join us again to talk about growing organic traffic using domain acquisitions. So stay tuned.