Scars, Side Hustles, and Second Chances

Lessons from restarting my engineering consultancy and never relying on one income stream again

The thing with failure is that it hurts—bad. I tend to obsess over a failure for years until it becomes woven into my being. That might not be great for my mental health, but it does prevent me from making the same mistake twice.

That’s the trick, really: learning from your failures. If you learn something from them, you get to call your scars “experience.” If you don’t, then you’re just a dumbass. Have I been a dumbass? Sure. But for the most part, I’ve got a lot of experience.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes over the years—personal, professional, and financial. So much so that now, at my age, I’ve become rather annoying to my children. Maybe that’s the irony of experience: younger people don’t usually listen to it until they make the same mistake themselves.

Take my engineering consultancy, for example. Decades ago, I started a small side hustle to earn extra money for my growing family. It was a success. I pulled in an extra $10,000 a year. Eventually, it got so busy that I had to turn away work—or else I’d be working two full-time jobs and never seeing my family.

In hindsight, the mistake was turning away the work. If I had fully committed to an entrepreneurial mindset back then, I might’ve built something big.

But then again, if I had gone all-in, I might never have stepped into the AI startup world or learned how to build software and applications. I might never have developed the marketing and sales skills I now rely on—skills every business owner needs.

So why write about this now? Because I’ve restarted that engineering consultancy. It’s sputtering back to life, but I’m facing some real headwinds.

One of the biggest challenges is the threat of tariffs from the current administration. Rising material costs will slow construction and possibly cancel some residential projects. Commercial work will likely slow as well—once a building is started, it’s hard not to finish it, but new work? That’ll be pushed off at least a year.

Public sector work will continue as long as the funding holds out. But if we hit an economic downturn and tax revenues shrink, those projects will be the first to get cut. And that’s when the layoffs start hitting big engineering firms.

Is there any recession-proof engineering work? That’s a question I asked an old colleague—someone who’s run a one-man consultancy for nearly two decades. He’s weathered many economic cycles. His advice? Focus on wastewater. Specifically, septic systems.

In my region, residential septic system design is considered “bread and butter” work. You won’t get rich doing it, but it’ll keep you fed—if you’re smart about it. The average cost of a simple gravity septic system ranges from $22,000 to $35,000, depending on the site.

Engineers typically charge about $2,200 for the design, around 10% of the low-end system cost. At $100/hour, that’s roughly 22 hours of work, including site visits, soil tests, design, inspections, and preparing the final plans.

If you “cookie-cutter” your design templates, then it’s just a matter of filling in the blanks—site data, names, dates, specs. Add in time for inspections, the as-built plan, and the soil test, and you’ve got steady, repeatable work.

But here’s the catch: homeowners don’t usually call engineers directly for septic systems. They call septic contractors, who then hire the engineer. That means if you want to make it in this niche, you need strong relationships with several contractors.

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My mindset shifted last November. I made myself a promise: I will never again be without a second income stream.