The accidental business a retired teacher built.
Margaret almost didn't tell me her story.
"It's not that dramatic," she said, when I first reached out. "I didn't overcome anything massive. I just sort of... figured something out."
That's exactly why I wanted to share it.
Most of the stories we hear about reinvention involve a crisis — a layoff, a health scare, a marriage ending. Margaret's didn't. She just reached the end of a long career, looked at what retirement actually looked like on her income, and decided quietly that she wasn't done yet.
What she built from that decision is more instructive than most dramatic turnarounds I've come across.
THIS WEEK AT A GLANCE
★ The Feature — How Margaret turned 30 years of classroom experience into a $2,100/month online income without a website, a following, or a business plan
⚡ Quick Win — Identify the teachable version of what you know
💡 Opportunity Spotlight — Curriculum and instructional design consulting — a growing market most people have never heard of
❝ Reader Story — What Margaret says to people who tell her they're not sure they have anything worth teaching
★ THE FEATURE
How Margaret turned 30 years of teaching into $2,100 a month
Margaret spent 31 years in education.
Twenty-two of those years in the classroom — middle school English, mostly, in a mid-sized district in Indiana. The last nine as a curriculum coordinator, helping teachers across the district improve how they structured lessons, assessed students, and kept struggling kids from falling through the cracks.
She retired at 61. Willingly, on good terms, with a small pension from the state and a Social Security estimate that she describes as "not terrible, but not enough."
The gap between what she had coming in and what she wanted to spend in retirement was about $1,400 a month.
"I didn't need to get rich," she told me. "I just needed to close that gap. And I wanted to keep doing something that felt like it mattered."
For the first few months of retirement, she did what she'd always done — she read, she thought, and she paid attention to what was happening around her.
What she noticed was this: the teachers she'd spent nine years supporting were still struggling with the same things they'd always struggled with. Lesson planning that actually worked. Differentiated instruction for mixed-ability classrooms. Assessment that told you something useful instead of just generating grades. The pandemic had made it worse, not better. And the support systems inside most districts, she knew firsthand, weren't keeping up.
She also noticed something else. A small but growing number of education consultants — people advising districts, charter school networks, and private schools on curriculum and instruction — were doing what she'd been doing internally for nearly a decade. Except they were doing it as independent contractors, working with multiple clients, and earning considerably more per hour than she ever had as an employee.
She didn't start with a business plan. She started with one email.
She wrote to three former colleagues — people who'd moved into leadership roles at other districts — and told them she was exploring whether there was appetite for the kind of curriculum support she'd provided internally, offered externally on a consulting basis.
Two of the three wrote back the same day.
One had a project. A district-wide literacy initiative that needed someone to help design the instructional framework. Six weeks of work, a defined scope, a clear outcome. Margaret quoted $3,200 for the engagement — nervously, she admits — and the contact agreed without negotiation.
"I'd been about to say $2,000," she told me. "I pushed myself at the last second. I'm glad I did."
That first project led to a second. Then a referral to a small charter school network in a neighbouring state. Then an approach from an educational publishing company looking for someone to review and improve their teacher-facing materials.
Fourteen months after retiring, Margaret was earning $2,100 a month in consulting income, working roughly twelve hours a week, mostly from her kitchen.
Her total setup cost was zero. No website. No ads. No coach or course on how to start a consulting business.
Just 31 years of knowledge, three emails, and the willingness to quote a number and see what happened.
When I asked what surprised her most about the whole experience, she thought about it for a moment.
"How much people needed what I knew," she said. "I'd been inside a district for so long I assumed everyone in education knew the things I knew. They don't. It's obvious to me because I've spent decades getting it to be obvious. That's the thing I kept forgetting."
She doesn't forget it anymore.
⚡ QUICK WIN
Find the teachable version of what you know
Margaret's insight — that what's obvious to her took decades to become obvious — applies to almost every experienced professional. Here's how to find your version of it.
- Write down three things you do at work that newer colleagues consistently get wrong or ask you to explain.
- For each one, ask: is there a process, framework, or way of thinking I use that they don't have yet?
- Now ask: is there an organisation, business, or individual outside my current employer who would benefit from understanding this?
- Write one sentence that describes what you'd help them understand and what they'd be able to do differently as a result.
- That sentence is the seed of a teachable offer. It doesn't need to be a course. It could be a consulting engagement, a workshop, an advisory arrangement, or a simple document you get paid to create.
The knowledge was always there. You're just starting to see it through someone else's eyes.
💡 OPPORTUNITY SPOTLIGHT
Curriculum and instructional design consulting — the quiet market most people don't know exists
Most people outside education have never heard of instructional design as a commercial field.
Inside it, the demand is substantial and growing.
Companies — not just schools — need people who know how to structure learning. Corporate training departments, e-learning companies, professional associations, healthcare organisations, and technology firms all need people who can take complex knowledge and turn it into something teachable, organised, and effective.
Former teachers, trainers, curriculum developers, and learning and development professionals are extraordinarily well positioned for this market. The skills transfer almost directly. The clients are often willing to pay rates that would surprise someone coming from a public sector background.
Typical consulting rates in this space range from $75 to $175 an hour for independent practitioners, depending on the complexity of the work and the size of the client organisation. Project-based engagements — designing a training programme, building a course framework, reviewing existing curriculum — commonly run from $2,000 to $8,000 per project.
Two or three projects a year, alongside a small retainer client, can easily generate $1,500 to $2,500 a month without anything resembling a full-time commitment.
The entry point, as Margaret found, is often closer than people think. Former colleagues now in leadership roles. Professional associations in your field. A direct approach to companies in industries where you understand the learning challenges.
The market is real. The competition is thinner than you'd expect. And the people with genuine classroom or training experience are exactly what most clients are looking for.
❝ READER STORY
I asked Margaret what she says to people — and she meets them often now, through a loose network of retired educators she stays connected with — who tell her they're not sure they have anything worth teaching or consulting on.
She doesn't hesitate.
"I ask them one question. I say: in your whole career, what's the thing you saw people get wrong over and over again that you knew how to fix?"
She smiled when she told me this.
"Nobody has ever said 'nothing.' Not once. Everyone has an answer. Usually they have three."
That's the point at which most people in those conversations start to look a little differently at what they've been sitting on.
"The knowledge is always there," Margaret said. "The only thing missing, for most people, is the decision to treat it like it's worth something."
She made that decision fourteen months ago with three emails and a quoted price she almost talked herself out of.
The gap she needed to close is closed. Then some.
CLOSING SIGN-OFF
Margaret's story stays with me because of its quietness. No crisis. No dramatic pivot. Just a clear-eyed look at the gap, a few emails to the right people, and the willingness to put a number on what she knew.
Most of what stops people isn't the market. It's the moment just before sending the first email.
Next issue, we're looking at AI again — specifically what the data actually shows about experienced professionals and AI, and why the "AI will replace older workers" story is considerably more complicated than the headlines suggest.
Until then,
Richard
P.S. If you're a former teacher, trainer, or learning and development professional reading this — Margaret's market is your market too. Hit reply if you want to talk through what that might look like for your specific background. I'm happy to think it through with you.
