More full-time academics have a business or side-hustle than I ever realized when I was in grad school. Dr. Toyin Alli helps faculty entrepreneurs make it work semester-round.
Dr. Toyin Alli returns to The Social Academic podcast to talk about showing up online for yourself and your business as an academic. As an entrepreneur herself, Toyin has balanced full time academic life with her business. Now, she helps academics like you create a semester-proof business that works for your full time academic life.
In this episode: finding community, video for YouTube, and running a business in 5 hours a week or less.
In this interview
Professorpreneurship with Dr. Toyin Alli
[Jennifer van Alstyne:] Yay, we are live. Hi everyone, I am Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome back to The Social Academic. I’m so excited that we have a returning guest today and that is Dr. Toyin Alli. Toyin, would you introduce yourself to people?
[Dr. Toyin Alli:] Yes. Hi, I’m Dr. Toyin Ali. I am a senior lecturer at the University of Georgia. And, I run a business called the Academic Society. Within that business I actually have two brands, one where I help grad students with time management and productivity. And the other, where I help professors create what I call a semester proof business, which is just one that is reliably profitable even during a busy semester where you have less than five hours a week to spend on your business. I had lived in Athens, Georgia for almost nine years. I recently got married and moved to Greenville, South Carolina. Luckily I get to teach my classes remotely. So I still teach at UGA and it’s just been wonderful.
[Jennifer:] Well congratulations on your wedding and the move. I love that you get to stay with your students and continue to teach. That virtual aspect of the classroom must be skills that you really bring into running your communities. Last time you came on the show, we were talking about the grad school brand.
This time I’d really love to focus on the faculty. Honestly there’s many faculty right now who are trying to protect themselves, are wanting to do something more, are already taking steps to create their own space in the world through a business. There’s many faculty that are juggling both. And then, there’s so many more faculty who don’t realize that that’s an option for them. So I’d love to hear a little bit about that side of your business.
[Toyin:] Yeah, I do think it’s so important to be well-rounded as a person and not let academia just be your whole life. Whether you wanna start a business or not, there should absolutely be something else that you are involved in that lights you up, that you’re able to put some of your energy in that is not academia and the stress of it all.
And for me, I’m someone who I absolutely love my job. I love being a math lecturer. I can’t even imagine not teaching math. My favorite thing is teaching math to students who are terrified of math and I’m trying to make them love math. That’s my secret goal is to make all my students love math. I love it so much.
But, there is so much that I’ve learned. And, it’s same with other academics. We had to learn so many different skills and even take up other hobbies as we were going through our grad school process. And often when we get into our positions, we’re kind of using the same few skills over and over again.
When people come to me, I find that they have these other skills, these other learnings that they’ve gotten along the way that is just bursting out of them that they want to share. They want to help other people. I call these people professorpreneurs because they’re professors, they’re teaching. But they also wanna teach other things than just their disciplinary work.
It is totally possible if they’re building a business under a specific business model. Not every business model is gonna work for academics who have busy schedules maybe sometime of the year, not all. And their schedule changes and it’s kind of hard to run maybe a brick and mortar business. But an online education, digital business? It’s perfect for academics because they’re doing this work already.
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What can a professor business look like?
[Jennifer:] I met an amazing professor who has a brick and mortar. He has business partners with it, but his brick and mortar is actually a bakery, a co-op bakery. And I thought how amazing that he could fit in this time for something that he loves while also keeping his full-time [academic] job. I’ve met many other professors who have started a business because they have to almost for their research. It’s something that comes naturally in order to advance their research.
But professor entrepreneurship seems a little bit more focused on building something that is sustainable with your full-time professor role. You mentioned five hours a week or less. So I’m curious, what can professor entrepreneurship look like? What does it look like for some of the people who are in your Program?
[Toyin:] Yeah, it’s mostly leaning into your skills, your gifts, your mentorship and being able to serve students outside of the students in your discipline. And when I say students, these could be adults who are not in college who want to learn a skill, who need knowledge from your expertise. So people in my community, I have a counselor in counselor education. She did her research for her dissertation on the strong black woman narrative. She helps women unlearn that strong black women narrative, which often leads them to leave their jobs and do something different. So she’s kind of a career coach now. I have another community member who helps tenure track faculty member progress through and become, get tenured. I have someone who helps people with their job talks in academia. I work with someone who helps first generation students actually matriculate and get through the college experience.
Typically it’s something that you personally identify with and you wanna help others do. You can use your skills of teaching, of presenting and sharing as a business. So it’s typically an education based business where they’re creating courses, workshops, books, they’re doing speaking engagements. These are the types of businesses that I think are awesome fits for academics who also still have their academic job.
[Jennifer:] That is so cool. And I’m really happy that you’ve created space for people to come together. When I started as a business owner, I didn’t have that community. And, I was too scared to seek it. It really took people being persistent with me to be like, “Hey, come be friends.” And that worked. But I think that I would have grown a lot faster and more comfortably if I had a group like yours.
Now I’m not a professor, I don’t teach anymore mostly ’cause I love doing this [online presence] stuff that I do full time [with faculty]. I can’t do five hours a week. I just love it. But I also think about people who are maybe toeing the line, who are like, “I’m curious about starting my own business but what if I love it so much I wanna leave my professor job?” Does anyone ever kind of question whether it should be balanced or whether maybe the amount of balance should shift based on what they’re most interested in?
[Toyin:] Absolutely. I do have people in my community whose ultimate goal is to leave academia. But they’re happy with doing it for now and they want to have that security of a regular paycheck of doing something they enjoy. And, seeing their hard work of grad school actually, go towards the career that they plan for. So people are content in their academic jobs but also can be interested in moving on and just doing their business full time. I do think it’s always still rooted in that education, in that teaching of others.
I personally love my academic job and I can’t imagine leaving it. Maybe that’ll happen someday, but I found that my income can still increase with my business. So much so that in my business I bring in almost double what I make in my academic job, but I still love my academic job so much so I’m able to not sacrifice the work that I do there. I’m still an awesome professor. My students love me. But, I’m able to grow this other thing. I think that duality is really nice because you are doing kind of a bit of different brain work. So, you are doing work in one area and then the other area starts to feel like a reprieve and then you’re working your business and then your school start your schoolwork starts to feel like a reprieve. So it’s really nice to be able to do both.
Creating content for your academic business
[Jennifer:] I am curious what were some of the growing pains or areas in which once you started your business you were like wow, I really need to pay more attention to the time management or my focus here to make both work?
[Toyin:] For me, it was never the time management. I’m a time management person. I’m great at time management, I’m great at boundaries, I’m great at me time. I always have time for myself every single day. So for me the time wasn’t the struggle for me. It was figuring out a business strategy that actually worked. Because I’m an academic and I love learning, I just found myself learning about all these different business models and strategies. And, I wanna try all of the things. So I’m building all of these little bridges but I’m never actually getting to the goal because I have not seen anything through because I’m learning something new.
While I still love learning about things and the information that I’ve learned is helpful for my clients because I don’t help my clients build identical businesses, to me what I found was understanding who I am as a person and what I need is probably the first step in creating a business model that actually works. I get to do things that I’m really excited about versus feeling drained and that energy shows through in the content that I create.
You can probably tell with my Instagram content that I’m not all in there, but with my YouTube channel, you can feel the energy. So I’ve recently decided I’m just gonna stick with what’s been working for me, what I love: my YouTube and my email and that’s it. And that’s absolutely a semester proof business. I can do those things while running my business at the same time. So to answer your question, What was something that I had to learn along the way is that I had to build my own business and not follow what everyone else was doing.
[Jennifer:] I love that so much because when I started out I didn’t know any website designers. Well, I knew website designers but not ones that I was brave enough to reach out to and talk with about actually working. I ended up kind of creating my own packages and systems that work really well for professors and then realizing after the fact that this not the model that most website designers do. Now, my model works, it works really well for academics so I’m not gonna change it. But if I didn’t have that lack of knowledge, I probably would have tried to build a different format for my business.
And when I think about academics who are already making so many decisions and prioritizing so many different things in their lives, the option of having so many different business models must be really difficult. You narrowed down and found a business that really works for your business. You mentioned video and I love video. It’s not something I expected to enjoy when I started my business, but now I’m all in.
How did you know video was right for you? How did you know, ‘oh, these are the clues that I want do more of this.’
[Toyin:] I definitely grew up in the YouTube era. I was a YouTube girly, I was watching all the YouTube videos. I actually started a YouTube channel when I was in grad school back in.. 2011 ish. I called it YouTube University and it was where I was watching a YouTube video and learning something and then trying to apply what I learned. It was mostly like beauty and hair type of videos. And I remember my mom who’s always the most supportive person, she would share my videos to people we knew and I got so embarrassed I was absolutely not one of my videos even got to 4,000 views. I was like, oh my gosh, I’m shutting this channel down because I feel so embarrassed. I was always so shy show so introverted, but I always loved YouTube. I watch it as if it’s TV, I watch it mostly on my TV.
And so when I finally started my business, The Academic Society, I have to have YouTube videos ’cause that’s where I would consume. And it just so turned out that as I’m creating these videos I realized I connect with people on video. So it actually is trial and error.
And that I think is what gets a lot of academics stuck because academics are experts. They’re experts in their field and it’s really tough to show up as not an expert. And so often they try to choose the perfect platform, the perfect type of content, the perfect offer. And they spend all of this time trying to create this perfect thing that they never actually put it out into the world. When what I found is it’s really like co-creating your business with whoever is watching and who’s ever listening. It’s like you’re trying to figure out what resonates and you actually have to put something out there to see if it works or not.
So I tried YouTube and it worked, but I also could have tried it and it not work. I would’ve moved on to something else. Maybe podcasting my is my thing. Maybe blogging is my thing. Maybe Instagram is my thing. But you have to actually get it out there to see how it feels to see how the people connect with you.
[Jennifer:] Well thank you for sharing that because shutting down your first YouTube channel, I really relate. My first YouTube channel, I started in college and it was a singing channel. It was me singing and it blew up overnight one time and I was like, nope, that’s it. I cut it off and I never did another singing video again. It’s scary. It’s scary but it’s also a good barometer to recognize your own comfort level. ‘Cause on this YouTube channel that you have, you seem very comfortable and you love it. You’re leaning more into it.
I think I’m kind of similar. I don’t wanna do singing videos but I do like creating these conversations for The Social Academic. I do like jumping on Instagram stories and creating short form videos. So there’s different things that work for me and different things that definitely don’t.
Recognizing what you’re wanting to try out and are willing to experiment is half of the journey. Because you can’t wait for perfection to happen before, it doesn’t happen before you start. You can’t know that that’s gonna be the platform for you before you start. You can hope. You can learn the features in ways that help you be more effective at it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the right fit for you. Thank you for sharing that.
It’s like building an airplane while it’s already in the air
[Toyin:] You are welcome. One of the things I tell my clients because academics, they like to follow a path they like to learn and implement.
[Jennifer:] Yeah.
[Toyin:] But I tell them, it’s great to learn these different strategies, different things, but you’re not gonna know what works for your business is until you try it. This business thing is building the airplane while it’s already in the air and it’s terrifying. You are just trying stuff but it’s out there and it’s trying in public that seems really, really scary. Usually you do your research, you work with your collaborators and then once it’s ready then you publish it for the world. But for your business you have to publish it for the world before you’re ready.
[Jennifer:] What tips do you have for an academic who’s maybe just starting out on YouTube? Whether they’re releasing their first video about their research or their first video is about that upcoming business that they’re excited to be developing, I’m curious what tips you have for them.
[Toyin:] Yes. Okay. It is really important to study YouTube a little bit. Especially, I do recommend if you’re gonna be on YouTube, you probably should be someone who consumes YouTube content so that it’s very clear and you understand what the algorithm will promote and even your own viewing habits. What makes me click on a video to watch it? Is it the thumbnail? Is it the title? Those kind of nitty gritty things are not intuitive. You might name want to name something your video one thing, but that’s not what really pops on YouTube.
And also it’s the almost like a stage presence that you need to have because you can really see in a YouTube video when someone is uncomfortable being on camera. You have to think, okay, where am I most comfortable? Am I most comfortable when I’m speaking to my students? That should be the style of video you create where you’re like speaking to your students. Are you most comfortable when you’re having a conversation? Maybe you should have guests on your channel. Are you most comfortable when it’s a voiceover and you have slides? You should do that.
Figure out your comfort level so that you can show up confidently on camera. And, understanding YouTube but also being realistic about what kind of YouTube videos you wanna make and how much time it takes to make them. Because I could spend all day editing and making super fan fancy videos with B roll, but often academics are talking about such specific niche topics that no one else is talking about it on the internet. Your video doesn’t have to be fancy if you’re talking about what no one else is talking about. People are just glad that someone’s finally talking about it.
So most of my videos are just me sitting at my desk or on my couch talking to the camera. No frills, no animations, no B-roll. Just me talking, sharing my experience, sharing my advice. And that’s helpful to the people who are interested in what I’m talking about.
[Jennifer:] I switched The Academic Designer podcast from recording in a virtual studio with an a awesome audio engineer to this live format. Because I really had this dream about getting up more content and I was like, I need to change my process in order to have the kind of channel that I want. I wanna feature more guests like you, Toyin.
That change happened about a month ago now and I’m just realizing how lighter my life feels. It’s so fun to have these conversations. Again, I’m not thinking about timelines or schedules or all of these things that I used to have in the back of my mind when I’m trying to focus on professor client website design. I was like, wait, when is that video gonna come out? I really like how changing my format has helped me better show up on YouTube.
I’m curious, have you always done that kind of style of video or is that something that you’ve changed and tried different things for?
[Toyin:] It’s mostly what I’ve always done, but I’ve always tried to experiment and try to do more fun fancy videos like what I like to watch. And it just doesn’t serve the purpose for me. My purpose is to help grad students or my purpose is to help professors. They really don’t need all that extra and it’s a lot of work for maybe a video that wouldn’t even resonate. I find that academics don’t need the fluff, they just want the answer. And as long as I’m given the answer then I’m good to go.
I remember that I always laugh: I tried to do a dramatization at the beginning of one of my videos where it was a before picture where I was a grad student, super stressed out, try to do the work super frazzled and then the that grad student is like having a conversation with a more put together grad student and I’m playing both roles. I crack up. That video still is up but I crack myself up every time I see it. I’m like, ‘This does not feel or look natural at all. It’s hilarious but it’s not for me.’
[Jennifer:] There are some styles and channels that maybe we wanna experiment with but just don’t feel right. So sounds like that’s one of them for you. Singing is definitely one of them for me. You know who I’ve seen do a good video like that, Dr. Sheena Howard. She’s good at playing both roles without changing like what she is wearing or looking like and you could just sense the difference. I like her Instagram because she gets creative on those short videos. I don’t have any of that. I don’t have any of the creativity when it comes to like being on trend. I really don’t.
Who was it? Oh I’m not even allowed to say. There was a social media platform that asked me, ‘How do you find new content? Who do you follow to get inspired [to copy them]?’ And I was like, “Oh to be honest, I don’t really consume a lot of content that I’m like, ‘I wanna copy that.’”
And part of that is because a lot of the content that I consume, like you, Toyin, is very well done. It’s highly produced. Maybe they’re using B-roll and all of these elements, audio. Like, I love it. But it’s not the kind of content I wanna create. And it sounds like it’s not the kind of content most professors thinking about businesses or sharing their academic life online, maybe they don’t need to think about it too. Is that right?
[Toyin:] That’s correct. I would say the most creative I am with a different style of video is a vlog. People are very curious about like what my day-to-day life looks like as someone who’s doing both academia and a business at the same time. So that is where I’ll deviate from my talking to camera style, but that’s it.
[Jennifer:] I love that. My father-in-law, Bob Pincus, just started a YouTube channel. He’s an art history professor. And, he’s using all the B-roll and fancy things. I don’t do any of that stuff. But it takes so much work! I’m not doing the work [for him]. But it takes so much work. So if you are thinking about a channel like that, just know yeah there’s more that’s gonna go into it, but if that’s what you dream about, that’s okay too.
[Toyin:] Yeah.
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Six Figure Professor Program
[Jennifer:] Okay. My next question for you is really about your program for professors, Six Figure Professor. I’d love to hear because there’s people who are on this that are like, I really wanna have a business too. Or I’ve started a business and I wanna grow it. I like Toyin, how can I work with her?
[Toyin:] Yes. So I have a one-on-one coaching program called Six Figure Professor. It is the program where I teach you the business strategy and framework to create that semester proof business. This is the business that you can run on five hours a week or less and it reduces what you’re doing in your business operations. It really just reduces it down to one task is getting people into attracting them to your funnel basically all a semester proof business is is an automated email sales funnel, but you do need to have the assets around it to make it run.
And so once you have your automated email sales funnel up and running, your only task is to get people in that funnel. And that is such an easier task than try to be like, well should I post on YouTube? Should I do Instagram, then I need to do this blog post and then I need to be on this podcast. It’s like, is it getting people in the funnel or not?
You can do the other things on breaks in the summer or in the winter, spring break, do all the fun business things. But when you’re conserving your energy and you’re splitting your time, you need a business model that’s actually gonna work when you don’t have time to work on your business.
And so that’s what we set up together. We create a low ticket offer that people will say yes to super easily. We create a free lead magnet, we create a email sequence, we put all the pieces. One of the things I noticed my people struggled with is tech. They don’t know what software to use, they don’t know what makes the pieces talk to each other. So we do that as well.
My clients get one coaching call and one tech session with me every month so they can implement on the thing they’re working on for the month. We screen share and I’m like, ‘Click this button. Then you’ll click this button and this is how you set this up.’ Because often they have been in online courses for business where they’re taught the strategy and it’s like, all right, go do it. And they’re like, but how do I do it? So we actually do the doing in the program. I think that’s where I shine. I’m able to take a big picture thing and break it down into small steps to. I think that’s like my math background, teaching math, you have to do that.
[Jennifer:] And that brings us back to what you were saying earlier about how professors really like things that are implementable things that they can follow a plan. And so it sounds like you help them create the plan and then actually implement it as well. Is that right?
[Toyin:] Yeah, by the end you have the funnel put together, it’s ready to go. Yeah.
[Jennifer:] So how long’s the program?
[Toyin:] It is six months and it doesn’t necessarily have to take six months to get it done, but I recognize that part of it’s gonna be during the semester you’re gonna be busy so you’re not gonna be able to implement all the time. But something I love doing is, as a bonus for joining Six Figure Professor, a popular bonus that I’ve done is have people also join my community, The Secret Society of Academic Entrepreneurs.
There’s a group of academics who have businesses and we have coworking sessions: actual time to implement on our business. We have experts come in and share a strategy and we implement on that strategy together. We get to talk about what are we doing? How are y’all doing this? What’s been helpful for you? And so I think that’s a great compliment to a Six Figure Professor is that they get invited to join this community as well while they’re in the program.
[Jennifer:] Can I ask, how do people feel? what’s different for them being part of a community than say just doing it on their own?
[Toyin:] Yeah, it’s like something about knowing that other people are going through the same hardships as you is like, ‘Oh, maybe I’m not doing it all wrong.’ It gives you that confidence like, ‘Oh, this is normal and I’m not failing in my business. This is just the stage that I’m in.’ And I’m seeing people who have gotten through this and are on the other side or even just talking about it with other people. Someone else can name the issue that is happening and just having the language for what’s happening can be very comforting as well.
I had a client who would always ask me, “How do you keep going when people aren’t buying? When people aren’t commenting on your posts? When it feels like no one is listening?” I was like, ‘Well, I’m in communities in addition to being in academic entrepreneurship communities, I’m also in business owner communities with people who may have bigger businesses than me. I see super successful big businesses: they create offers that don’t sell, they create content that no one comments on. But that doesn’t mean they’re not a successful business.
So you get to understand what’s a metric that I should actually care about? Versus a metric that’s really not important, it just feels bad, you know? Normalizing a lot of what’s happening is a huge benefit of being in the community.
Think of it as teaching
[Jennifer:] I love that. Before we wrap up Toyin, do you have a message for professors who are listening to this who may be thinking, ‘I wanna have that business but I’m a little bit scared.’ Do you have a message for them?
[Toyin:] I would say just do it. Think of it as teaching. Whether you teach classes in your academic role or you mentor grad students in their research. What does that feel like when the student actually gets it when your grad student actually gets their PhD? It feels amazing to have played a small role in someone’s success. And when you think about it as having a business is serving and helping others and if I don’t help others with the skill that I have, it might take that person that much longer to get to where they want to go.
If you reframe it as from ‘it’s all about me and I’m doing this special thing ’cause I’m trying to make money’ and you reframe it to, ‘I’m here to help others and if I’m not gonna help them, they may have a harder time getting supported.’ That’s what really drives me: being able to help people.
My overall business is just help. I really wanna help academics and grad students see that academia doesn’t have to be their whole life and they can have something outside of academia and still be successful in academia at the same time. That’s my message.
[Jennifer:] Thank you so much for coming on The Social Academic. I am so happy that this series is live. We get to feature more people like you. For everyone who’s listening, Toyin and I had an interview a few years ago that I am going to add that link in the description below. And I really just want to encourage you, if a business is something that you’ve been thinking of, there are people that you can reach out to and be in community. You can get in touch with Dr. Toyin Alli.
Also, if you know someone that has a business, don’t be scared like I was. You can reach out to them and ask if they’re open for an informational interview or a quick catch up. There are so many ways to have a business as a professor academic. I started my business coming right out of grad school. It was at at my graduation, they were asking, what are you gonna do next? And I was like, ‘I am filing my LLC paperwork right after this.’ So wherever you are in your academic career, if this is something of interest to you, I encourage you to find community. Don’t wait like I did.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Toyin!
[Toyin:] Thank you for having me. This is great.
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Bio
Dr. Toyin Alli is a math professor, business strategist, and the founder of The Academic Society, where she helps grad students with time management, productivity, self-care and grad school success strategies.
After building her own six-figure business while teaching full-time, Toyin now mentors other professors through her signature program Six Figure Professor and her community, The Secret Society of Academic Entrepreneurs.
She’s been featured on various academic podcasts and has spoken at universities across the country.
Whether she’s teaching in the classroom, facilitating a virtual workshop, or coaching behind the scenes, Dr. Toyin Alli is on a mission to help academics reclaim their time, expand their influence, and redefine success on their own terms.
Watch our past interview with Dr. Toyin Alli about grad school.