This Fun, Flexible Side Hustle Pays $35 an Hour and Gets You Into Exclusive CEO Summits, Music Festivals, and Sports Events If you want to make money in your downtime, why not do something that feels less like work and more like an adventure?

Everyone loves a side hustle they can do from home. But now that working from home is so common, some of us wouldn't mind getting out of the house in our off-hours — and doing something inspiring, exciting, or social. If that sounds like you, there's a side hustle that might just be perfect. Tremont Turner has been doing it part-time for a decade, and makes about $40,000 a year in extra income.

Back in 2014, Turner was working his way through college in Hammond, Indiana, making minimum wage at Chipotle and Panera and dreaming of becoming an actor. One day, a friend of his who did some work as a brand ambassador asked if he could cover for her. She was supposed to work a promotional ESPN event — a fantasy football draft — but something had come up and she couldn't make it.

Turner was iffy at first. "I know nothing about football!" he said. She assured him it was easy, then told him how much it paid — double what he was making in fast food. "I was like, what?!" he recalls. "Oh, I don't care what it is," he said. "I'm in for sure."

He drove the 45 minutes to Chicago, did a short training with the company staffing the event (ATN Event Staffing), then waited around a couple hours, helped some attendees build their fantasy teams, and got to leave early but was still paid for the entire time. That night, he began thinking, "Could I do this full-time, while pursuing acting?"

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Turner began picking up more and more brand ambassador jobs. He worked at music festivals — giving out samples of products like Aperol Spritz, doing line control, and creating brand "photo moments." He worked tech conventions, assisting people with downloading an app or following a brand's social media accounts. He also worked executive summits, helping powerful business leaders with networking and getting around.

"That's probably my favorite kind of job," he says. "We bring the 'woo!' and make sure guests have a good time, and facilitate them meeting each other. We'll get different guests assigned to us, and one might say, 'Hey, I want to meet this CMO from Patagonia.' So then we brand ambassadors reach out to each other like, 'Hey, who has Patagonia?' And then we'll help facilitate the meeting."

Some of these events offer a daily rate — generally about $300 to $400 a day — and others are hourly, in the range of $25 to $35 an hour. There are events at all different days and times, so you can build your own schedule. This flexibility allowed Turner to start doing more background acting, and eventually, in 2017, to move to Los Angeles — where he could develop his acting career, and find even more work as a brand ambassador.

For anyone looking to break into the events circuit, Turner says, the best place to start is often Facebook Groups. "Search for something like brand ambassadors of [insert city]," he says. "Or promotional models, or promo models. And then join a group and just start submitting applications. It's kind of a numbers game, but once you have a couple of jobs under your belt, and a few pictures of yourself at events, it's easy. You can also talk to other people working the events and say, 'Hey, what companies do you like?' Chances are they'll give you a few of their companies."

Once you've worked for a brand, Turner says, they send out email blasts about upcoming events. "Let's just say Coca-Cola is doing some special activation to promote their new flavor. If you want to get on a team, then you can sign up ahead of time to work this day or that day. You always want to have at least one consistent brand like that in your back pocket. For a while I was working Pocari Sweat at the Angels games, and was able to pick up at least one or two a week."

But if you unexpectedly find yourself with a free day, Turner says there are also plenty of last-minute opportunities. "Let's say it's a big event, and they have to staff a hundred people," Turner says. "You know that probably ten aren't going to show up. So they're going to put out an emergency post like, 'Hey, we're in need of someone in the next few hours for this amount.'"

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There isn't usually much training, Turner says, except if you're working a convention, where you're getting people to download an app or show them what it does. "'Then you might have a three-hour Zoom training or something like that," Turner says, "but you're getting paid for that time."

More often, he says, "The brand might send something ahead of time, like a little PDF, 'This is what you're going to be doing, and here are a few keywords for the brand.' And when you show up and they might go over it a little more, But then boom, you're working."

Turner acknowledges that being a brand ambassador may suit some people better than others. "On the one hand, it's easy work," he says. "But if you're not an extroverted person, it will be harder, because you have to be 'on.'"

But if you're looking for gigs that get you out of your day-to-day groove, there's always something new happening in the world of events.

And if you want to learn more about the brand ambassador side hustle, Turner wrote a whole book about it: Find it here.