Stacy Morris runs apparel design business MySideHustleDesign.com. Photos contributed

Editor’s note: For our annual Women in Business issue Feb 14, The Business Journal highlighted three women with interesting side hustles in addition to their day jobs, to see what motivates them and their entrepreneurial spirit. Here is one of those stories.

Some people might say the Stacy Morris that runs Visalia-based Employer Driven Insurance Services, Inc. is a different person than the one who owns MySideHustleDesign.com.

Morris, the president and CEO of EDIS, oversees 70 people at the third-party health insurance administrator that covers most of the western United States. But when she leaves that job, she leaves that part of her behind to adopt the other titles by which she describes herself — wife, mother of two, athlete and also owner of a design website for custom t-shirts, sweat pants and more.

 

“I’m a completely different human in both,” Morris said. “I have to be on top of everything at work during the day, from six in the morning until six at night, going at 100%. Whenever I get home, I eat dinner and I spend some time with the family. When I start making shirts, it’s usually 7:30, 8 o’clock at night. Sometimes I’ll go until 10 or 11.”

When Morris started at EDIS, she took a 35% pay cut from her previous job at a staffing agency. A friend had told her about the company and she loved the culture.

“The money is high up on that ranking, but it’s not as important as the happiness,” Morris said. “And I know if I could be pleased every morning with the place that I called my work-home, I knew I could work up my way in the company and make up any pay cut I had taken.”

She started as an underwriter in 2000. An opportunity arose to buy the company, then-called Ben Elect. She founded EDIS in 2014 and opened in 2016.

Part of recouping the pay cut was starting MySideHustleDesign.com

The cost of doing business in California has made a side job a necessity for her, Morris said.

She was able to write off most of the printing equipment she uses, and last year she earned $22,000 in revenue.

“It turned out to be bigger than I thought, but it was fun,” Morris said. She had seen on social media a demand for T-shirt printers, and along the other titles she has, she is also a creative, and it gave her the opportunity to fill that need in her life.

“I’m a creative mind, so I need that outlet,” she said. She likes to paint, she likes colors and how they work together, she said. People send designs they want and she prints them.

Her family has also found the website to be a creative outlet. Her daughter has taken to leatherwork and makes belts. Her husband works with epoxy resin to make pens, bottle openers and “pretty much anything you can with epoxy resin.”

She has received contracts from schools and colleges for jerseys and uniforms.

But she knows out of experience she has to pace herself for her own mental health. When she took her pay cut at her new job, her youngest child was a year old. She would work until midnight some days and go back at 5 a.m. the next day.
“It leads to burnout. It leads to the lack of boundaries between work and home life,” Morris said. “The balance is gone, it affects you in every realm of life.”

Now, she lives by that code. This past Christmas, orders began piling in at her website. She eventually had to cut them off. She sent customers to other websites for their needs.

“You have to, for your own good and for the sake of your family, be able to say stop.”

Morris extends that same philosophy to the people working for her.

When she sees them working late, and they have families at home, she will send them home. “Work is work. They need to be happy at home in order to be happy here,” she said.