Start Your Side Hustle and Keep Your Full Time Job

17 Apr Start Your Side Hustle and Keep Your Full Time Job

Start Your Side Hustle Now!

You hear it from your friends and see it on social media all the time, it seems like everyone has a side hustle these days.  You’ve thought about it, but wonder if you can have a side hustle and a full time job.  The short answer is YES.  You can start a side hustle online business to build extra income while keeping the security of your full-time job.  Starting a side hustle from home lets you be your own boss, provides extra income, and offers new entrepreneurial opportunities.  Many side hustles have led to great revenues, surprisingly useful relationships, and lifelong friends.  However, building a side hustle to profitability with a limited amount of time outside of your full-time job is never easy. It takes strong prioritization, tremendous persistence, and a mindset shift.  You need to change how you view what’s most important in your life and the willingness to get very creative and scrappy every day. 

A long-time hobby or passion can also motivate you to grow a business around things you love to do. Aspiring entrepreneurs with a strong drive can look to a side hustle as a stepping-stone toward financial freedom. Your side hustle allows you to focus on your passion to achieve the satisfaction you may not get from your full-time job. It can give you the flexibility (and extra savings) to travel the world to become a “Digital Nomad“. If you want more money hacks and great new ways to earn more money, check out LifeUpswing. Your side hustle will allow you to pursue causes like caring for the environment, in a more meaningful way.

Don’t Become Part of the Dreaded 90%

According to a 2020 study by Zapier, 34% of all Americans have a side hustle with a full-time job. While most people will tell you, they have hopes and dreams of becoming an entrepreneur, the flip side of this picture is not as thrilling. To put it bluntly, the vast majority (nine out of ten) of new businesses are doomed to fail.  Believe me, I’ve been there. My first entrepreneurial business, a hotel consulting firm managed to join the failing 90 percent in a fiery inferno. I learned the hard lessons, faced the fear of failure, and sharing these tips, so you avoid my past mistakes.  We want to ensure your side hustle doesn’t become part of that dreaded 90%! 

If you’re planning to start a side hustle, here are 6 tips that’ll help you get more traction.  Remember, keep your full-time job, as it is the funding source of your new side hustle.

1. Identify Your Skills and Areas of Interest

Never enter a battle ill-equipped for the challenges you’ll be facing. To experience quick results, you must back your side hustle with relevant skills, experience, or industry knowledge. After all, business success happens only when the right skills meet the right interest areas. Your business will succeed only if it’s, something you love to do and something you’re good at.

For example, many musicians monetize their skills by offering online guitar, violin, or piano lessons. On the other hand, some creatives also have profitable freelance side hustles as graphic artists or digital storytellers. If you lack key skills that relate to your interests or the side hustle you want to create, there’s no better time than the present to learn them. 

2. Validate That you can Monetize Your Side Hustle

Your side hustle idea may seem awesome to you, but that’s not necessarily how your potential customers will see it.  Be sure to validate whether your product or service will gain traction in the real world.  You can do that with objective feedback from friends and potential customers.  Ask them to join a waiting list, or to if they would pre-purchase your potential service.  Be warned, without validation, there’s a good chance you’re nurturing an idea that not enough people will find value in.  All your efforts, time, and resources will just be wasted.  So quickly abandon ideas that aren’t getting a positive response and consider other opportunities

3. Define Clear Business Goals for Your Side Hustle

It’s commendable to dream big. But when it comes to success for your side hustle, you will fail by aiming short term mega sales. To make your larger goals happen, you need to start with very small, incremental goals. After bringing on one satisfied customer, it’s time to get your second. Then your third, fourth, fifth and so on.

If you begin by aiming for 1,000 customers instead of just one, you’ll get too overwhelmed with everything that needs to be in place before handling that many customers. In my experience, having practical goals that are attainable on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis helps you develop positive habits and train yourself for success. One good framework to use when formulating goals is the SMART Goals Criteria. Developed by management icon Peter Drucker, SMART is the acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.   If a goal isn’t SMART – then it’s just a dream!

4. Delegate Work Outside of Your Expertise

By now, you know your strengths. You can’t be good at everything all the time and you shouldn’t want to be. The reality of starting a side hustle is that you’re going to have weaknesses. That means some (or even many) of the skills necessary to efficiently running your side hustle must be found elsewhere.  Use a Freelance Marketplace like Fiverr to hire experts to handle your weakest tasks.  Also, using Freelancers can free up your time to continue doing only what you’re best at within your business.

For example, you might be good at accounting and management, but your graphic design skills will easily turn off your audience instead of getting them glued to your message. To fix this, do the things you are good at and work to outsource everything else. I recommend not even trying to learn new skills in the immediate term, unless they strongly relate to both your what you’re interested in and the needs of your business. Outsourcing your weaknesses is a more effective and easily implemented alternative. It’s also more affordable in the long run as the value of your time increases significantly.

5. 10 Best Side Hustles to Make Extra Money Each Month

1. Work as a freelancer
2. Start a digital agency
3. Become an affiliate marketer 
4. Launch a print on demand store
5. Start a blog 
6. Sell information products
7. Become an Instagram influencer
8. Offer virtual assistant services
9. Sell your photography
10. Get a part-time job

6. Build Traffic & Sales Before Quitting Your Full-Time Job

My advice is to never leave your full-time job until your side hustle is providing you with a sustainable, growing cash flow that exceeds that reaches at least 75 percent of what your full-time job pays you. Most entrepreneurs have a healthy appetite for risk, but you shouldn’t plunge into anything without having a decent chance of success.

Moreover, have at least six months’ worth of savings for both personal and business purposes to pad yourself in the likely event that your business doesn’t grow as quickly as expected. Remember that having excited customers and translating them into revenue in the early stages of your side hustle is your clearest indicator of future success. If you have a family to support, restrain the urge to immediately quit even more so.

The Elephant In the Room…

Lastly, here is the elephant in the room on this topic.  Obviously, you shouldn’t work on your side hustle during company time, nor should you use company resources to advance your own pursuits. Not only is it unethical, but it’s likely a violation of the employment agreements you signed when you began your job. Make it a point to consistently deliver excellent performance at your full-time job even as your side hustle picks up momentum.

Final Thoughts About Starting Your Side Hustle

I want to repeat, YES, you can have a side hustle and a full-time job.  But I don’t want to sugar coat this, it won’t be easy!  But by using the tips above, along with your persistence and commitment, you can have a successful side hustle.  The best news is that if you fully nurture your side hustle it can become a true business that replaces your full-time job, and now you become your own boss, and get to fire your boss!

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