The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Side Business
Thousands of people every day are starting their own side businesses while working full time. Some people want to leave their 9 to 5, while some just want to make some extra income. Either way, this article is for you. Here you will find the ultimate guide to starting a side business while working full time.
Try to Pick Something You’re Passionate About
When building a side business, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the extra daily tasks that you’ll be required to complete along with your full-time work and personal life. If it’s something that you don’t care about but just looking for some extra income, you’re going to get drained and burnt out very quickly which means you will most likely quit before you have any success. Picking something you really care about is going to help you complete the daily tasks, enjoy your side hustle, and actually look forward to growing it every day.
Validate Your Idea
The worst thing you can do when starting a side hustle or business is to create something that people aren’t passionate about. Everyone believes they are right 100% of the time and all of our ideas are home runs. This means that sometimes we think we don’t need to do the proper research to see if people would even care or purchase the product or service you want to start offering. What you need to do is do some extensive market research to find out if there are still opportunities in the market for the industry that you want to tackle. Then use the research you completed and adjust your business idea to make sure there is demand for your business. This will allow you to create the product or service that people will actually want.
Decide How You’ll Be Different
Now if there are companies out there that already provide what you want to provide, you can’t just copy their whole process and expect your one to work. Customers are more likely to go with the established brands and yours will get left in the dust. You will have to come up with a way that you’re going to be different. You can have a cheaper price point, a better product, faster results with the product, you can be friendlier (think Chick-Fil-A). There are many different ways to have an advantage over your competitors. So your business can’t just fill a need in the market. It has to fill a need in a different way than all the competitors in that space.
Become A Master of Your Time
One of the most important things while building this is balancing the time that you focus on your side hustle and focus on your 9-5. Obviously, your full-time job is going to take up forty hours a week but you also have other responsibilities. Everyone does. You might have a partner and a family to spend time with. Maybe you have a hobby that takes up a big chunk of your week. Either way, you’re going to have to become a master at time management throughout the days, weeks, and months to really see this project go through.
You don’t want to start this side business but never really finish it because then you’re just wasting your time. If you really want it bad enough, you have to start thinking about when you’ll be able to do it every day. Will you work on it for a couple of hours before your real job? How about when you get home from work? Or maybe you need to wait for the kids to go to bed first? No matter what you do, try to carve out some time without affecting your personal life and most importantly your health. One easy way to make sure this happens is by following our next set of advice.
Another thing that can help you with your time management is to outsource anything that you don’t enjoy or know how to do. Even if it’s something you enjoy doing, finding help when you don’t have time to do it is a good idea. Outsourcing to trusted third parties is a very good way to get certain jobs completed while you can focus on other things. It is also extremely scalable as you can hire as many freelancers as you want on an ad-hoc basis. You want everything in your side hustle to look and feel great so when something comes up that you can’t do, you can’t just throw something together and hope it works. There are thousands of people out there that are passionate about the things you don’t know how to do and will help you out for just a little bit of compensation. I’m not telling you to do this at the start, but once your business gets rolling and you have a little bit of extra income to spend, outsourcing is not a bad idea.
Make Realistic Goals
Every great business sets goals for every step of the process. Without goals, you’re basically blindly swinging at different actions hoping something will work out that will grow your business. With my own business, I set goals for the things that I wish to achieve every day, week and month. Your goals for the month should allow you to have a step-like mindset to figuring out your sub-goals for each week that will allow you to achieve your final goal for the month. For example, if you own a Web Design company, your goal for the month might be to try to get more work from existing clients and your goal for the week is to finish the existing work you have with them. Once you have those goals, you should be able to come up with the daily things that needs to be done to accomplish this.
Be Patient
While getting these daily tasks done and crushing your monthly goals, you’re going to get excited along the way which is good. But I’m here to remind you that your side business doesn’t just explode overnight. It takes time and care and you must be patient. One mistake I made during my early entrepreneurship career was that I wanted to grow my business too quickly and when the business grew much slower than I expected, I was rather upset. You have just got to be patient and hard work will pay off. You’re going to do things and even though they are getting you results, they’re small results and it might feel a little discouraging. You can’t let that get to you. The longer you stay with this and focus on the big picture, the more likely your side business can one day become your main gig.
Now It’s Your Turn!
Starting your side business is completely different from someone else’s business. Every journey has its own path but hopefully, these steps can help guide you a little bit to that ultimate goal of building your business. If you have any questions, leave us a comment below and we would be happy to help you out.
