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It may be that you have a specific financial goal, such as saving up for a wedding or funding your travels around the world – perhaps even saving up to buy your first home. Or it may be a longer-term ambition to run your own business, achieve a better work life balance and do something that you really believe in. Either way, setting up a secondary income stream, or ‘side hustle', is a great route into it. You gain extra money and experience alongside your main job, and it can give you a great grounding for transitioning into doing it full time eventually and visiting Company Formation UK. However, although starting a side hustle is relatively easy, it definitely pays to look carefully before you make the leap.
- Don't Give Up The Day Job
The whole point of a side hustle is that it's complementary to your main gig. That way, you get the security of a regular income while you work out how to make your business work. This can often be quite hard work, so you have to be equally committed to both ventures. The last thing you want is for your performance in your main job to suffer and to lose that job before you've developed your other business. Take care to try and achieve a balance. Get a scheduling app and clearly allocate time for work, time for your new project, time for friends and family and time for yourself. Try to be strict with boundaries and don't let one thing dominate the others
- Stay Away From Debt
Have you ever heard the saying ‘you have to spend money to make money'? Well, that's partly true. Even the most low-cost start ups have some expenses – if you become an eBay reseller you'll have packing materials, stock and postage charges to pay, and if you're setting up an eCommerce site you'll have costs like domain registration and site hosting. But you should never take on debt to finance these these things. It could take quite a while for your side hustle to become profitable. So do some research on the costs for your business and aim to save up a pot of money before you launch or look at providing a service which doesn't require much outlay in order to fund what you want to do. Prove that there is an audience out there before making big financial commitments.
- Start Small
While there's nothing wrong with big ambition, start off by limiting the scope of what you do. If you're running a coffee stall at events, for example, start off by making the best cup of coffee you possible can. Don't start trying to expand in all kinds of directions before you've established one thing. Have the focus that you're going to need to run a successful business.
- Focus On The Money
The sole purpose of a side hustle is making profit. That may change as the business grows and develops, but for now, you need to prioritise whatever makes you money over anything else. Make your small business admin as simple as possible and never waste time on anything which isn't directly making you money. Focus on selling and working and then once you're up and running, you may be able to be a bit less strict
- Just Do It
Making plans is great, but plans don't generate a profit. So instead of spending a lot of time on designing a logo or sketching out your vision and values, just plunge in and begin! Learn as you go and remember, the beauty of a side hustle is that things don't have to be perfect–it's not your main job. That means that you have the luxury of being a little less than flawless, making mistakes, working hard and hopefully also having some fun!
