Turning the Corner – When Side Hustlers Get Profitable

If anyone has ever watched West Indies cricket 🏏, the term “turning a corner” means a change in fortune, although our corners here seem to go all the way around the block. In any case, turning a corner as a side hustler means your pet project is now profitable, so you can make a go of it. But how do you get to that point, and when you’ve got there, how do you know?

The Art of Scalability
Side hustlers are entrepreneurs, albeit without the massive financial backing that other business owners have. As a business owner, you need to ask yourself four questions about whether this side hustle is ready for prime time:

1. How much time does it take? 🕑 If your side hustle is a one to two-hour thing a week, then it’s still a hobby. If you spend more than twenty hours working on it, you’ve got a business on your hands.

2. Can you live off the profits? The last article made us consider what money comes out of our side hustle and if it makes sense to do it. Here, we pull back further and explore whether it makes as much per hour as our regular job. If it beats your 9-5 hourly rate, it’s a good candidate to convert to full business 💵. And a good side hustle could lead to even bigger things; see this inventive example of how Stefan Sharpe, from T&T, invested his small side hustle money in the stock market to make even bigger money.

3. Is it Scalable? – Most hourly work gigs aren’t that scalable 🍹.  You can only make so much stuff in the hours of work you have. If that’s enough to maintain you, you’re all set. But if you want to scale into a more significant business model, you need a model to work from. What’s your end goal? What do you see this business accomplishing?

4. Can it compete? – The customer determines whether your business succeeds or fails. If all your customers are friends and loved ones, you might not have a viable business on your hands. However, if you’re getting customers from referrals, and those customers keep coming back or referring others, then you’ve already established your competitiveness in the marketplace 🥇.

Side Hustling for a Living
Changing your part-time job into a full-time business will take a lot of effort, and it’s thankless work, but it’s worth the effort to work for yourself. But what if you could expand your business with someone else’s help? In the next article, we’ll look at partnerships.