The Secret to Turning Your Side-Hustle into Your Full-Time Thing
Let's just use opening a restaurant as an analogy.
You’ll need some different things. You need a building, you need tables, you need a kitchen to cook the food in, etc. You also need some people, some chefs to cook the food, some waiters, some hosts, and a manager to keep the whole thing organized. You also need someone who's going to take out the trash and all of that dirty work finding those things and those people are the basic work required to set up shop for your restaurant.
However, your restaurant isn't going to be a real working restaurant, a real business, and it's certainly not going to be making any money until you have a steady supply of two more things.
First of all, you need food and again, it needs to be a steady supply of food. You also need a steady supply of customers.
If either one of those two things stops appearing then your restaurant would come to a screeching halt. As long as there's a possibility of one of those two things disappearing, well, you're not going to be able to rely on your business to continue to provide you with a steady stream of income.
So what do you need to do to make sure that those key things keep coming on it? How do you make sure that you don't run out of food or customers for the food?
You need a system for consistently ordering it, preparing it, and serving it to the customers and to make sure that customers keep coming into the door.
You need a system for attracting customers, welcoming them into your restaurant, and seating them. When these two systems are working well, your whole restaurant business works. There's nothing that's stopping it. Things can keep running smoothly, and you can keep making money. Now, this isn't just true of restaurant businesses. It’s true of any type of business. You have to have products and you have to have customers.
In order to have those things in steady supply, you need to have a system for creating and delivering your products to your customers and a system for attracting customers so that you keep seeing the sales come in.
If you want to turn your side hustle into your full time thing, then you need to create those systems.
That will allow your business to produce predictable results you can rely on. Many people who want to become entrepreneurs and start their own business and turn into their full time thing think that the whole process of building a business is what is really just setting up shop. They think that they need a website that they need to file their business with tax purposes. They do all of these things to set up their business and they think they're building their business and then they wonder why their business isn't making any money. They also often spend way too much time on what should be a pretty simple process of setting up shop, especially if you see it in that big picture of you need to first set up shop but then you need to create these systems. Does this sound like you?
The secret to turning your side hustle into your full-time thing is to create the systems that allow your business to create predictable output so that your business creates income that you can rely on. This isn't just about your business creating a consistent amount of income each month. It's about your business being a stable entity that you can rely on long into the future. It's also about those steady paychecks so that you know roughly how much money you're going to earn every month and it's also about being able to scale or grow your business month after month after month so that you're not just earning more one month and less than x and finding yourself on that entrepreneurial roller coaster.
Production System
So what exactly are these systems that your business needs? Well, first of all, you need a production system. You need a system for creating the product that you're going to sell and deliver.
Depending on what kind of business you are running and what kind of product your business creates and sells. This process will look really different from one business to the next. For example, if you're selling a service, you might just need to have the skills so that you can offer that service to your customers and have some sort of process for how you'll deliver the service.
On the other hand, if you're selling a physical product, then you might need a whole manufacturing process for creating the physical products so that they're available for the customers to buy.
Now, here's a little hint if you happen to be selling a digital product, then you get a little bit of a pass on this one. Yes, you'd need to initially create your digital product, which can definitely be a fair amount of hard work. But once your product is created, you no longer need a production system, because you can sell a practically infinite number of units of your digital product without having to create your product over and over again.
You will still need a delivery process that can often be automated, something that ships your digital product to your customers when they purchased it, but you don't need a production process.
Marketing and Sales System
The second system or set of systems that every business needs is a marketing and sales system. Sometimes this is called a sales funnel for your business. It can also be called a customer journey. Basically, you need a process for getting the word out about your business to the people who might be interested in buying products, getting them interested in what you're selling, and then finally closing the sale.
That process can look a lot of different ways for a lot of different businesses. There's a video I created all about How to Build a Sales Machine for Your Business that is exactly about all of that and I have a few other sales funnel tutorials on my Youtube Channel that you can check out as well.
Let me reiterate what I said before the secret to turning your side hustle into your full-time thing is to build systems for your business that create predictable output that these systems in place your business will be able to create the consistent income you can depend on and your business will be stable and you'll be able to grow your business month after month.
Now, what's the next step you need to take with your business? You just need to get started.
You need to determine if you need to finish setting up shop to build your production systems or are you ready to build your sales and marketing systems? Or maybe you already have both of these sets of systems up and in place? And you're ready to start scaling by sending more and more input into these systems so that your business can earn more and more money each and every month.
small business 101
Are you interested in starting a profitable online business the simple way?
I invite you to download my free Small Business 101 course. These 8 action-packed lessons will teach you how to start a successful business without the headache or overwhelm. If you're all about keeping things simple, this is for you!
