Before You Start Your Side Hustle

If you want to acquire greater business acumen faster, one way to do that is to start and manage your own business, in the popular vernacular what is called a “side hustle.” However, entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone, even though many glamorize it in this new economy.

If you are going to start your side hustle, there are some things to make sure you have in place for you begin.

• Customer or client acquisition strategy: How are you going to find and attract customers or clients you need to run a successful business? If there is one primary reason new companies fail, it would be the most fundamental of all failures, it is that they do not acquire enough customers. A website by itself is not a customer acquisition strategy.
• The ability to manage a sales process: It is your responsibility to help any prospective client or customer through a process that helps them decide to buy from you and become a customer (or client). Without knowing how to manage the sales process, you make customer acquisition difficult at best, impossible at worst.
• The time and energy to execute: Here’s the thing about a side hustle. It’s a side hustle. That means you have a main hustle providing your present income. It may also be what’s funding your side hustle. For most people, “side hustle” means working nights and weekends. That means giving up hours in front of the television watching sports, bingeing on Netflix, and potentially spending time with the most important people in your life.
• External resources: If there is one thing that enables the side hustle more than anything else in this new economy, it is the proliferation of people who can provide services necessary. Whether it’s editing content, bookkeeping, marketing support, or human resources, you will need other people to do some of the work of running a business so you can focus on client acquisition, sales, and execution.
• A business model: This might have come first on this list, because of its critical nature. It’s last on this list because you have to have a model that allows you to be profitable. Which means the money you spend on acquiring clients, providing services, and paying for the external resources you need cannot exceed your revenue.

If you want to know why businesses fail, you will likely find on this list. If you want to know why most startups never make it out of the starting gate, is because they’re missing one or more of the things in the paragraphs above.