Strategies for Transforming Your Side Job Into a Full-Time Career

Everybody wants to have a side hustle or passive income source, that eventually becomes so big that it takes over your current job and becomes its own thing.

That’s the dream – now do you get there?

Do you go big or go home?

Or do you listen to Gary Vee and only sleep 5 hours a day?

It's up to you how you want to get there, but the strategies for getting there are exactly the same. Whether you’re in the welding business or construct planes for a living – the strategies for side hustles are the same.

When you’re a young buck, and your parents ask you to start your own business, you think to yourself – wow they’re so dumb.

Don’t they know that all parents give their children money and toys for free?

Well, if only the world listened to that dumb kid’s parents it would in a much better place and we’d have more entrepreneurs and social change agents than before.

Shifting mindset

Having a taste of entrepreneurship is good enough to get you started.

When you experience your first few failures, you get key lessons in marketing, branding, customer retention and resource optimization. That is where most entrepreneurs go wrong – they think that their failures are because of their own lack of effort.

This is because common wisdom is ripe with fallacies such as “work hard and play hard”, or “keep pushing until you’re dead”.

Whereas most billionaires don’t involve themselves much in the daily activities of the business. They outsource, manage and delegate most of the tasks.

So common wisdom set aside, what are the ways that someone truly changes the way that their side hustle behaves?

It's all about seeing what works.

When you don’t use your own preconceived notions, and focus on making things work, you can change your perception about reality and make more changes in your business to set it up for success.

Business is the ultimate equalizer and it gives everyone a chance to change their situation.

This allows some people to have the keys to business and others don’t. Switching mentality to focusing 100% on your business during the time allotted is one such key.

Don’t worry or stress about it. Instead focus on creating maximum profitability for your business and how you can turn things around for it.

Time Management

Coming to our next key is time management.

You must know when to spend time, how to spend it and what areas are best to spend time in. You can’t delegate things and sit back and laze around.

You must be able to manage time, strategize and figure out the best course of action for your business. Spending your time accurately and tracking it well is key. You don’t have to be someone who’s expecting everyone else to be on time – that’s impossible.

But you can be someone who has a strong penchant for tracking the myriad of activities and things that happen in your everyday life.

It’s not about seeking the best time for your activities, it's about having the best available resources to ensure that everything’s on time.

When you manage your time well, you can have a better shot at becoming a better entrepreneur leading you towards greatness in your side hustle.

Pareto Principle

Often, our mind goes everywhere – with distractions all around us (even in our business).

We know that certain projects and businesses give us 80% of the return on 20% investment, and we should invest in those business areas.

We know that some of our clients are very demanding but offer little in return, while others are more laid back and even have more profitable work. We should invest our time and efforts in those clients and resources that give us most impact for our money.

We don’t want to keep wasting our time or allowing others to waste it.

We should also focus on cutting out any negative clients in our business, as they also take away a lot of our time and investment.

These types of clients and business areas just suck your time and spirit in so that they can benefit and not you.

You must be able to figure out which areas work better for you and which don’t. If you start to invest in positive areas of your business, you may find remarkable and incremental changes in your businesses’ growth.

Something that you may not have even previously thought of, can suddenly become your go-to strategy for your business.

This is the power of the Pareto Principle.

Planning & Mapping

While you may not be actively spending time planning your day, let alone your week, it’s a good strategy to enforce nonetheless. Planning and mapping are great ways to ensure that your business has a healthy outlook towards success.

When you take 10 minutes out of your day to plan the rest of it, it makes for a deeper commitment to stick to it.

It’s not about thinking about the plan, it's also about thinking thoroughly about it.

You don’t want to have to take decisions in your business based on passive thinking.

You want to be able to invest the right amount of time in the decision and plan your day out strategically. You want to give tight deadlines to yourself so that you can execute your projects effectively.

In case of any errors or changes, you also want to include flexible time that doesn’t cut into your 10-hour work schedule. Once you’re all set, you want to also create parameters for success including – work done, hourly money invested/created, value generated etc.

This will help mature and develop your side-hustle better and create more opportunities for you and your business.

Conclusion

Life isn’t all about work but investing a good chunk of time into mindset training, time management, planning and resource allocation makes sense from a business development perspective. You don’t want to simply go big or go home…

You want to make the right changes that can help in making an impact on your career.