One of the challenges of starting your own business is that if you are employed (by your boss or by your children), you will most likely be setting it up as a side hustle! Meaning that you are running your business on the side while your main hustle helps you pay the bills.
Now, we all start side hustles for different reasons. Some of us just want some extra money to pay for that trip to Langkawi. Some of us are working hard towards achieving FIRE. Some are looking at building a business empire.
Regardless of your reasons, growing your side hustle while working your main hustle is a difficult balancing act. If you don’t get the balance right, it can lead to burnout and other mental health issues.
So this week, I’ve decided to share some of the tips that I have used to help me balance my main hustle of teaching at the University and my side hustle which is this accounting blog. As part of a slightly adjusted publishing regime, I will be breaking this piece into three parts which will be published throughout the week!
Let’s get started with Tip #1!!:
Identify your financial goals.
What are your financial goals?
This is by far the most important question you need to ask yourself. This is where you see yourself in 5 , 10 years from now and this is where you want to be. Financial goals come in all shapes and sizes, and they don’t all have to be ‘Financial Independence, Retire Early’ (and even if that is your goal, FIRE comes in many different flavors, which is a topic for a different time).
Your financial goals will determine how much of your time you will set aside for your side hustle each week.
Some common financial goals include:
Survival
By far the most important financial goal is to put enough money on the table to survive. Surviving means having enough money to cover rent, food, utilities and other essentials. Some of us may find that the main hustle isn’t paying enough to cover our basic needs and thus a side hustle becomes essential in order to survive.
Some of us may have even lost their main hustle in the recent economic troubles and have no choice but to start a side (main?) hustle to make ends meet. This was the situation I was in when I lost my job back in March 2020. As a family, we couldn’t afford to support ourselves on my partner’s income alone and I had no choice but to start something of my own.
If survival is your main financial goal, then your side hustle will be a higher priority and may even be your only priority when it comes to work (in which case it becomes a main hustle). If you find yourself in this situation, don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you have support networks you can rely on, reach out to them. If you need someone to talk to, flick me a message and I’ll see how I can help ;).
Making a bit of extra money
You might be reasonably happy in your main hustle and it makes you a decent sum of money but you would REALLY like to go on that trip to Langkawi or buy that fancy new E-scooter (why though?). Having a little bit more money means that you can start to enjoy some of the more frivolous things in life. And hey, that’s perfectly fine – you’ve worked this hard, you can afford to treat yo’self a little bit!
If you are starting a side hustle mainly to make a bit of money, then it’s not as high a priority as if you are trying to survive off your main hustle. Therefore the amount of time you devote to your side hustle really depends on how much extra money you want to spend. There’s no point in working yourself to the breaking point just to afford the latest pointless smartphone with the super fancy camera (*cough, iPhone 10, *cough).
But you may find that you enjoy making money through your side hustle and you may decide that you may want to work towards:
Sustainable Self-employment
Basically this means that you want to build your side hustle to such a point that it can pay for all your basic needs (see: Survival) and a little bit more. In other words, you want to be able to make enough money from your side hustle that you can leave your main hustle. This means that your side hustle becomes the main hustle.
If this is your financial goal, then you will want to devote a bit more time to growing your side hustle. Mainly you want to be asking yourself:
“How much money do I need to be making from my side hustle to become happily self-employed?”
And then break that down in terms of number of clients/sales/delivery of product and/or services that you need to achieve every month or so.
Currently, this is my financial goal for my side hustle. Full-time employment is not super reliable these days and if I can build my business to a point that if I lost my job, I can still live comfortably, then that’s pretty awesome.
Financial Independence
Which is really an extension of the previous goal of sustainable self-employment. The idea is to grow your business to the point where it becomes a fat juicy pipeline which requires a bit of maintenance to continue delivering income to you.
There are many ways to get there – but they all involve lots of time spent planning and putting in systems to make it happen. If this is your goal, be prepared to put in a lot of time now for a greater return (in both time and money) in the future.
Ultimately – this is what I am working towards as well. It involves quite a lot of planning and setting up systems and etc. etc. etc. (stuff which I will cover at some point in the future).
World Domination
Whoa, slow down there buddy. We’ll get there eventually – but for now, let’s focus on more realistic and achievable financial goals eh?
Stay tuned for the next tip in this series: Tip #2: Schedule relentlessly!