The number one reason why people don’t start a side hustle is because we were raised to believe in the ideal of the entrepreneur. In order to be a successful entrepreneur, we need that one big, stellar, awarding-winning idea that will hit us like a thunderbolt one sunny afternoon and it will change the world!
“Side hustle” means many different things to many different people but we can all agree that 99% of us are just not born to be entrepreneurs. Wrong! It’s 10 % about your product and 90% about how to manage your business.
BUT what if you don’t have an idea of what to offer the world? It’s all about just taking the first step! Playing, experimenting, investigating and refining your ideas – no matter how big or small. All you need to be able to do is sell one product or service to one person for $1… and then repeat!
Show notes
- It became so apparent to me that people don’t understand the concept of “side hustle”.
- We struggle to overcome the traditional idea of an entrepreneur.
- Feedback from my webinar last week is that most people don’t believe that they have THE next best thing.
- We idolise entrepreneurs as misnomers who stumble across an idea, have the guts to give up everything to make it successful, and become mega rich.
- The first myth is that this thunderbolt idea will NOT make or break your business idea.
- The second myth is that this thunderbolt idea will NOT just come to you while you are waiting around.
- Starting your side hustle is not about being a professional entrepreneur but having multi-disciplinary skill sets.
- It’s like an athlete that doesn’t specialise in one athletic discipline but can complete a decathlon!
- You need to build your skill sets in all areas of business.
- There WILL be guaranteed failures. You need enough resolve to overcome them.
- A successful business is not about one grand idea but about endurance.
- It’s 10 % about your product and 90% about how to manage the business.
- The most difficult part is building a repeatable, scalable business that attracts a continuous flow of customers to know, like and trust you AND your product.
- BUT what if you don’t have an idea of what you to offer the world?
- There are so many tools and platforms that monitor trends and niches from products to services.
- Shift your mindset from thunderbolt idea to using freely available universal tools to find what you want to offer the world.
- Sign up for my webinar to understand exactly how this works. You’re welcome!
Sign up for the Side Hustle – course starts 15 May and doors close COB 14 May
Sign up for my 16-week side hustle training course with 9 modules and 31 videos to help YOU find your idea to launch your repeatable, scalable, successful business!
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Transcript
Lisa Linfield: 00:21 Hello everyone and welcome to today’s episode of Working Women’s Wealth. I’m going to be chatting to you about the number one reason why people don’t start a side hustle and why it’s so wrong. And it’s embedded within that concept that you have to be a born entrepreneur, which is a mindset that is totally incorrect. There is no such thing as a born anything, but a lot of what we do in terms of starting businesses is just putting one step in front of the other.
Last week’s live webinar confirmed something for me that comes up time and time again, is that the feedback from the participants was that people don’t start a business or side hustle because they don’t think that they have one of those award winning absolutely stellar ideas. Those ones that you have been able to pitch on a TV show that change the world and get given kajillions to start it off. Those ideas that enable you to give up your day job and start that perfect business where all will be right with the world.
You see, most people are waiting to receive a thunderbolt idea, one that strikes from above. And this is the first biggest myth that anyone can have about starting a side hustle. Firstly, the thunderbolt idea is not what will make or break your business success. And secondly, it is never going to come to you in a single puffiness moment. As you can guess, both of these could not be further from the truth if you tried. Creating a successful business, one that can help you in the money you need to give up your full time job is like doing a decathlon. ‘That thing in the Olympics that requires you to have 10 sports in order just to finish the race’
You see, your idea or your product value proposition is just one of the 10 sports. It’s one of the very many things you’ve got to get right in order for you to have a successful business. It is an important part, and I’m not going to say it’s not, but it’s only one small part. Some people may have big, complicated, wonderful ideas that actually might be earth shattering. But to start off with one of those big, complicated, wonderful ideas before you’ve learned all the other parts of what it’s like to run a business is like trying to do the Iron Man of swimming, running and cycling before you can even walk around the block. You have to build your skill set. You have to build your fitness for being in business. You have to build the mindset that you need to keep doing it every single day and to pick yourself up when the absolutely inevitable and guaranteed failures sit around the corner.
Most people either never start a business because they have no idea or they give up because they don’t have the training or the business skillset strength to complete that marathon. When you realize that building a successful and long-term business requires you to build strength in so many different skillsets, flexibility in your approach to product and customer growth and endurance to make sure that your business survives the long haul, you’ll see that the smallest part, although very important, is what you actually sell. In fact, the best way to start a business and to build Olympic and marathon level skillsets is by starting small. You have to walk round the block first before you can run a marathon.
Choose an idea in any field that interests you and focus on the learning journey first, how do you set up a website? How do you launch a product? How do you build clients outside of your family and friends or people who already know you? If it’s a physical product, how do you source one product? How do you photograph it? What kinds of ads will sell? How do you get it to the customer? Which courier companies are reliable? How many people send your product back?
When I was waiting for my perfect lightning bolt idea and I was exploring different businesses and concepts, I decided that I wanted to set up a franchise. I’d read Robert Kiyosaki’s book and agreed with his view that franchises were a great way to learn a whole handful of lessons that everybody needed to learn without having to worry about what product to sell and what the branding and marketing look like, and I think it’s a great view and a great perspective. So I settled on a printing franchise, one that could help small businesses with their printing and binding and other stationery needs.
You see, I love stationary, but I think what I love more than the stationary itself is the idea that if I buy the stationary, that it’s all going to somehow magically organize and file, and little labels of everything in my office will suddenly jump into order and my office will look magically neat. Anyway, with this idea, I went and met with a friend of mine who had started a business or two and had some really amazing guidance from him. But the lesson that struck me the most was a saying that he said to me, which was, “Lis, you’ve got to sell one product once to one person for dollar and then repeat.” It really was the most valuable lesson that I’d ever learned because it taught me that there’s a huge amount to get that one product art to sell the first time to get someone to give you one brand and then be able to build it and scale it.
The hardest part of any business is to create the sales engine. A repeatable, totally scalable way to get a continuous flow of people to know about you and your product, to like you or your product enough and then to trust you and the product promise enough that they will buy it, that they will trade their hard earned dollars for some form of satisfaction that they seek from your product. And whether you’re selling tablecloths, training courses, coaching a book you’ve written or your gym kit, the same marketing strategy of know, like, buy and trust is needed. The same strategy where people will only buy something small until they trust you enough to invest more of their hard earned dollars with you.
But what happens if you don’t have a product, that you have absolutely no idea what you will sell? There are so many tools out there these days that can help you quickly pick up new trends. New trends in what selling new product niches within those trends, the volume, the location of where people are buying and they can even help you identify manufacturers of those products. Who in China sells it? Someone in India, who locally manufacturers it? And for those of you who don’t sell any physical products like me, there are also amazing platforms that are available for information based products and services such as consulting, selling books, designing a course, any of the information products, the platforms out there are so easy to use.
If you can drag and drop these days, you can build a website or use a product. You just need to shift your focus from trying to come up with a thunderbolt idea to finding and using the tools available out there to help you narrow down and launch one small idea and then learn how to scale that knowledge and that product to create a successful business. Successful businesses or decathlon. And in order to win the business Olympics, you need to master each and every element of it. So focus on starting small and learning. There is no such thing as get rich quick, just a learning journey of daily improvement and you’ll get the growing business you so deeply desire.
Today the cart is open for my online training course, the 16-Week Side Hustle. It’s a nine module, 31 video training course that will take you from finding your business idea through to