3 Hidden Costs Preventing Your Side Hustle From Being A Profitable Small Business
You've read the books and watched the YouTube videos about transforming your side hustle into a profitable small business you can pursue full-time, but what is holding you back?
You've already discovered many of the little costs of building a business, but you might not be seeing some of the big hidden costs that's keeping you from pushing through to the small business level. Most of these have nothing to do with opening your wallet, but with allocating your time and focus correctly. Your time and focus is your most precious resource as a side hustler, so let's use it efficiently and get the most out of what you have.
To make your side hustle into your career, you'll need to minimize or eliminate these hidden costs.
Hidden Cost 1: Taking Your Time
Speaking of time, most people have no idea how much time they are wasting on things that don't actually matter (also called productive procrastination).
When you're running everything yourself, you need to be fast and make decisions quickly. Large companies take FOREVER to make any little decision because forms have to be submitted, committees must meet (several times), analysis performed, options taken up the chain of command, and orders trickled back down, all before any real action is taken. As the business owner, you don't need to give yourself a form, you are the committee, you can use AI to help with analysis and options, and you are the only link in the command chain.
Your competitive advantage against large companies is your ability to quickly come to a decision and execute within minutes, not weeks.
As a side note, if you have any tips for speed, I'd love to hear them because I am actively working on my own speed.
Hidden Cost 2: Posting Inconsistently
Let's face it, people like what they can predict, and the dreaded algorithms are no different.
You might be saying, "But David, I want to be cool, hip, and unpredictable like Apple!" I hate to break it to you, but Apple (or any tech company) is consistently predictable where it counts. Sure, what they are announcing could be revolutionary, but they have the same quarterly earnings calls as anyone else and schedule their announcements like clockwork.
For content, you have to be consistent; it's better to post 4 consistent times every week for a year than post twice per day for a week, then nothing the next, and repeat.
Hidden Cost 3: Pursuing Perfection
Perfection is a myth and my favorite story about this is the Pottery Class (paraphrased from "Art & Fear" by David Bayles and Ted Orland).
A class of pottery students was broken into two groups with the first group told they would be graded on creating 1 perfect pot and the other told they would be graded on how many pots they created (regardless of how good they were). The first group read every pottery book they could find, watched the best potters on YouTube, and dissected different techniques to figure out how to hit perfection. The second group immediately got on the wheel and started playing around with the clay.
At the end, the first group produced a pretty good pot on their first try. The second group had gone through hundreds of pounds of clay, made a room's worth of pots, and their last batch was far better than the first group's single pot.
The lesson? You learn far better by getting into the filth and doing than by trying to come up with the "best method." In the end, you find it either way, but by doing, you have a room full of examples (or content) already, not a single piece.
What's even better is when you start eliminating these costs together.
Focusing on speed is multiplied when you aren't putting your time into perfection. You'll discover you have far more time than you originally thought that you can now put into being consistent with your content.
Consistently focusing on speed and doing will layer on itself day after day until you look back and have achieved more in a month than you had in the last year.
