MBA1016 Should You Start a 2nd Business on the Side?

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster.

And with a premium suite of monitors.

And accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O.

Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Because it's more than just finding out why others were successful. It's finding out how you will be successful. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn should you start a second business on the side. As entrepreneurs we get great ideas all the time. We come up with ways to solve all kinds of problems. But does that mean you should turn that solution into a business when you're already running one? I'm sure that many of you have thought about starting a second business, a third business, even a fourth business while you're running your current business or businesses. I certainly have and have done it. So in today's lesson I'll be sharing with you when is a good time? When is it right to start a second business or an additional business, let's say. And when is it a bad idea? Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. In today's lesson we're gonna be discussing should you start a second business, say an additional business to the existing business or businesses you have. Let's begin with when you shouldn't start an additional business. Now, some might say you shouldn't start a second business or an additional when your existing business is not doing well. Now, I'm here to tell you that's not necessarily true. That might be the best time to start another business or experiment with another business, because, hey, the current one is not doing so well. You might need to pivot. You might need to hop onto a different lily pad, right? But what I will say is you shouldn't start a second or additional business if you don't have the funding, if you don't have the money for it, if you do have the funding, if you do have the money, starting this business is not going to cost you much. Costs are low, then the risks are low, so you could be all right. But many people start second businesses that are costly and not only are they spending money to do it, but they also will be spending time. And that's something a lot of people talk about. As soon as you start thinking about starting a second business, you're going to start spending time on it, and that's going to be time away from your current business. Now, spending less time on your current business is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a bad thing. If you don't have a plan, spend less time, meaning that you need somebody to do the things that you spend time on. You need to replace yourself or replace some of yourself or some of your duties with a hire. Because building and launching a new business takes a lot of time and it's a long road. So if you have a current business and you're thinking about starting another one, how you can free yourself up in terms of time, because it's not just money you're going to be spending. You need to free yourself of time. Can you take off your plate and give it to somebody else that you can hire? And that leads me to the second point of when not to start a second business is that when you don't have the time, if you can't outsource your duties, if your time is already spread too thin, meaning that you might have other commitments in life, whether it's your family or health commitments, like you really need to go to the gym three times a week, cutting that out is not going to be a good idea for your health. Like I mentioned in yesterday's episode, time is limited. So if you don't have the time for it and you can't make the time, then you may want to put this idea on the back burner. Now the next thing I want to discuss is you have to answer the question why? Why do you want to start this second business or this next business? It's a great opportunity. Is not a good enough reason. I want to make more money. Also not a good enough reason. Because businesses, again are a long term thing. What does this business look like in five years, in 10 years? Do you still want to do it? To build it to a successful point? Are you able to hang in there long enough for you to be able to even have the option to sell it? It's a responsibility, it's sort of a burden that you're going to take on as soon as you decide to build this business. So keep this in mind. Now I want to give you some examples of what it's a really a good fit, a good idea to consider this second business or third business or whatever. And that's when you can utilize shared resources. Let me give you an example. Let's say you run a very successful cafe. Everybody loves your coffee. You got great customer service and you got a great manager that runs that cafe for you. You want to open a second cafe, that's a second business. Now you have a ton of shared resources that you can use to help build that second business. You have a great manager that can manage and also train new hires. You know what it takes to make a great coffee. You have a menu that works that you can implement in your next cafe. When it comes to ordering supplies, you can just double your orders and save some money when you order in bulk. You get the point. It makes sense when you can share resources. This is why it's very common to see a lot of software companies come out with one product. They nail it, people love it and they come up with another software product. Atlassian is a great example of that. Atlassian is a very, very successful software company in Australia. Great software like Jira, BitBucket, Hipchat, these are pride and true and very popular software apps. They started with one and they started building others. Obviously they had plenty of places to share resources, whether it was developer talent, whether it was marketing managers. Point is that Atlassian didn't start a software company, launch a software product and then went into high end fashion, right? Having shared resources to help your second business or third business or whatever really, really helps. It really allows you to have some sort of competitive advantage. Part of the resources is again your experience. You know what it takes to have a successful product or cafe or software. In Atlassian's example, they learn Some hard lessons and they can apply it in the next business they launch. Now, we talked about shared resources, but another big, big asset that could really help you when you start a second business is a shared audience. So when Atlassian started their software company, they built software for businesses. So naturally their customers and their interested leads were business owners, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, whatever it is. So when they launch their next business or their next product line you might want to call it, but they are kind of separate businesses. They can tap into the same audience, audience they've cultivated already. People that are already happy with their products and services, people that are already interested in their products and services. This is really gold because it allows you to have some sort of head start really when you launch that second, third, fourth business because you have an audience to talk to. You have an audience to sell to. You have somebody to say, hey, I have something new here, a new business, a new offering you may like. Again, Atlassian Saint, we're going into high end fashion. They don't have an audience in that, you know, in that marketplace, but they're gonna have to still build that audience, build credibility and build trust with people that are interested in that product. If you can tap into your existing audience with your new business, it might be a good idea to start it now. If you have that going for you have a shared resource, shared audience. The topper, I believe, is if you have those two already and your new business, your new offering, your new product doesn't really exist in your marketplace. Big opportunity. That means you could be first to market plain to people who, thing is, they've never seen it before, right? But the whole marketplace for that solution is going to be yours. Now, even if your product is not completely first to market, but the way you present your solution, or better than the competition in a different way can really hit a home run with this new business. Now the title of today's episode is should you start a second business on the sign. And that's very important because when you're running your current business, audience actually wants what you're building are about to build. Now you may kind of know from your existing product line or existing business, but you want to make sure this is where a minimal viable product is so important and where you want to invest the least amount of time and money to validate your product, to validate your business.

Dear McDonald's, your breakfast menu fire tens across the board. I could be happy with anything, even though I ordered the same thing every time. Thanks for not judging me. I'll Try something new next time.

Maybe score a two for five dollar deal on a sausage McMuffin with egg and more. Limited time only. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer single item at regular price.

If your team isn't using ClickUp, you're wasting time and data proves it. 61% of knowledge workers manage work more than doing it. Switching apps a thousand times a day, that's work. Sprawl and call costs millions. ClickUp replaces 20 apps with convergence, uniting projects, docs and chats while AI super agents handle the busy work. Join 4 million teams using ClickUp to finish work 30% faster. Try it free and get 15% off AI upgrades@ClickUp.com podcast that's C L I C K-U P.com podcast.

So we've talked about minimal viable products plenty of times here on the show and it applies when you build a second third, fourth business. When you're doing this on the side, this is a good chance for you to test, market and find out what people actually want and how do you build the right product. You can do this easily with a landing page or with the tool that Product Hunt has called Ship. Ship is an easy way for you to put your product idea out there and get feedback and to get leads really from people that would be interested. You get access to Product Hunt's vast audience of people that are really interested in new products. Definitely worth checking out. You want to nail that idea. You want to make sure that you come up with the best, minimal viable product for your audience before you launch, before you actually put it out there in the world. Now you're running your current business or businesses right now, so you can take a little bit of extra time to make sure you nail this. There's nothing wrong with pursuing a second third, fourth business while you're running your current business or businesses. But I wanted to do today's episode to show you when you have the best chance for success and how important it is to ask yourself the right question. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode when you hit subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast. This tells the app to download our episodes automatically every day so you don't miss a single beat, but it also gives you access to our archives. That's over a thousand episodes on everything business. So hit subscribe right now to get access. All right before I go. I want to leave you with this. Building a second business, third business can be overwhelming. So pace yourself, take your time and make sure you don't neglect your current business. Because, hey, it pays the bills, right? It makes sure that you're actually able to open that second business. So don't neglect. Take your time and try as much as possible to have some sort of crossover in audience and resources. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

Okay. Does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy, cute PC, some McNuggets and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now, so you do what you want.

Share and share alike with the 20 piece McNuggets from McDonald's for just $6, limited time only. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer.