MBA976 How to Build a Business On The Side P1

Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, your priceless daily business school that costs you nothing with our 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 hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's lesson is part one of our two part lesson on how to build a business on the side. Most of us just can't quit our jobs and start a business full time. So this two part lesson was one of the most popular requests we had from our listeners. So I want to deliver it to you. I know how it is. You can't just drop your job, drop your career at the drop of a hat and start a business. You got bills to pay, you got people relying on you. You need steady income. I know this firsthand. I side hustled for over 10 years before I became a full time entrepreneur. But over the years I learned what works and what doesn't when it comes to building a business on the side while you're in a job. And in this two part lesson I want to give you my step by step strategy. Exactly what to do if you're thinking about starting a business right now while you're at a job, you're going to learn how to prioritize your time, how to make sure that you have tight deadlines so you hold yourself accountable, how do you make sure you get your to do list done so you get your business off the ground while you're working, as well as how to deal with funding, how to make your first few sales, and how to grow your business and your audience before you quit your job. We got a lot to cover in this two part lesson. Part one today, part two tomorrow. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is supported by the Jordan Harbinger Show. This is Jordan Harbinger's all new podcast and it's a huge hit. Jordan teaches everything from what you do in a crisis, how to cultivate resilience and grit, how to handle uncertainty and instability, and how to protect your mindset so you're always performing at the top of your game. Every episode is loaded with practical insights and material. So if you love this podcast, you will love the Jordan Harbinger Show. Subscribe today on itunes. Stitcher, Overcast Whatever you use to listen to podcasts, this has become one of my must listen podcasts. So subscribe to The Jordan Harbinger Show. All right, let's build this business while you're in a job on the side. The first thing I want to say about this whole concept, about this whole topic, is that you're in a position of advantage actually when you build a business while you're in a job. Yes, you can dedicate all your time to the business, but you have the luxury of having a safety net. When you don't have regular income coming in from your job, when it's just you and your business, the stakes are incredibly high. If your business doesn't do well, if you don't make sales, you don't eat, you don't pay the rent. When I side hustled and built businesses on the side when I was a teacher, I was actually really willing to take more risks, try things out. There's a little bit of a feeling of fearlessness because, hey, you have a job, you're actually getting paid every month or every week or whatever it is. And worst case scenario, if the business fails, at least you still have your job. So a lot of people don't realize the advantage of doing this. The second thing is that if you've never started a business before, then side hustling, building a business on the side is a great place to start because you still have to learn a lot about business. You got to get some experience under your belt. You also want to learn what kind of entrepreneur you want to be, what kind of business you want to be in. And that may take some time. And it's nice to kind of do that when there's not a lot of pressure to actually make revenue to make money. So this is not a bad position to be in. Now, I would suggest just be wary of that. You can get comfortable with that. You can actually plateau in your business because, hey, you're in a comfortable space and you don't really extend yourself because you don't want to take that huge leap of being a full time entrepreneur. But we'll talk more about that in part two of this lesson tomorrow. But I wanted to start with that statement that this is actually a position of advantage. Starting a business while you're in a job gives you a sense of flexibility. You have your revenue coming in to pay your own expenses, your family expenses, and you're using some cash and some money to start exploring something on the side with very little or minimal risk because you have cash flow coming in. All right, I want to start with step one of starting a business on the side. And this is probably the Most important step of all. And a lot of people take this for granted. They don't even really focus on this. They kind of skip this step. And step one is commitment. You have to commit to doing this. You can't just say, I would love to start a business. You can't just say, that would be a great idea. I've always wanted to do that. You actually have to commit to yourself and say, I'm going to do this and I'm committed to seeing this through even if it fails. You got to be willing to say to yourself, I'm willing to go through the motions and build this business even if it fails. Why is that important? Because you got to be honest with yourself. I'm going to be honest with you. There's a good chance it's gonna fail. I'm not saying that you're not gonna be successful off your first business or your first side hustle. It's very possible. But it's also very likely that you'll fail. And you gotta be okay with that. You gotta get some failures under your belt. That's just par for the course for any entrepreneur. The most successful entrepreneurs out there have failed in their first ventures. It's normal. That's how you learn. You don't really learn anything when you win, when you actually succeed. And to be quite honest, from my own experience, knocking it out of the park and being a successful entrepreneur with your first venture is really unlikely. You just don't have the experience yet. That's like me saying I can perform heart surgery after reading a few medical journals. No, I need to get my hands into the operating room. I need to actually learn how to do all this stuff with hands on experience. So you gotta commit to actually building the business you have in mind. You gotta say to yourself, I will only fail. I'll only consider it a failure if I don't follow through and do this thing and give this a good shot. Give it a go. Too many of us say to ourselves, I have this business idea, I'm gonna start it. And then after we kind of think about it for a while and put up a business plan. A week goes by, two weeks goes by and we just let it go. We don't really follow through because we were not committed. You gotta commit sometimes I say commit. Even if you know it's gonna fail, just go through it. You can learn a lot through going through the motions. So step one is commitment. If you're serious about this, say to yourself, I will commit to seeing this through. I want to Put this product, this idea out in the world and have something for sale. That is the goal of you starting your first business. If this is your first side business, that's success. That's what you got to commit to. Launching it. Having something for sale, whether it's successful, whether it's profitable, that's a different matter. But right now our goal is just to get it out in the world so we're a doer and not a talker. Alright, Step number two, so important, hugely important. Something I learned the hard way again. And that's time allocation. You have to allocate time before you even start anything, before you even start writing down a plan or launching a website. You have to commit and allocate time to the side business. This is like picking up another job. If I picked up another part time job after my full time job, I got to show up to work. That's what I signed up to. And that's what you got to sign up to right now when you're starting a side business. Hey, I told you, I'm going to be honest with you when it comes to this advice, I'm always honest with you. But this is something I learned the hard way. If you don't put enough time into it, it's going to be incredibly hard for you to be successful as a side hustle. Remember, when you're starting a business, you're competing with everybody, not just people that are side hustling. You're competing with people that do this for 60 and, and 100 hours a week. So in my opinion, if you're going to start a side business, the minimum, absolute bare minimum time that you need to put aside is 15 hours a week. You got to do that. That's like really the minimum, absolute minimum. And that's if you're extremely good with your time, you're super laser focused when you're working and you have zero distractions. Why? Because 15 hours is really not much what you put into a week. 15 hours is what some people put in a day. Really. Honestly, some people put 15 hours of work a day. There are months when I started a lot of my ventures where I put 15 hour days. Even these days I work easy, 10 hours, 12 hours, not something abnormal. So 15 hours a week is the minimum you got to do. And that's bearing in mind that this is going to take a longer to actually get this product or this business out there. Now obviously if you could put in more than 15 hours, that's a super bonus. And that's really going to help you propel your business further. But I found that any less than 15, you just don't have enough momentum. What happens is that you put in 10 hours, you put eight hours a week, and you just don't see enough progress for you to be motivated to keep going. And what happens is that after a couple weeks, maybe even a month, maybe even two months, you feel like you really haven't gotten off the ground. And you just think this is just too hard and I can't do it while I'm at work with all the demands I have at work. So in order for you to get any kind of Momentum, you need 15 hours. I would even. My recommendation would be 20 hours. Really? But minimum 15 hours just so you can get some momentum. Now you might be thinking, where am I to get these 15 hours? Well, first of all, you can easily allocate five hours on one of your weekend days, like Saturday. Five hours is nothing. Especially if you're building something that you're passionate about, something that you love. You're fulfilling the dream right now. And the other 10 hours, just take two hours a day for. From the five days of the work week. Yes. This means you're gonna have to cut out some of your leisure time. I remember when I was building my businesses on the side, especially at the start, I had to cut out a lot of my leisure time. Things like my basketball league that I loved. But I couldn't commit to it anymore because I had to come home from work, have dinner and work on the business for a couple hours. Then I wanted one hour maybe just to relax and just diffuse, go to bed. Cause I had to wake up early in the morning. I was a teacher, remember? I had to get up like at 5:30 every morning. So you get the point. You gotta allocate at least two hours a day and then five hours during the weekend. At some point, that's the minimum. If you can put in 20 hours, 25 hours, even better. Now step three, you need deadlines. You need deadlines. You can't just say I'm gonna build it when I build it. You can take forever to build something if it's, you know, deadline free. So you should have milestones for every week. What are you gonna finish in these 15 hours? We're going to break down some of the things you're going to have to do first later in this episode as well as in tomorrow's episode. But you got to put some deadlines on yourself and you got to hold yourself accountable. One of the ways to hold yourself accountable is to make these deadlines public. A lot of people blog about the actual creation of their business, and they say, hey, my deadline for so and so is this. And then next week they report it and say, hey, I made that deadline or I missed that deadline. This is how I'm going to make up for it. And they make it public to hold themselves accountable. Some people feel like that helps. The point here is that if you don't have deadlines on the tasks you have to complete, whether it's, you know, putting up your website, whether it's the marketing, whether it's the actual product creation, whether it's sourcing the product, whether it's finding a location, if you have a physical business, you gotta have a deadline. You can't just say, I'll find it when I find it, or whenever I have time, or hopefully I'll get it done this week. You're just not gonna get it done if you don't hold yourself accountable. So deadlines are important. All right, step four. And we're just still setting up our whole routine of side hustling, building a business on the side. And that's your workspace. You need a quiet distraction, free workspace. When you're working on your business. If you don't have a room where you can have nobody interrupt you, whether it's a home office or some sort of den or something like that, you're asking for trouble. If you are allocating two hours a day to work on your business, and in those two hours, you're being interrupted five or six times, so that whole two hours can be considered a wash. Sorry, you just. You're not concentrated. You need concentrated time. You need to make the most out of every minute that you're doing this side hustle business. You don't have the luxury of the interruptions. You just can't have it if you want to get any kind of progress done. Again, I'm learning this the hard way. I had distractions. I had to have myself in a separate room and nobody bothered me. If that's not an option for you at home, then I would go somewhere after work, which, whether it's the public library, whether it's a cafe somewhere where you're not going to be distracted. Now, distractions are not only, you know, physical distractions, people and sounds and places, but it's also on your computer. You got to shut off social media. You got to cut out any kind of distractions on your computer while you're working. Shut off your email, client, whatever you're using to, you know, look at your email so you don't get distracted with popups of an email. You got, you got to go to town, you got to really make the most of every minute again because your time is limited. You so be wary of the space that you go to when you work on your business. All right, now we're all set up. We have our hours, we have our deadlines that we're going to set up with our tasks, we have our space. We're of course committed that we're going to see this through. Step one is that you got to get your idea out of your head and onto paper. You have to analyze your business idea before you actually get it out in the world. And there's two things we're going to do here. Number one, you're going to have a simple business plan. This is going to take you maximum an hour, maybe even less. Now you're wondering how do I write this? What do I do? No problem. Got you covered. If you go to100mba.net guides one of our guides, Free Guides, is a one page business plan. You can download it for free. And basically it's like a business type of canvas and it's a five step procedure where you answer some questions so you know what kind of business you're building. Now I don't have time in this episode to kind of go through the business plan, the one page business plan with you, but it's kind of self explanatory. When you download it, you basically answer some simple questions and it covers things like your idea, your cost, your market, how you're going to market all that kind of stuff. Fill out this one page business plan so you have your idea down on paper. Why is this important? So you can analyze your business idea and find out within yourself if this is something you actually want to do and that is actually feasible. Step two of getting your idea down with your business plan and analyzing it is taking our five steps of idea validation video course. Again, totally free. You don't pay anything for this. The point of this course and the workbook that goes with it is to force you to do these exercises to see if your business, if your product is actually something that people want. If you just go to 100 MBA net on the homepage, you can opt in for this course. You can enroll. It's a seven part video course with the workbook. Complete the course with the workbook. Again, it's going to take you about an hour to do. The workbook is going to take you a bit more because you actually have to do some exercises, get out in the world, talk to people to validate your business idea. So those are the two first two steps you got to do. You can definitely do everything I just talked about in today's episode in week one. Now I got one more thing I got to cover in part one of this two part lesson and that's creating a minimal viable product. We'll talk about that in a second. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Snoring is a serious issue not only for the person that's snoring, but the person that's sharing the bed with them. But luckily there's Zquai. Zquai is a revolutionary anti snoring product created out of one family's need for peace and quiet. Dan and Trina Webster were desperate for a solution for Dan's snoring. That personal desperation led to a simple solution to a problem shared by millions of Americans. And that solution is Zquiet. Made in the USA using soft BPA free material, Zquat is a comfortable, easy to use mouthpiece that has been helping snorers and their bed partners for 10 years. Just pop it in when you go to bed and it works immediately. 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This is a step past doing this course of idea validation and doing the workbook where you evaluate your idea. This is when you actually find out if people are willing to pay money for your product for Whatever you're offering, your service, whatever it is now, this doesn't have to cost you a lot of money. A minimal viral product is the minimal version of what you're thinking about offering. A lot of people when they start thinking about starting a business, they think of version 300, right? The version that is taking over the world. They think of Walmart, they think of McDonald's, when really they just need to think about cooking one burger, right? You got to think about the minimal. Minimal, Minimal viable idea or minimal version of your idea. Let me give you an example. Let's say I want to start a T shirt company. It's going to be an online store where you can buy T shirts with digitized graphics of your favorite pieces of work, pieces of art, whether it's Van Gogh's Haystacks at Noon or one of Picasso's pieces where he shows all this perspective. And you're going to make a kind of a retro, digitized version of it. Sounds cool. Right now, you don't need to print hundreds of T shirts, and you don't need to actually design every single kind of T shirt right now or build a store, any of that kind of stuff. What you need to do is sell one T shirt T shirt. I know that sounds very, very minimal, but that's what the whole point is here. You need to get the ball rolling. You got to find out if somebody's willing to buy it. So if you're a designer or you can hire a designer, you can get them to design one T shirt. One of your favorite designs, let's say, for example, you love Haystacks at Noon by Van Gogh and you want to make a really cool 80s graphic y digitized version of that on a T shirt. You get a designer to design it and you have a mockup as an image. Right. It's not a real T shirt yet. And you email as many people as you know, your friends, your family, anybody. Your point here is to sell this one T shirt. Say, hey, here's a T shirt. It comes in these sizes. It costs this much. Let's say, for example, you're going to sell it for $40. Can you get somebody to buy this one t shirt? If so, you might have something on your hands. If they say yes, ask them for the $40. Now, if your product is a lot more than $40, let's say your product is $5,000. You can ask for a deposit, but is that you're going to ask for some money and tell them that you'll deliver it once it's created, this is a startup. And here's the projected date of delivery. Once you've got one person, see if you can get more. Some people might say, hey, let's do some Google adwords to see if I could sell this. Yes, you can, but let's not complicate it. Keep it minimal, sell to one or two people, see if you can get three people, four people, five people. At that point, when you have, you know, let's say an order of five, you can go and go to a local print shop, you don't even have to go online or you can go online, get, get these printed. You're not going to pay, you know, bottom rates. You're going to have to pay a lot of money because the order is only 5T shirts. Even if you break even and you spend, you know, $40 in the printing and in the shipping and everything, you're trying to have a proof of concept here. Ideally you want to make a profit, but you want to see how much you're going to have to charge. Maybe you have to charge $60 for the T shirt. The point is, is that once you have a proof of concept and if you actually sold a minimal viable version of your business, it's fine. You know, one T shirt's not your business obviously, but you need to start somewhere. You gotta get your MVP out there. So think about what your most minimal version of your business is and start with that. This is something you can easily do in a week. You have a game plan now. You can get started even today. And in part two, in tomorrow's lesson, I'll be talking about what to do now that you have proven that you have a minimal viable product that's successful. How do you build around that mvp? How do you fund your business, how to plan to be profitable as soon as possible, how to build a website, all that kind of stuff, all while keeping your job. I'll be giving you a lot of examples from my previous side hustles as well. All right, that wraps up today's lesson, part one of our two part lesson on how to build a business on the side. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss tomorrow's lesson. Part two of this lesson. And don't forget, tomorrow is free ride Friday. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our courses. This Friday and this month we're giving away ezcourse, our 30 day course on how to build an online course. All you gotta do is leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw to win a free ride. Takes two seconds to leave us a review, and you enter the weekly draw for every week until you win. Alright, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. I know that this MVP stage might seem scary. Wow. I'm actually building something and selling something. Yeah, you gotta do it. That's what business is. Everything else is playing business. Everything else strategizing and taking forever to commit to building your business and sharing your idea with the world. That's just all talk entrepreneurs do. They try things, they see if they work, they see what doesn't work. They modify, they iterate. And we'll talk more about that whole cycle in tomorrow's episode. But the point here is that you gotta commit to this. You gotta do this. And the MVP is very simple to do. Think of the bare, bare, bare minimum of what your business would be. And if it seems overwhelming and too hard and too much cost and too difficult to do, then maybe it's not minimal viable enough. Get even more minimal viable. All right, thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Until then, take care, Sam.