Christian Osgood outlines two strategies for scaling a side hustle: set a $1 million annual revenue target to cover expenses, and reinvest most early earnings back into the business until you hit critical mass. He uses his real estate progression from a single condo to multi-unit properties as an example, and describes his time-blocking system to maintain focus without burning out.
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I'm about to share 2 tips on how you can turn your side hustle and your escape from the 9 to 5 into a multimillion-dollar business. I've done this on multiple companies. I'm going to share exactly how I did it and how you can do the same. Hello everyone, welcome back to the channel. This is Christian Osgood from the Bahamas. I am in Nassau at the Atlantis. This is one of the very few times I have taken a vacation and actual time off. And this is actually going to link right into my second tip for how to build a million or multimillion dollar business out of whatever your side hustle is. I've done this a couple of times, so really excited to share what works, but this will connect, I promise. Right now we are here with just me and my wife enjoying some time off. I did a lot of work from here, but I did actually take a couple of days fully off just to relax and reset before I turn on the 90 Day Burn. If you haven't heard of that before, Check out one of my recent videos. Caleb and I went over exactly what that strategy looks like. However, one of the first and most important things that you need to do when you are setting up a side hustle, a goal, a path to escape the 9 to 5, whatever it is that you want to do outside of your job, is you need to choose a big enough goal. I think on a very basic level, you need to choose something that can make $1 million a year. Now, why do we choose a goal that's this lofty or for some this small? But why is that the bare minimum? The reason is there are a lot of expenses, whether you do real estate, business, online business, physical product, doesn't matter. Whatever you're setting up, it's going to be harder than you think. It's going to take more time, more people, more money. You need to have a business that is scalable enough so the reward at the end of that is going to be worth it. This is why I got stuck and I started so much later than Cody in larger multifamily, but I started with a condo.. And I had to work a job and the condo, get a renter in there, wait for the appreciation, sold it, bought a duplex, bought another duplex. And I took about 8 years out of my career to do all the saving up to buy my house, that first condo, the duplexes. And that was still not anywhere near financial freedom or $1 million a year. What we found it actually took to do it in real estate was buying a 38-plex, a 6-plex, and a 7-plex in about a 3-month period. And then between the two of us, we bought a resort and about 200 other multifamily units. That just about did it. And so I'm going to be starting the part where I start paying down all the debt. We're going to document that on this channel. But you need to have enough top line income to cover the bottom line. Bottom line is extremely important. Managing your expenses is extremely important. As you're scaling though, you need the top line before you get to bottom line. You cannot get bottom line revenue if you do not have enough coming in in the first place. That is everything, which means you may be running on slim margins at the beginning. Most of what you make, you're going to reinvest into growth. I actually love this. This is, uh, MrBeast is probably the most prolific YouTuber for doing this exact strategy. But you take everything that you have made and you roll it back into the business and you reinvest and reinvest and reinvest until you hit critical mass and you can actually start paying off the debt. Then you go debt-free and then you have won. You own your stuff. You are ahead of the game. You carry no debt. You own what you wanted to own. And congratulations on your victory. Now, if you accomplish this at a younger age, you just go ahead and set new goals and new goals. And even if you're older, I think that everyone should be working on projects and moving forward till the day they die. But if you hit retirement, that's what you want to do. You can do it. For most of you, this means you've built enough revenue to sustain beyond what you need. You've paid off your debts and you've optimized your systems. You may have employees involved. Involved any of that. But again, the benchmark, rule number 1, build a business that makes at least $1 million a year. There are so many ways to do this. It can be real estate. It can be something else. I have done it in both. But it's up for you to decide. Now, the next piece, what does it actually look like on a work standpoint to build a million-dollar company? I've done this in an education platform. Property management will get there one day, but it's on the path. We've done it in real estate. What does it look like to put together these companies and these structures, whether it's real estate, business, an idea you're working on, a product? What does the actual workload look like? Now, for me, and this is most of the other successful entrepreneurs I know, not all of them, but this is the most tried and true path. They're people who hate weekends. If you like the structure of, hey, I go to work, I go home, I have what they call work-life balance, which means I work most of my time, and when I'm tired, I go home and do what I want. And I get 2 days to myself where I intentionally don't work. I hate that. I actually get really frustrated on weekends when I want to work with lenders or vendors and everyone's taking the day off. It is very frustrating. What I have found is a rhythm for me is more of a flow state. So what I do, first of all, it's called time blocking, but I actually put— because I have multiple companies, I put different emphasis on different days. So I have blocks of time that say this is dedicated to this company. Mondays, I work mostly on property management. Tuesdays, I work mostly on our coursework. Wednesdays are going to be dedicated to our resort business, which is another million-dollar business that we've built in hospitality. But as we go through the different steps in the different businesses, I've blocked out time for those. Then you have your normal schedule of the actual set pieces on your calendar. But when I do this topical thing and I kind of get into a flow, I get to work on things creatively. As I'm inspired, but focused on specific tasks for what is going to yield the most for each company. What this has resulted in for me is I usually work about 10 days at a time before I go, okay, I actually need a breather. I might take a half day or occasionally a whole day, but most of the time I'm not taking a lot of days off. Even on this trip, I am intentionally on vacation. I've been gone for 2 weeks at BPCon and then over here in the Bahamas. I have taken 2 full days off here and the rest of it have been partial or full workdays. My first 3 days in the Bahamas were almost entirely work. That being said, my company's moved forward. Everything is stable. I'm still getting to have a lot of adventures and relax, but I'm not focused on when's my next break, when's the weekend. I don't have set spaces. I can feel when I'm hitting burnout and I'm losing productivity. And that's when I stop. Don't worry about trying to maintain work-life balance. Find the balance for yourself. I call it a flow state combined with some time blocking. But if you can fill, fill your schedule with a structure that is just like that, I think that is the simplest way to take your side hustle or whatever your passion project is and turn it into a million-plus dollar business. If you want to learn more, I share a lot of these tips on Instagram @ChristianOsgood. Or just click follow and watch the rest of this channel. We try to share this stuff as much as humanly possible. And of course, if you have questions, join us Wednesday for our lives, 3:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.
