Taking Your Side Hustle to a Full-time Gig

Is your subscription box business your side gig? Are you ready to make it your full-time job? Let's talk about what you need to do to make it happen. Come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Hey there, it's Sarah. And today we're going to talk a little bit about taking your side hustle to a full-time gig. Now, a side hustle, if you're unfamiliar with that term, is something that you do on the side. Typically you have a full-time job, you have something that you have income from full-time, and you start a side hustle to make income on the side to help yourself, your family, save for something, take vacations, whatever you use your side hustle for. I mean, that's, that's completely up to you and your family, but a lot of people have a side hustle to supplement their income, their everyday living income. And a lot of people in our community, in the Launch Your Box community, they have a side hustle with their subscription box. I started my business as a side hustle. I was working full-time. I was an art instructor. And I was teaching at a local studio and I started my business. I started making these frames and it was never this business that I started that I thought would ever become like, it would become my business. It was this side hustle. It was a way for me to earn extra money. And it was great because it helped our family a lot. You know, we were, we lived paycheck to paycheck for just a very, very long time and being able to have, more than $20 in your checking account was awesome. Be able to take a vacation that you never could have afforded before was an amazing gift that I was able to give my family. And just being able to eat out for dinner, those things, you know, I tend to maybe take for granted now, but I didn't have the luxury of being able to do that when I first started my business because our paychecks paid our bills and we lived very, you know, We had a, we had a comfortable home, but we didn't have a lot of extras. There was not a lot of frills to our, to our lives. And we didn't get to go and do a lot of things. And so when I started my little side gig, um, it was the way that I, we had extras, we had money to go eat out. We could go to the movies, we could take a weekend trip. And we were, we weren't able to do those things very often before. And so if you're sitting here right now listening and you've got your side gig going, and I want to say, I'm proud of you because you work all day at your at your real job, your— and I say real job, but I shouldn't say that— your regular job. And then you work all night, all night on your side gig. And my children were little. My children were babies and they were young and I would put them to bed. We would do bath time. I would get them put to bed and then I would stay up and I would work into the hours of the night working on my side gig, never with the dream of building a business the way I have, but always just this feeling of accomplishment that late at night when I'm, when I'm painting in the, in the extra, in our extra dining room, I knew that I was bringing something extra to our family and it was making our lives better and it made us more comfortable and less stressed out. It was taking some of the financial burden of our family off. And that made me feel good about myself and it made me feel good about what I was doing. And I loved my side gig. I would rather do that all day long than go to my regular job. And so many of you might be feeling that way and you might be using that income for those extra things in your life. And I love that you do that. I love that you are using your income that way, but maybe you're to the point where you can see the potential of your business. And when you can start to see the potential of the way your business is going and it's no longer looking like this side gig thing, but now you see the potential of it being your full-time gig. How do we get there? It's, it's a struggle and it's not something that you want to gamble with. You know, your family's finances are very important. Um, and there's more that comes with a full-time job than just the paycheck, but you have benefits and things like that. When you work for yourself, those aren't as easily ready available for you as when you're working for someone else. But I'm going to take you along a journey of mine of how I went from having a side hustle to my full-time business. I went from just having an extra couple hundred dollars in my pocket to building a multi-million dollar business. And what I can pay myself now in a month was more than I made in a year's time. And I know that you can get there and it's, it's not hard, but it's a journey. And we just, we have to make a plan. We have to take that roadmap and look at this as a long-term goal. So if you're ready to start taking your side gig and making it your full-time gig, um, let's talk through that and let's see what that looks like and let's put that little target point on the map. So the first thing that I really want you to think about is what is the income that you need to replace? So what is that yearly salary or what does your yearly income look like when you add up your paychecks? What is that dollar amount that needs to be replaced. And I'd love for you, if you're in a place where you can grab a piece of paper, let's just start making some notes as we talk through this. Because when we get done with this podcast episode, I really want you to feel like you have an idea of what it's going to take to take your part-time gig into a full-time gig for, for you. So let's just jot down what is that salary, what is that yearly income that needs to be replaced before we can quit our job. And then there's a couple other things, because quitting our job and going full-time with our business isn't always about the, the money. It's not always about that income, but it's about maybe the time that you are working. So are you working 40, 50, 60 hours a week right now in your full-time job? And maybe the goal is that you want to work less. You want to have income enough to pay your bills, but you, you are tired and you want to work less. So maybe That's one of your goals. Maybe you want to make more income. Maybe you want to have more revenue than you're currently making. So is, is that the goal of the business? Maybe you want to, you want to buy your dream house, or maybe there's some big picture, big ticket item that's been on your dream list for a while, and you're ready to make that happen for yourself. So I want you to really figure out what is the goal here. The, the, for me, the goal was to be able to do something I really loved doing and be able to replace my full-time income, like have enough money in my bank account that I could go to the movies when I wanted to, that I could go out to dinner anytime I wanted to and, and be able to pay my bills at my house comfortably. And so that was really my goal. And so you've got to look at that, that number. And the other thing is is that what is the survival income that you need? So maybe not, it's maybe it's not the replacement income, but it's the survival income. If you look at your bare bone expenses every month, and this is going to take a little bit to figure out, but if you could just get a piece of paper out and start thinking about what is the mortgage or the rent, what is the utility bills? What is the cable and the phone bill? Like, what is the grocery bill look like? If you could put, what is your survival monthly budget? What does that look like? That's going to help us determine a lot of things too. So I want you to, I want you to think about all those things, the big picture. What do I need to replace? And then not only just replacing it, where would I like to be? What income would I like to have so that I have the things that I'm missing or want now? And then what is that drop dead point of this is survival for us? We have to pay the car payment. We have to pay the house payment. We have to have groceries. We have to have the lights turned on. What is the survival monthly income that you need? And I know that if you're in this push and pull with yourself, I see it with our community. There's several people that they're ready to make this their full-time gig, but they're scared or they feel stuck and they, they feel like they can't take the leap. It's too scary. It's too risky. And if we don't ever make a plan to take the leap, we're going to sit back and look and wish we had taken the leap. It's a security blanket. Like having that steady paycheck in our bank account is our security blanket. Having the benefits so I can go to the doctor whenever I want to, that's a security blanket that we have. And it's a great benefit and it's a great thing, but we have to decide what do we want to do long-term. And so once we figured out what the replaceable income we need is, and then what is our Survival income. What do I need just to survive? We have to figure out, is there someone else in the household that helps pay those bills? So typically your spouse, or maybe you still live with your parents and they help pay the bills. Like, can— what portion of that survival income that's needed can be covered by someone else in the household? You know, for me, I knew that I needed to make X number of dollars and my husband has a good job. And we, we looked through our finances when I was at the breaking point, I was at the breaking point of, I really think this is a, I can make this a full-time gig. And I really think this can work, but I'm really scared. And you might be feeling that way too. And I, we really had to look at what could we pay from my husband's salary If I made nothing, if I made nothing, could his salary cover our bills? Almost, but not, not enough. And so we had to look at what kind of income would I need to survive so our family would survive. Because when you're building a business, you're not making a lot of money in the beginning. Like, it's not like, okay, I put the open sign on my business. And now I have a paycheck. That's not how it works. And any of you listening that have been building your business know exactly what I'm talking about. It takes time. There's a lot of things that go into this. Um, and so starting a business takes an initial investment. So what is that investment going to be? And you've got to figure out, you know, if you've already started your side hustle, you already have invested in products, supplies, packaging, all those things. If you haven't started your business yet, you're going to have to figure out what that investment is for you to get started in your business. And you have to realistically know that you're not going to take a paycheck for a while because we have to reinvest in our business as we make money so that we don't deplete our savings account. So we don't take our family money that we've been saving all of these years, our savings account. We don't want to use that to build our business. We want to take one initial investment to get our business started. And then as we make money, We're taking that profit and we're putting it back into our business, and we have to do that for a little while, which means we're not going to get a paycheck right away. For me, it was 9 months before I was able to pay myself a regular paycheck, and that doesn't mean that I didn't make anything for 9 months. It means that when I would make money, I would reinvest it in more supplies. When I would make money, I needed more product. When I would make money, I needed more things, and that way I could keep building my business, because if we don't we don't ever put money back in our business, we are not able to grow. I knew that my goal was to grow this business that I had an income from and that I had a steady paycheck from. It wasn't this lavish income that I wanted. I wanted to replace my $48,000 salary. That is all I wanted to replace. That was a big deal to me. I made $48,000 a year at my job and I wanted to be able to replace that with a paycheck from my business every month. And that felt big and heavy and a lot of pressure, but that's all I needed. And so it took a while. And so the transition happened like this. The transition happened with me working full-time, starting my side hustle. So this would have been 8 years ago. Started the side hustle. I started making money. I started selling my frames. To the people I was teaching my art classes to. And I would have nights where I would sell $200, $300 worth of frames to the students in my classes. And this was like cash. This was money. This was something I had in my pocket to be able to contribute more to my family while still getting a paycheck. And then I would take part of that money and I would reinvest it into buying more wood so I could get more frames. And more paint and more options. And then I started getting decorative frames and I started, you know, really increasing my business. And so every time I would teach these classes, I was making a couple hundred dollars a night extra, um, building my business. And that initial investment into my business was $1,500. I started with $1,500. I bought wood, I bought framing supplies, I bought paint. That's what I used to start my business. And then as I started to sell the frames, I would take not only half— because you got to figure out, some of us, a lot of us have half of our costs tied up in that product, but it was more than half. So I was taking 80% of my profit and I was reinvesting it back in my business. I needed to grow my business. I needed more frames. I was selling out every time that I would go. I needed more time to paint more frames in the middle of the night while my kids were sleeping, because every time I would take these, I would carry these frames in these big bags to my classes, I would be wiped out by the time the class was over and I could have sold more. And so then I was like, I got to work more. And so this is how the business started. It was all doing it out of my home. I didn't have a lot of overhead, but they started building our bit, my business, and I had extra money to go do extra things. But at that point it wasn't replacing my income. And I knew that I needed to have a strategic plan to be able to say, I want to do this full-time. And The thing about that is, is that it starts off, you're not gonna, you're not gonna make enough sales to do it full time for a little while, and that's okay. But if you can have sales every week or sales every month, it starts somewhere and you just keep building off of that and you reinvest your profits back into your business so that you can continue to grow it. I was doing that and I did that for almost a year, and then I looked at my husband, I said, I think I want to quit my job. And he was like, whoa, what are we doing here? We just got comfortable. We've had this little extra side hustle money. We've paid our bills down. We paid off credit cards. We were, we were at the point where we were starting to pay off one of our cars. Like we were really financially helping our family. And now I was like, hey, I want to leave my steady paycheck that goes in my bank account every month because one, the time I needed to grow my business, I no longer had. I was, working during the day full-time and then working at night almost full-time as well. And so it was like burning the candle at both ends. And I had no more time to make more money in my side hustle because I had no more hours left in the day. And I knew that if I wanted to increase that, I needed to decrease something else. And so the conversation went like this. It went something like, you know, I'm going to use my profits from this Christmas season and we're going to save those into this special bank account that's going to be my nest egg for when I quit my job. And so I did a lot of Christmas shows that year. I taught extra classes, so I had extra income on my paycheck and also I had extra side hustle money too. And I kept funneling this money into this bank account. I wasn't spending it. I wasn't paying off that car that I wanted to. I wasn't taking extra trips. We weren't buying expensive things. I was funneling it into this special account. And I knew that I needed 6 months worth of that survival amount in this account before I would feel comfortable quitting my job. Now, someone else listening might feel more comfortable just saying, hey, I quit and walking out the door. I did not feel that comfortable. And I probably still wouldn't to this day. I don't gamble with money a lot. Um, I don't, I don't make a lot of risky decisions. Um, with money. And so that was important to me, that I would give myself 6 months to make this work. And I knew, I knew that if in 6 months I couldn't make this work, I have a great resume, I have a great education, I have a great, you know, solid work history. I can go find another job. And I wasn't worried about that. I just really wanted to make this work. So I set myself up for 6 months to, to dig in, get the business going, knowing I could pay my salary that I was leaving for 6 months based on the savings account. And so that's what, that's the first challenge. What would 6 months look like for you? And what can you do now while you're working your side hustle to generate enough extra revenue to build 6 months worth of income for you as a, as a nest egg? And maybe you don't need that much, but it's the survival amount. It's not a huge amount, It's what, what bills do I have to cover that no one else in my household can cover? So it was what bills did I need to cover that my spouse did not, was not able to pay with his paycheck. And so I put that money in an account and I quit my job. And it didn't start with me just quitting. I pulled back some of my hours, talked to my boss at the time and said, hey, can I work one less day a week? Um, sure, no problem. I used that day to start building my business even more. I had more hours in the day to do social media, to do email marketing, to make the product I was selling. And so I started pulling back and I worked one less day a week, and then I started working two less days a week. And then it got to the point where I had to quit because she wasn't going to let me keep working less and less. And so I had to make that really hard decision. It's a hard decision, y'all. It's a hard decision. And I ended up leaving. And started my new, my new full-blown big girl business. And it was hard. It was hard. I was selling stuff. I was working every day, all day, um, doing the things, but it took me a while to really make enough revenue that I didn't have to put it back into my business, that I could start taking some money. And I would take some, you know, every now and then I would take some money to make my car payment that month, or I would pay myself so I could you know, pay part of the utility bills or something like that. I would take money, but I wasn't taking money steadily. And so I wanted to get to the point that no matter what happened, I would be able to give myself a paycheck every month. So I want you to think about what that is. What's that minimum? And then I need you to start making a plan to work towards that. So what's the date? So we're going into the holiday season. You're probably going to make some extra money this holiday season. Can we bank that extra money into an account? This is my I'm going to quit my job account. Can we bank that right now, figure out what those survival expenses are so that we can make a plan for the new year? And then we have to put a target date on this. So what's that target date look like? Is that 8 months from now? Is that 1 year from now? If we don't we don't ever make a target, we cannot hit it. We'll just keep pushing it down the road. So I need you to get your calendar out and make a target date to quit your job. If you always have that security blanket, you won't hustle as hard. Like, that's it. Like, that's the bottom line. If you always have that paycheck, you don't have to hustle that hard. So is that security blanket stopping you from realizing a bigger dream, a long-term dream? That's the question I want you to ask yourself. I don't want anybody quitting their job all willy-nilly and not being prepared for that. That's not what we're, that's not what we're about. I want you to plan for it. I want you to create a target date, a target amount in that special account that we're going to create. And I want you to start working towards that goal so that you can quit your job and go full-time. The other really big piece of this puzzle is that we have to be profitable. If your profit margins are not more than 30% right now, it's not time to quit your job. You don't have enough money to reinvest. You don't have enough money to give yourself a paycheck unless you're doing huge volumes of stuff. And you're probably not if you're— this is your side hustle. So we need to push our margins. We need to push them and increase them so that we have the extra funds available. Reinvest back in your business and start making progress to paying yourself. So right now, if you're not paying yourself consistently, let's start with a number. Maybe that's $200 a week. Maybe that's $400 a week. If we're just taking $400 once a month for our car payment, how can we give ourselves a steady amount So that it feels like a paycheck, even if that amount is $50 a week. Let's start working on that, giving ourselves something every week, putting something in our nest egg. And then we're going to, we're going to work on increasing that over time. If you get so comfortable with your side gig money, because it's extra money, it's like fun money. You're never going to quit your job because you don't want to give up your fun money. So let's be responsible. We have to take responsibility for our own results. If we spend all of our fun money all the time because it's extra, we're not preparing ourselves for a long-term goal. So we have to be responsible for that. More savings equals quicker results. So the more money you can save for that target date of quitting your job, the quicker results, the quicker you're going to get to that target date. We spend a lot of our fun money, our, our side hustle money. Then it's going to take us longer, and that's okay too. It depends on what season of life you're in right now. For me, I'm looking at long term. I'm looking at the big picture and how I want to build my business. And I'm sitting here 8 and a half years after starting this little frame business in the extra dining room of my house while my toddlers were sleeping. And I made a full-time income for myself, for over 20 employees. And the freedom that I get to go to work when I want to work. I get to leave when I want to leave. I get to go and do what I want to do. And I have this incredible sense of accomplishment and pride in what I get to do every day. I am not saying this is easy. I am not saying I don't work hard. We work hard. We work hard. But I get to wake up and do what I want to do and do what I love to do every single day. I don't have to clock in and out. I don't have to answer to anyone. And I've created this really awesome business from my side hustle 8 years ago. I want you to think about what your life would look like in 8 years. Never could I have dreamt this. I want it for you too. I know it's possible. So let's start taking the steps to make your side hustle your full-time gig. Make sure you subscribe to the Launch Your Box podcast. I'd love for you to take a minute to rate and review it. Let me know which episode is your favorite so far. Don't forget to join me next week right here.