How to scale your side-hustle into a full-time career

Having an extra gig on top of your full-time job is becoming increasingly popular, with 39% of Americans reporting that they have a side hustle. Many people use their side gig to boost their savings or help cover expenses, but others see their hustle as a business with serious growth potential.

If you’re passionate about your side hustle and want to make it your career, prepare to take the leap with the following key strategies and get ready to turn your part-time project into a full-fledged business.

Adopt a growth mindset

To convert your side hustle into a full-time career successfully, you must first build confidence in your ability to be a business owner. Understanding what you’re working toward and knowing why you want to own a business can help you stay motivated as you take on the challenge of growing your side project.

Start visualizing ways your side project could expand, then brainstorm paths toward achieving those goals.

Expand your target customer reach

Discovering ways to expand your reach within your target market or identifying new potential markets is crucial to business growth.

To expand your reach or explore new markets, redefine your target audience by considering demographics, lifestyle, and interests. Narrow your focus to specific demographics or personality profiles that are most likely to benefit from your core offerings. When starting out, honing in on a niche audience can be a highly effective strategy for establishing a loyal customer base that propels your company forward. But to grow, you need to branch out to new audiences or find new ways to grow your business among your existing niche.

Utilize data analytics and social media to gain insights and engage with potential customers. Furthermore, you can keep your marketing message broad yet tailored to different markets to ensure your message resonates effectively. In an ever-evolving business landscape, it is also critical to nurture relationships with existing and potential customers as these connections form the foundation for sustainable growth and adaptability.

Study your competitors

Setting yourself apart from your competition is a smart way to build a recognizable brand. However, keep in mind that you can still learn from your competitors.

Consider studying different businesses in your sector, including more prominent brands and other growing small businesses. Browse their websites, follow their social media pages, and observe how they interact with customers.

By exploring their branding, marketing techniques, and product offerings, you can:

• Learn effective business strategies
• Avoid potential pitfalls
• Gain a better understanding of what makes your business unique

Scale your service or products

When you initially launch your side hustle, your primary focus may revolve around selling a specific product or providing a particular service. However, if you aim to establish your side hustle as a sustainable and dependable source of income, exploring avenues for expanding your offerings is beneficial.

For instance, numerous small business owners diversify by creating digital content that complements their products or services. Subsequently, they leverage this content to broaden their revenue streams through means such as advertising or affiliate partnerships.

In light of this, consider how to introduce your product or service alongside related offerings to facilitate the expansion of your portfolio over time.

Create a business plan

You may not have an in-depth business plan when you’re earning money on the side, and that’s okay. However, being a full-time business owner requires considerable planning and commitment. To that end, set aside time to write up a business plan that summarizes what your business does and how you expect to fund its operation. A plan like this can:

• Help keep you on track as you grow your business
• Serve as a professional primer when presenting your business to potential investors or partners

Open a business bank account

You may use your bank account to handle your business expenses and accept payments when operating a small side hustle. However, separating your personal and professional expenses is critical to grow your business.

Using a separate business account allows you to monitor all expenses and income, giving you an accurate picture of your business’s financial health. A business account also simplifies your taxes and protects your savings from issues with your company’s finances.

Register your business

By officially registering your business, you turn your side hustle into a legitimate, distinct legal entity. Additionally, having a registered business can:

• Provide you with certain legal protections
• Help separate your personal assets from your business assets
• Further establish your brand identity
• Ensure you’re keeping up with any legal requirements for business owners in your state

Design a professional website

Even when your business is still in the side hustle stage, having a website can make a massive difference in your success. A website is a centralized, easy-to-access tool that customers and clients worldwide can use to learn about your business or purchase your offerings.

You can also use your website to showcase industry-specific content, such as videos, blog posts, or tutorials, all of which can help build your credibility within your niche.

When setting up your website, start by claiming a relevant, impactful domain name that’s memorable to customers. Select a domain name that matches your business name or showcases your industry expertise through relevant keywords, such as .beauty, .photography, or .fitness.

By partnering with name.com, you can easily start your domain name search, secure a relevant domain name, and immediately connect it to a Wix website. This allows you to start building immediately and manage all your digital assets on one platform.

Leverage social media

Social media is another powerful tool for marketing your business. You can leverage social media platforms to connect with your target audience and engage with them in real time.

Consider using social media to share content that gives customers an inside look at your journey from side hustler to business owner. Doing this can help you cultivate a strong community of supporters who believe in you and your brand.

Additionally, social media provides a streamlined way to:

• Gather authentic feedback from your customers
• Provide prompt customer support
• Encourage customers to connect with one another
• Collect customer emails to include in upcoming lifecycle marketing campaigns

As your business expands, you can use your social media pages to funnel customers to your website and promote your online shop. Furthermore, you can keep your audience engaged and informed by implementing email solutions to create targeted email campaigns and automating responses at various stages of the customer journey.

Develop a schedule

Once you’ve laid the groundwork for growing your business, start treating the journey like a full-time job by setting up a schedule. Even if you still have a full-time job, you can dedicate a certain amount of time each week to expanding your side hustle.

Being consistent with your schedule allows you to promote steady growth for your business. To that end, experiment with your schedule until you discover what allows you to balance your side hustle expansion with your other obligations.

When you’re ready to go full-time, have a plan for sticking to your daily schedule, managing your workload, and staying focused throughout the day.

Consider scalability

Starting a side hustle often means handling every aspect of the venture yourself. However, as you transition your side project into a full-fledged business, it’s crucial to keep scalability in mind to prevent becoming overwhelmed. After all, your day only has limited hours, imposing constraints on the amount of work you can personally manage.

In your pursuit of scalability, consider expanding your team by hiring employees or implementing automated systems to manage administrative tasks efficiently. Moreover, consider the possibility of securing a dedicated workspace as your business grows to accommodate its evolving needs.

Set achievable goals

Becoming an entrepreneur is a serious undertaking, so it’s essential to be realistic with your goals and patient with your progress. Don’t give up if you don’t see immediate success—remember that growth takes time.

To that end, here’s a strategy for effective goal-setting:

• Identify your long-term business goals
• Break down those long-term goals into more manageable benchmarks
• Celebrate successes along the way

Setting small, reasonable goals can help you maintain momentum and achieve consistent, gradual growth.

• Optimize your systems

Every successful business has standard operating procedures and policies to ensure a consistent, high-quality customer experience while managing administrative issues behind the scenes.

So, when scaling your side hustle, develop official processes for the core functions of your business and regularly look for ways to make them more efficient. By continually optimizing your business’s operations, you can:

• Maintain a strong customer experience
• Ensure your business runs smoothly
• Free up time and resources, which you can then invest back into your business as you find new ways to grow

Seek networking opportunities

As a small business owner, networking is key for expansion. Networking can help connect you with other like-minded entrepreneurs, introduce you to potential investors and business mentors, and find qualified employees.

Be proactive about connecting with others in your industry, whether engaging with online communities or attending in-person events. When you meet others in your sector, be prepared to promote yourself and ask for advice about committing to your business full-time.

Have a plan for setbacks

Growing a business comes with challenges, and expanding your side hustle into a full-time career involves a certain amount of risk.

Before launching your new endeavor, consider setting up a plan for setbacks to help you overcome any potential roadblocks. Your setback plan could involve:

Diversifying your income streams

Building a healthy savings account to help your business thrive until it becomes consistently profitable

Scale your side hustle with Name.com

Creating a strong digital presence for your side hustle gives you a direct channel to connect with customers and advertise your business as it grows. By registering a custom domain name with Name.com, you’re investing in valuable digital real estate that you can use to launch your business.

Claim your digital identity today using Name.com’s intuitive domain name search tool, and get ready to turn your side hustle into a full-time career.

Sources:
Bankrate. Survey: 39% have a side hustle, and 44% believe they’ll always need one. https://www.bankrate.com/personal-finance/side-hustle-survey/