What No One Tells You About Turning Your Hobby Into a Business
Ohhhhh boy. If you’d have shown me a blog like this years ago—before I’d successfully done it—I would’ve been frothing at the mouth for tips, tricks, and techniques on how to successfully execute this. I probably would’ve saved myself a lot of lost time, also.
Entrepreneurs are a different breed. We have a repulsion to outside employment that is hard for people without it to understand.
If you’ve laid awake more nights than you can count, dreaming of what it would be like to work for yourself, know that I am you.
It is possible But it is hard work. Not everyone is cut out for it, and that’s ok. Sometimes you can’t know until you know.
Here’s a 40,000 foot view of what I know on how to turn your hobby into a business successfully.
1. Get serious about business
When your hobby becomes your means of income, it no longer is a hobby. That means:
You can’t just do it when you feel inspired anymore. You have to show up, every day, whether you want to or not.
You don’t have anyone to call in sick to anymore. The responsibilities you might’ve been able to successfully avoid at your day job will be waiting for you to come back when you’re self-employed.
This means you need to take this stuff more seriously. Your customer-acquisition strategies can’t die because you’re busy. Your taxes will need to be done (get an accountant!). Profit margins need to be analyzed. Wasted time needs to be reclaimed. Everything matters now.
Stop treating your hobby like a hobby when it becomes your business.
2. Up your self-discipline. Boundaries, baby
Hand in hand with getting serious about the technical and business side of things, you need to just get better at self-discipline as a practice.
At least for a little while, set a standard “work hours” for yourself and don’t stray from them. Don’t allow things to interrupt them all willy-nilly.
Teach your family and friends to respect the time you’re in the office working. You might become the friend who gets called at 1:30pm on a Tuesday to help do something. That’s ok in an emergency, but benefit yourself and your business by not making it standard practice.
3. Fill each day with making and managing
No matter your industry, there’s an element of your job that’s going to be fun (the making) and then there’s stuff that are just tasks to be done (the managing).
In a perfect scenario, your day should have a bit of both. Emails need to be answered. Payments processed. Bills paid. All that stuff. Those days can be sort of lame and you might find that you avoid them (🙋🏻♂️). That’s fine for a time, but it can’t go on forever.
Be the responsible adult who gets stuff done for part of the day, but leave another chunk of the day—however small—to practice the hobby you turned into a business. If you don’t balance both enough, you will very quickly find yourself not as satisfied as you once imagined.
4. Take inventory of your time, and then optimize it
It’s ok that, especially in the beginning, you’re going to eat the cost of extra time taken on things you don’t really get paid for. But keeping track of all the hours you spend doing menial tasks that are just time-sucks is going to shock you when you realize how much dilly dally-ing can take place when you’re not careful.
Recognize that the time you spent making a necklace to sell on Etsy (for example) is not at all the length of time it took to make that $20 or so. There was the time spent:
Developing concepts and designs of your necklaces
Time spent sourcing parts
Money spent on materials
Time spent putting the thing together
Time spent packaging it
Time spent adding it to your web store
Time spent promoting it
Time spent closing the sale
Time spent processing a payment
Time and money spent shipping it
Boom! That’s a long list! How friggin’ terrifying it is to really do the math there!
But whether you want to face it or not, selling a necklace on Etsy does take that amount of time. Eventually you need to either streamline those processes, or increase what you charge to make up for the time spent on the surrounding tasks to make that sale.
5. Find a new hobby
Whether you realize it or not, you actually just gave up a hobby when you made this thing your job. Now is the time to take up a completely new, unrelated hobby that you’ve been meaning to try.
Work is great, and working when you’re passionate about what you’re doing is, indeed, greater, but you still need time to unwind, step away from your job, and just put brain power into something else. Don’t care if you wanna become a gym rat or a dedicated Netflix-er. But find a hobby and claim it as your new thing outside of work. (And try to avoid the temptation to monetize that as well!)
6. Set goals - literally write them down
This one is no joke. And I challenge you not to gloss over it.
Don’t just aim for “a lot of money.”
Take the time to write down what goals (particularly financial but whatever) you have for your new business, and tell them to a few trusted friends. Make an effort to have those happen.
It’s important to write out your goal because you won’t know you’ve achieved anything if you haven’t decided what you’re aiming for. You might’ve done something, but it wasn’t accomplishing a goal.
You will find a different level of satisfaction and enjoyment in your hobby-turned-career if you put your attention into something and run after it. Generalities don’t work anymore.
7. Find new ways to push your craft
Once you start building routines, and you’ve optimized your time, you might find that your work gets repetitive. Happens to everyone.
Find new ways to push your craft in new directions. Find fellow creators on Youtube. Join local small business groups. Follow interesting people on social media. Whatever it takes.
Every year, you should have grown your business in some way—big or small—that continues to benefit your customers. Don’t ever think you can’t improve.
8. Do things you couldn’t have with a day job
Ok, my last big piece of advice on how to successfully turn your passion into your income is to do things that you now have the freedom to do.
Despite talking about setting work hours and having defined boundaries on work time, it’s also ok to throw that out the window once in a while.
Work remotely. Travel more often. Take 3 day weekends. Remember: you set your hours now, not anyone else.
It is all too easy to go back into the workforce. One day, you might decide to! No shame. Self-employment is fun, but it’s not for everyone, and it’s not always forever, either.
But in the time that you report to no one but yourself and your clients/customers, take the time to enjoy this. Take an extra 5 minutes with your cup of coffee in the morning. Take an extended lunch. Work late. Whatever.
By going self-employed, you have given yourself a great gift.
Cherish it. Protect it. It is easy to have it corrupted. But if you can keep it alive and thriving, you will see that, for many of us, there’s no other lifestyle we’d want. No day job can offer you what you have by working for yourself.
Breathe deep. Smile. Remember the days you were shackled to your day job. They are gone! Celebrate. Life is beautiful.
