How To Start A Side Business

[arve url="hhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z9POlaRkc0" mode="lazyload" align="center" /] How can you start a side business or side hustle that earns you extra money and helps you achieve financial freedom faster? Transcription: Starting a side business can be a great way to increase your income and also move you towards financial freedom faster. So in this episode we want to talk a little bit about how we started side businesses and side hustle, the side hustle that eventually became both of our full time Gig and lead to financial freedom for both of us and how you can start your side business and your side hustle as well. So can I actually braided your first side business? Actually work because mine didn't. No, definitely not. I think I first discovered side business when I was in high school. So last year of high school and or maybe in selling lollies shape man. No, I think actually it was the first year after school I learned about how people make money online by having websites. And so my first side business was I created a bunch of blogs but then I didn't know what to write about and so I stole content from other people's websites and put it on my own website and got zero traffic and made zero money. Visionary. Can't copy and pasting Cagle cagle smart. Yeah, exactly. So, but in, you know that at the time, and so yeah, so my first side businesses or the blogs that I started made zero money and I think I dabbled in that for a year or two before I made my first dollar in and we'll actually set up a lemonade store last weekend with my kid is their first lemonade store. We walked up to the raid, the shop at the end of the straight, got some like cheap bottles and got some ice, went back by handmade this signs and then we just set it up next to the beach and we got six people. We only did it for half an hour because they got bored. It costs us $11 and six people bought drinks. May Have Five, $5 loss on the store, but, you know, like they're four and six years of age. And I think like the lemonade store was the first little thing that I did when I was a kid. And then fast forward at university, um, I got my first little side business was um, I was really into business and sustainability at that time. And so I want some grants of the Queensland government in my third year of university to $10,000 projects where I actually helped businesses reduce their carbon footprint and save on water and stuff like that. And that's pretty cool. And that was my first taste of a side business and I was like, so did you actually make any money from the business or you just got grants from the government and they paid you to help businesses, you know, to $10,000 grant. So the whole business model was just when to grants and then figure out a way to deliver. Because I had, I'm pretty sure they just gave me the grant because I was young and motivated and everyone else asking for them was like 50 years of age. So I just got what you had to do is go get 20 businesses to sign up with you and then you could use those business names to apply for the grant. So how'd it go? And door knock and find these businesses say, hey, I'll help you save some money on energy and water. Um, and then I submitted that grant and that was my first taste of a way to make money on the side because at the time I was still working at like noodle box in and cleaning rooms at a hotel while I was at university still. And that was, that was cool, like $20,000 in the first year from doing something that really only took me in terms of total time, maybe a month to complete like those really it was my first taste of big chunks of money. One of my other side businesses was taking my savings at the time, which was like 500 to a thousand dollars and buying USB sticks from China to resell on Ebay. But I'm gay. No, there were duds. I got sold on that and I didn't work it out until I had already sold something on Ebay and then people started complaining about them. And so that was usb sticks that were made to look like 32 Gig, which was the biggest usb stick at the time. So when you plugged it in, it looked like a 32 GIG USB stick. But it was only like one gig and so it will overwrite data more than like one gig on there and so there were dodgy. So I basically spent the money on them, which I couldn't get back because you have to like send it through Western Union and there's no refund, like there's no paper, 30 day money back thing. And then I had sold them on Ebay, which I had to refund. So then I had all these Ebay fees to pay as well because I just thought, well that does. I'm just going to refund everyone that I sold them to it. I'm like, don't post it back to me because I don't want to pay for post it back because it's a dad anyway. Just keep it and here's your refund. But I think looking at side businesses, realizing a big lesson is that money is just a representation of value. So when someone gives you money, you're giving them value in return. So they're, they're giving you value and you're providing them with value. So they're giving you value in terms of cash, in terms of money. You're giving them value in terms of a product or a service or something that you can do, so I think the easiest way to start a side business is to say, well, what is valued that I have that I can give to people in exchange for some sort of money and why way to identify what value you could give them. Market is simple. There's two questions you asked yourself. The first one is, what am I naturally a little bit better than most people at? Yes. Secondly, what do I enjoy doing? And if you stack what you enjoy doing with what you are naturally a little bit better than or more experience with someone with something that's actually marketable that you can take to the marketplace. It is crazy how much more money you can end in your daily rate or your alley, right at work, from actually packaging those two things together because the reason it's important to have your, your side business is something you enjoy is because business is hard. That can be really good days, really bad days, good months, bad months, and if you don't enjoy it, you can't persist for long enough to actually create something that's many. Yeah, and there's so many uncomfortable things you have to do in business, like you going door knocking for the grants, like I can't imagine that was a great time dude. I knocked like 70 doors and like people would. I think people just felt sorry for me and that was the first time actually realized the power of influences because my first grand I door knocked on these doors and got all these rejection. My second grant I just went to one person who had 20 businesses under their control and I say, can I help you do this? And he said, absolutely. And so I realized one influencer or one powerful relationship is more important than 20 little ones. Yeah. And so I think while ideally you want something that you enjoy and you love, there are also opportunities in your life where you can see value or there's value arbitrage. Like Gary v at the moment has a show called trash talk where he goes to garage sales and he'll buy stuff sounds for like adult law or like $5 for a Lego set and then he'll flip it and sell it on Ebay for 25 bucks. And this dude, this dude's like multimillionaire has hundreds of millions of dollars, nearly a billionaire and he loves going to go south and stuff. He did with the pins now. Oh yeah, I saw it on instagram. I didn't actually watch that episode. So funny man. But that's the thing. Something like that where you're buying something from the guy. So if someone's selling for a buck because they can't be bothered listing on Ebay or Gumtree or facebook marketplace and you can then go and sell that. Like I got a friend who bought some clothes from the states and then wore them for a bit and then ended up selling them on facebook marketplace for more than they bought them for 100 percent. So there's opportunities they can do there because it's not. It wasn't a brand name clothes, but they were really nice. And so, you know, so there's opportunities in those sorts of things. Obviously there's businesses like knowing people's lawns or being a handyman or there's so many different opportunities where you can add value to people's lives and start doing that. The thing that I did after I figured out the, the grants with the Queensland government was I had a passion for sustainability and so, you know, I'll also wanted to learn how to sell. I think selling is one of the most important skill sets you can have as a business person and a lot of people have thoughts around selling and sales people, but you cannot exist in business medium term if you can't sell. Yeah, I think it's the number one skill set you can have outside of marketing that's the most important for long term sustainability in business. And so I started to sell solar on the side as a contractor for a mate of mine who was running a company and we ended up installing quite a few solar systems and that became what was a part time job into an actual full time job after university. And that was my first opportunity to really do something differently and um, you know, start that business in that way. And then after that, you know, I realized I didn't want to be in solar and I'm wanting to be in the construction game. So I took a huge pay cut to go back to normal wages for someone else. And in a nonsales role, I was a marketing manager at that time because I wanted to build that skillset for the future. And so I started on the side at night a social media marketing business where, you know, I ended up getting about $700 a week of cashflow from a bunch of little businesses where I was living in, you know, that was a nice little supplement outside of my full time job that, you know, are really just outsourced to other people that I knew,