Are you the computer wizz in your family? The guy or girl that is always called to set up a website or try to fix somebody’s slow computer? Then you may not realize that this interest and expertise can be turned into a business.
If you are dreaming of leaving the corporate world behind and working for yourself, then you should be thinking of how your hobby can actually be a money maker. There are so many ways to make money these days and they can all be turned into a profitable small business.
No matter what area you focus on, you can follow these steps to make a business out of your hobby. In fact, some of these businesses can even be done remotely!
1 - Find some clients
You may already have some clients in a way if you do small jobs for people based on your expertise. If you like to build websites, for instance, then you can lean on some people who’ve you’ve previously done work for before.
As people you’ve already worked with for a referral as word of mouth still counts for a lot in this digital world.
Set up a website that advertises your services and prices and have it as a sort of base that you can build the rest of your marketing on to find clients.
Once you have a good amount of clients and money coming in then this is the time to expand.
2 - Get a loan
You’ve got the clients so for right now you are essentially still just a freelancer. This is not a business yet. If you are doing all the work, then you will hit a ceiling in which you can’t grow your revenue any longer.
By getting a loan you can use the money to buy software to help automate the process. Maybe you need more space to do your work, or require a vehicle to get to clients. Using the money to pay people to do some of the jobs required will leave you free to focus on growing the business.
You can learn about the types of loans available to small businesses here.
3 - Set up repeatable processes
To be able to focus on growing the business, you will need to either hire others or outsource much of the work. To do this effectively, you need to learn how to simplify what you do into a series of processes.
For instance, if you set up websites for clients, you can make a tutorial on each part of the process. Watch it yourself and see how this can be used by others to do this part of the job. Then repeat for each step of the process until completion. At this point, you should be able to teach somebody with some experience how to do this themselves so you can hire for this aspect of the job.
At this point, you can actually focus on marketing and onboarding clients so you aren’t doing the dirty work any longer, but are running a business.
