how to go from side hustle to full time

Summary

a listener asked when to leave the day job for the side hustle. I came at this from a military career to entrepreneurship, so I have opinions. the short version: don’t quit until the side hustle is boring you, in the best way.

1. have a real offer first. not an idea. a thing someone has paid for, more than once, that you can describe in one sentence. Alex Hormozi’s 100 Million Dollar Offers is the cheat code here. read it before you write yours.

2. have a niche, not the whole world. “I help business owners” is not a niche. “I help solo physical therapists hit $20K months without insurance billing” is a niche. niche makes the offer obvious and the marketing simple.

3. have momentum. some sales. a small audience. a repeatable way to make the next sale. without momentum you are quitting one job to start a much harder job with no paycheck.

if you have all three, the leap is just a calendar event. if you don’t, the side hustle isn’t ready. that’s not a reason to quit. it’s a reason to try harder this quarter.

Transcript

introduction to transitioning from a side-hustle to full-time

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. So how do you know when it’s time to go from that part-time side hustle to full-time? This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and today I’m answering a listener question. I actually have a lot of listener, backlog listener questions I need to get to.

And I’m going to start with Hunter’s today. So Hunter, if you’re listening, this is answering your question, but you might be asking, hey, how do I submit a question? If you want to submit a question, make sure you’re signed up for the newsletter, J-E-R-R-E-D.com. So jerred.com, sign up for the newsletter if you’re not already.

my personal journey from the military to entrepreneurship

And if you are signed up for the newsletter, just reply to any email I’ve ever sent you with a question. And if you have a specific question, I’ll answer the question. If you have a topic you want me to cover, an area of interest, just let me know. If you want to hear more about anything from me, reply to one of those emails, and I will answer it on the podcast or discuss the topic on the podcast.

And I am getting to a backlog of these. Now today I’m doing a question from Hunter. Hunter had a two-part question. One, I think he’s giving me more of his background and then topics he would like to hear about. But I’m breaking this into two different podcasts because they’re both big topics. The first one is about that side hustle to full-time status.

And I’m very passionate about talking about that one because not only have I been in that situation myself in a very demanding career, but also I know a lot of people who are doing the part-time thing before they go full-time. So I want to talk about that. The second thing he asked questions about is a much bigger topic.

addressing hunter’s question and the common concerns of making the leap

It’s about finding clients, making the sale, marketing, Instagram, all those kind of things. And I know I will talk about those. So Hunter, I’m going to do two different podcast episodes answering your question because I think they’re phenomenal questions. So here’s what Hunter said. He said, some of my struggles are finding the time and more so energy to work on my coaching business.

So health coaching, personal training, move not. While working a full-time job, training, etc. I’m a public school teacher in NYC. My goal is to leave teaching and coach, but it’s scary as hell because with teaching your income is very straightforward. Everyone tells me to coach on the side while still teaching, test the waters.

Great advice in theory, but for me what that has meant is that my progress towards coaching has been very stagnant for two years. I don’t get much done. I’m not sure if it’s a motivation problem or a systems problem, but my plan is to quit teaching at least for a one-year trial and go all in for a year on coaching.

the importance of clarity in your offer and understanding your audience

So let’s talk about this side hustle to full-time and how to look at it. So my story personally, I was in the military and I wanted to fly. And so I was in the pilot pipeline, the pilot world, and what ended up happening was I ended up getting hurt. And so there was no side hustle when I was doing that.

That was going to be my full-time career, but once that kind of ended and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to fly how I wanted to, I did start a side hustle. And it was very challenging to have a side hustle because I had very demanding hours in the military. I had to be there very early for leading PT, being a part of PT, very long work days.

I’d oftentimes get called in after hours. So it’s just a very demanding career. So I definitely understand what you’re saying. And so in that timeframe, I was still trying to build my business and it did take a while to get going, but here’s my advice. So just so everyone knows I have a similar background of having to go part-time to full-time.

the role of validation and momentum in deciding to go full-time

But here’s also what I’ve learned. My business, when I finally did go all in, it took off. And I see this happen to every single person in our mastermind who’s going, they just want to hold on to this part-time, they want to have the full-time job with this part-time income, right? And they think, oh, once I get my side hustle up to X amount of revenue per month, then I will go and do this thing full-time.

But that’s never actually how it works because you need more time to get the thing that you’re doing up to a sufficient level. So here is my advice, very practical advice. I’m not a burn the ships type of guy. I’m not going to tell anyone, yeah, quit your job, go all in and just get it done because I don’t think that’s realistic.

What I think is realistic is once you have something going, you have a little bit of momentum, that’s when it’s okay to burn the ships and get going and go all in because worst case scenario, you go all in, it doesn’t work out, you have to get a job again. At least you tried, at least you tried and you put your hat in the ring and you can either try again later or you can be like, you know what, that lifestyle is not for me, whatever.

practical advice for those considering the transition

So my point being, only until you have some momentum, like a viable product, a repeatable way to make money, that’s when I would even consider quitting my job and going all in on running online business or in-person business, however you’re going to do it. So what does that look like? That means you know exactly what you’re selling.

So that’s step one, you have an offer, right? You know exactly what your offer is, you could tell me what your offer is, if I asked you, I said, hey, what do you sell? What services do you provide? I ask that question, you can give me a very concrete answer. If you know that, that’s step one. Step two, of this thing that you sell, that you’re very, very, very clear on, who do you sell it to?

That’s the second thing. So you know what you sell, who you sell it to. So now you’re very clear on your offer and you’re very clear on your audience. So we have a clear offer, we have a clear audience. The third thing I will ask is, how many have you sold and what do you charge? Now we’re getting into the mathematics of whether or not this is a scalable thing.

emphasizing the value of belief in oneself and one’s vision

And that’s it, that’s where I would start. So be very clear on exactly what your offer is. So a really good book on this one, it’s Alex Ramosi, 100 Million Dollar Offers. If you’re looking about how to craft an amazing offer, go dive into that book, that’ll get your offer really dialed in, especially if you follow all the steps there and it’s a pretty thin book, you could knock it out pretty fast.

Then who are you selling it to? Make sure you’re pretty niche down, you don’t want to be in that situation where you’re just selling whatever to whoever, because you’re not going to be very passionate about that. I just had a conversation with a buddy who’s looking to do some of this stuff online and I was asking similar questions, who’s your audience?

And he was pretty clear on it, but he’s, this is who my audience is, this is exactly who I want to target and what I want to do. But then he was like, should it be more broad, should I try to appeal to more people? And my answer is no, because if you came in to coach a very, like if you were a coach and you wanted to coach a very specific thing, like I coach CrossFitters who want to be competitive, like whatever, you’d have to have a really, I’m not going to get into how hard that would be, but anyway, if that’s the specific thing that you want to do, then go do that thing, shoot for that audience, don’t say, oh yeah, I also coach the CrossFit person who is 14 years old or who is a 42 year old mom or whatever.

conclusion and encouragement for future entrepreneurs

There’s nothing wrong with coaching those people. I just want anyone who’s selling something to be clear on who they help. That way you have a repeatable model because when you don’t have a repeatable model, everything gets harder. It’s harder to advertise, it’s harder to find them, it’s harder to scale.

And so that’s why you want to know exactly what your offer is and you want to know exactly who this offer is going to. And if you can answer those two questions very clearly, what your offer is and how much that offer costs and who your target audience is, who your niche is, you are so much further ahead because some people might just be like, I want to coach and I’ll coach whoever.

They never scale their businesses because they aren’t very clear on exactly what they do, what they offer or who they help. So get clear on those two things. And then lastly, like I said, make sure that you have a very repeatable process and you’ve sold some of these things and you’re moving through exactly what you’re doing because now the ball is rolling.

And once that ball is rolling, then we can talk about quitting jobs, we can talk about going all in. But if you don’t have any of those things, I would never recommend someone just quit their job tomorrow. And I’m not saying this is what you are doing, Hunter. I’m just talking in general terms to anyone listening.

If you’re just, if anyone thinks there’s some magic to going all in on something, but you don’t know what you’re going to sell or what you’re going to do, I just want to do Instagram and make money. Yeah, I’m sure you could figure that out, but I would get a lot more clarity before you go down that path.

And so once you’re getting a little bit of momentum, you’re making money, but scalable, we can do some of that math, then you quit your job. And in all honesty, you can do all of those things pretty fast. Even as a side hustle, it shouldn’t take two years, like it should take a couple months to figure all of these things out and to like really go hard.

And then once you’re starting to gain a little bit of momentum, quit your job, go all in. So that is my advice to you, Hunter. And I’m going to answer part two in a different episode. But that’s it. And I got to say, Hunter, you asked the question. Ultimately, you’re just going to have to try a little bit harder.