Alright, so now you have the correct mindset to run a side hustle as well as a pretty good and well researched idea that has a pretty good chance of turning some type of profit. However, you don’t want to start work on your side hustle just yet. Because you need a plan, and it needs to be a really good one.
You can’t just throw stuff at the wall and then try to see what sticks, because that is going to knock your traction towards success into a serious ditch! Having a plan (or a blueprint) is going to give you targets to reach, goals to check off, and something strong to fall back on whenever you need some support. But how do you make a side hustle plan that will work on ensuring that your business goals are met? Well, here’s how to get started.
Defining Your Side Hustle Goals and Objectives
First, no plan can start without some clear objectives and a clear goal. For your side hustle, you need to ask, what do you want this side hustle to accomplish? Do you want your side hustle to hit $10,000 in sales? To reach 500 people? To motivate people to change something about themselves? Do you want to make one sale and then you will be happy?
You need to answer that question, and don’t be afraid to have an answer that is big or seems impossible. Maybe you want to hit one million in sales or you want to help 4,000 people with your services. Having a huge and (what seems like) an unreasonable goal, can be something that will keep you and your side hustle striving as you keep working towards it. And if it seems too big of something to accomplish, then that is what the objectives are for.
For example, if you want to hit a certain number in sales, then we can break that goal down into some objectives that you can tackle one after the other. For example, to hit 10,000 dollars in sales, then how many of your products and services do you need to sell? How many customers would you need to have? What would your marketing need to look like to reach those customers? What would your budget need to be if you wanted all of that $10,000 to be pure profit?
Creating a Solid Business Plan
All of the answers to these questions are going to be your objectives, and now you’ve got some smaller targets to hit as you move towards your goal. Now, don’t worry if your objectives change or you add some new ones as your business goes on. For example, you might introduce some new products and services that will make you some more cash, so your ‘number of products sold’ might change. Or you might introduce a new objective because your situation changed. Heck, you might even upgrade your goal and move the goalpost!
Once you have your big goals, and a solid business plan for what you need to do in order to achieve them, then you need to think smaller and get very realistic. For example, if you want to make 10,000 dollars in sales, you first need to make one sale for 10 dollars.
What goes into making a sale for your side hustle? Do you need to market your business to your niche? Go door to door and market that way? Do you need to focus on making your product the best it can be before you go to market? Set some milestones around these questions and their answers, and that is going to help drive you towards your realistic goal of making a sale.
You can even make a business plan just for the completion of your small goal, just like the one you have for your big overarching goal. Again, having a strong plan with steps and milestones you can check off during the process of heading towards the goal is a fantastic idea, and it is going to help to keep you motivated.
Setting Realistic Expectations and Milestones
Finally, don’t be afraid to be realistic. Before you can make 100 sales, you need to make one, and that can be a little discouraging as you focus on how to make that one sale, find the right customer, and persuade them to buy your product or service. If even the smallest goal seems impossible for you, you need to make sure that you are focusing on celebrating the small wins when they do come.
There are a lot of small reasons to celebrate whenever it comes to opening up a side hustle. You might get your business website open and up, you might purchase a storefront, or you might send out your first advertisement on social media. Don’t be afraid to celebrate with yourself or your team and give yourself some time to be happy for these small goals. It might seem a bit silly, but if you can have some fun with celebrating the small goals, you will be able to better benefit from the big goals.
Making a business plan and all of these goals should take up quite a lot of time for you, no matter what your side hustle is or how profitable you think the side hustle will wind up being. The more time, energy, and detail you put into having a good plan that will meet all your needs, the more successful your business will be whenever you eventually follow that plan.