From Passion to Profit: Turn Your Hobby Into Your Full-Time Career

1. Introduction: Turning your side hustle into a dream career is a lot like a recipe. You're going to need to get together all your ingredients. You're going to have to put together a plan on how you're going to put all those ingredients together. If you're intimidated about the idea of pursuing a side hustle or even your dream job, I got news for you, pretty much everyone's intimidated by that. I certainly was intimidated. It took me a very long time to take that leap of faith. But here's the great thing, I'm here to take all of that intimidation away. My name is Joanne Molinaro. I am the creator of the Korean Vegan. You may have seen my work on TikTok, on YouTube, Instagram, or at an independent bookstore, like a recipe. There's going to be a lot of planning, a lot of research, and of course, the final taste involved. You're going to be planning how to execute on your dream. This class is about turning your passion into a hustle, into a full time career. I'm so excited to teach this topic because it's one that's very personal to me. We're going to talk about turning your hobby into income, financial planning, budgeting, scaling your side hustle, and finally, reaching out to those people who might be able to help you with your dreams. I hope you leave this class with the same thing that the Korean Vegan provided to me, confidence. I'm excited about the journey that you and I are going to take together. Let's get started. 2. Getting Started: I started my legal career in 2004, I'm a trial lawyer, made partner at a large law firm in 2015. A year later though I adopted a plant-based diet and I started The Korean Vegan. I was a little bit daunted by the change in my diet and I wanted to make sure I could still eat the foods I grew up eating. Kimchi, ramyeon, gimbap. Unfortunately, you just couldn't buy vegan Korean food, hence The Korean Vegan. It started out as an Instagram and Facebook posts where I'd take a photo of the food I made and post the recipe in the caption. A website with more fleshed out recipes and blog posts soon followed. A year into my little hobby I started also sharing stories about my family in the Instagram captions. I documented my running journey. I'm a marathon runner. I developed a small following, which led to a book deal with a really large publishing house in 2018. In 2020 I started a TikTok account. I shared the same things I'd been sharing on my Instagram and Facebook for years. Recipes and stories, only in video. And wouldn't you know it, they started going viral. So viral that when my book came out in 2021 it became an instant New York Times Best Seller. It was at that point that I decided to take a leap of faith, faith in me. I told my boss that I was withdrawing from partnership so I could pursue The Korean Vegan as my full-time career. It took me almost a full year to answer the question, what do you do? I would fumble around and say, like things, like, oh. Well, I was a lawyer and sometimes I still lawyer but also write books and, I don't know, YouTube videos. Now, when people ask me though, what do you do? I answer, I am a writer. I want to make sure that none of you have that same embarrassing problem. To that end, each of you will be tasked with a final class project, a deck. This presentation, it's going to be a pitch to an imaginary or future investor, explaining exactly why they should invest in your dream. Now, don't worry, we're going to walk you through, step by step, exactly what needs to go into this deck. By the end of this class I want you to be able to answer with confidence the following question. What do you want to do? As I mentioned, the Skillshare team and I, we've been really hard at work to make sure that we're going to provide you with all the tools that you need. Number 1, we're going to give you an Excel spreadsheet. It's essentially a template along with samples for financial planning and budgeting. These are things that are really important to completing this class. The other thing that we've prepared is a template for your business plan. I had a business plan when I was starting out and I think you'll do well to have one yourself. Finally, that final project that I mentioned at the very beginning, that deck to your future investor. Don't worry, it's not just a blank PowerPoint presentation, we've put together a template for you so that you know exactly what needs to go into it. In the next lesson we're going to get real about your dreams. 3. Get Real About Your Dream: Let's get down to brass tacks. Before we can go from hobby to hustle, we need to evaluate whether the hobby is hustleble. Can your passion turn into a successful income generating business? As a lawyer, I've represented some of the largest companies in the world in multi billion dollar cases. From that, I've learned that the secret to a successful business isn't really a secret at all. It's what we all learned in Econ 101, supply and demand. Presumably, if you're taking this class, you have some evidence of supply, the ability to create the product or service that you want to monetize. In my case, that was Korean vegan recipes and storytelling. But before you make your dreams real, you need to get real. Are you actually good at your hobby or are you like that person on American idol whose friends are horrible and don't tell them, bro singing is not your thing. Assuming there's demand for your product or services, we'll talk about that next, you don't need to be the best at what you do in order to monetize, though that certainly helps, you do need to be better than many and you also need to be smart about how you distribute, hence this class. Ask yourself, ask your friends, ask your family, are you actually any good at your hobby? Let's assume you can answer the above question with, yes, I am good. Let's turn to the trickier part of the formula. Demand, creating demand is hard, filling demand is easier. Don't create a product, then seek someone to sell it to, find a market, define your customers, then find or develop a product for them. It's a quote by Timothy Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week. I think a lot of people do what Tim Ferris talks about in this quote, we dive into what we want to do and then after the fact, wonder if there's a way to sell it. Here's the thing for hobbies, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that approach, because at the end of the day, hobbies are not necessarily income generators. In fact, for the overwhelming majority of people, hobbies are just things that help you cope with the parts of your income generating jobs, and that's one of the reasons I decided to start a blog to take my mind off the soul sucking nature of a legal profession. But if you want to turn your hobby into a money maker, you need to be able to answer the question, what problem am I trying to solve? For me, it was the lack of any veganized Korean recipes. Andy Grove, the co founder of Intel, once said, the Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand maybe, but it does change our access. We now have more data at our fingertips about the supply demand curve than ever before. I want you to go onto the Internet and I want you to research the following, is anyone else doing what you want to do? For example, before I started my blog, I went onto the Internet and I googled Korean vegan food and discovered that there was only one English speaking person who sometimes made videos on Korean vegan food. That was it. Another thing I want you to look into, are there any articles, surveys, or studies on the popularity of what you want to do? For example, I recently saw an article discussing the recent boom in Korean food here in the United States. Number 3, are there any businesses out there that tried and failed to do what you want to do? For example, the overwhelming majority of cookbook authors fail to sell more than 1,000 books. But I didn't see any failures, or quite frankly, successes of Korean vegan cookbooks. Now after doing some research, ask yourself whether there exists demand for your hobby, and if not, whether you can create demand for your hobby or tweak your hobby to meet an existing demand. For today's assignment, put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and write out one paragraph about your dream. It should include the following. One, when someone asks me, what do you do? I would like to be able to answer blank. I want you to fill in that blank. Number 2, add at least 2-3 sentences describing very specifically what goes into that answer. Number 3, identify at least three reasons why you think you can monetize your hobby. Discuss the competitive landscape, specific market trends, how you can set yourself apart from existing suppliers. Number 4, come up with a pros and cons list. What do you have going for your dream and what will some of the challenges be? One of the biggest stumbling blocks to your success is none other than you. This class, it won't mean diddly squat, unless you eviscerate that voice in your head that's telling you you're only good enough for just fine. I know, you can't just wake up, roll out of bed and say, hey, impostor syndrome is gone. But here's what you can do in the meantime, imagine yourself to be that person. What does that person look like? What do they wear? How do they talk to their colleagues, their friends, and their spouses? What would they tell themselves in the mirror, the moment of the voice you don't deserve this? Starts knocking around in their head. Wouldn't it be fun if for the rest of this class you pretended you were that person and that's the great thing. No one's here to judge you. No one will look at you and think you're being weird or cocky or annoying. This is your chance to experiment with being the non impostor syndrome you. In the next lesson, we'll talk about how to turn your hobby into income. 4. Turn Your Hobby Into Income: My mother makes beautiful, homemade stationery. She'll collect flower petals, ginko leaves, and even tall blades of grass on her walks, stick them between the pages of a fat book and when they've dried, she'll press them into paper and hand paint some Chinese Korean calligraphy in the margins. They're one of a kind, literally, I told her she should start an Etsy account and begin selling them. Sure, she might be able to make a few dollar here and there from her hobby if she wants to, but at this point in her life, I'm not sure she has the desire and wherewithal to scale a full blown stationary business that is part 1 of the growth potential formula. As in you are part 1 of the growth potential formula. Assuming demand is off the charts, do you have the capacity to create the supply that meets that demand? Do you have the ability to do it in a timely and cost effective way? Is the trajectory of your hobby headed up? Headed down? Staying steady? As you consider the income generating potential of your hobby, one of the best tools you have at your disposal is your existing expertise, i.e., you're 9-5, whether you like your job or not. If you've been doing it for a while, you have undeniably built some know how in that thing you do. For me, I had 17 years of legal expertise at my disposal. Could any of those things come in handy when it came to perfecting my craft, strategizing monetization, analyzing market trends, or making my product unique from the competition? For me, I realized that my ability to communicate effectively clearly gave me an advantage when it came to not just sharing my recipes, but sharing my stories. What do you do for your 9-5, whether you're an engineer, accountant, sales clerk, barista, or stock manager? I'll bet you could list out five things you're pretty good at just by virtue of doing what you do day in and day out. Now write them down. Do not undervalue those skills. They can be what separate you from all the other dream chasers out there. Here's my list. I'm very good at communicating complicated ideas in a short period of time. I'm also a pretty good problem solver. I'm extremely good at analyzing lots of data and drawing conclusions from them. I'm also extremely good at making people feel more confident about their choices. And finally, I'm obsessively good at time management, the billable hour. Now's the fun part. Let's think of all the ways you can actually monetize your hobby. Some of these ways will be pretty straightforward. If you're making a product, you'd sell that product. There are a few ways you can sell your product direct to consumer or D to C, or to the businesses themselves, B to B, or retail. You can actually do all three, but the product itself isn't the only thing that you can sell. You can also sell how to use that product. You can sell how to make similar products. You can also sell related products. For example, let's take my mother's hypothetical stationery company. In addition to selling the stationery itself, she could also offer classes in how to make stationery. She could also create products related to the stationery, beautiful pens or calligraphy brushes, journals, contact cards, gift boxes, et cetera. Once you've identified the breadth of what you can sell, it's now time to explore how to sell from social media like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, to websites, to a brick and mortar store. These are all the options that you should research when deciding what makes most sense for the kind of products and services you intend to provide. You should also think about the investments in these various distribution channels and marketing platforms. How much does a website cost? How much will an ad on Facebook cost? How much will rent at a small corner shop cost? Let's go to our worksheet labeled S1. On sheet 1, you're going to create a list of all the ways you've already generated income through your hobby. I've created a list of all the ways my hobby was generating money before I decided to go full time. Now, it's important that you include every source of actual income, even if it's small. For example, I offered some cooking classes. I didn't make a lot of money, but I made some. I made like $400, I'm including that here. Another area that I made some income last year, I made some YouTube ad cents. I'm going to add in about $2,000 for that. Amazon affiliate, I'm sure you guys have seen this. You can put an affiliate link in your website. I make a little bit of change off of that. I'm going to put $1,000 in for that. Brand deals, that's a big part of my business. I probably made about, I don't know, I'm just going to roughly guess $100,000 on brand deals last year. TikTok creator fund, that's gotten lower and lower. I'd say I probably made $1,000 off of that. So that's just an example of all the different sources of income that I keep track of on an annual basis. Again, the numbers don't matter, that's not important right now. What I want you to do is to get into the habit of listing all of these sources so that you can step back and take a look and evaluate them. This list should not only give you a little confidence, it should hopefully get the juices flowing on other sources of potential income that you haven't really explored yet. Now, that is sheet 2, potential sources I haven't explored yet. This is where I just want you to write down all the different sources of income that you maybe haven't looked into fully yet. These are things you don't want to forget. Next up we're going to talk about scaling your hustle. 5. Scale Your Hustle: I always say that the most important thing that you can do for your dream is to give it the longest possible runway, time. Think about how long it took to get good at your hobby to really feel like you're better than just okay at it. I started writing and started taking photographs in 2010. I started my current blog in 2016. It wasn't until 2021 that my hobby generated enough income to make a very small profit. That's nearly 11 years. In this lesson, we're going to talk about the things you can do to make that runway as long and smooth as possible to give your dream the very best chance at liftoff. Now, that runway to success, it's paved with capital. Your dream doesn't exist without you, so you need to have money set aside to make sure you're clothed, fed, and sheltered while you're hustling. At this point, you might be saying, well, I can just live off the income I'll make when I turn this hobby into a hustle. First of all, let's go back to that worksheet S1. Give it a good eyeball. Honestly, even in the best-case scenario, will this be enough to make sure you're not only breathing, but you have some cushion to invest in your hustle. Even assuming that it does, you're still assuming a bunch of other things. Number 1, that your hobby will generate as much as if not more income than you did in that worksheet S1, that you won't ever get sick, injured, or put out of commission, or drastically increase your expenses, that there won't be a global pandemic or disaster completely out of your control that will impact your productivity and or demand for your services and goods The point is, there are all sorts of things that can happen that will leave your dreams sitting on the tarmac. Take the time you need to save enough in the bank to pay for rent and your basic living expenses so that you have something to turn to if things go south. I waited until I had a full year's worth of living expenses socked away before taking the plunge. Now, you need to be the judge of what makes sense but at a minimum, you should have three months set aside. You can use the time it takes to save that amount to continue honing your skills, understanding your potential customer and audience, and crystallizing your brand. Now, one of the most important things about scaling is a brand story. A brand story doesn't need to be long. It doesn't need to be tragic. It doesn't need to have lots of fireworks. In fact, your brand story actually should be short and easy to remember, easy to understand. It needs to solve a problem, and it needs to answer the question, why are you uniquely qualified to solve that problem? My brand is the Korean Beacon. It's short, it's to the point, it even rhymes a little, and it's easy to understand, and it solves a problem. The lack of information or access to plant-based Korean cuisine. My catchphrase is, I veganize Korean food, I Koreanize everything else, which further adds to that story. It says a little bit about who I am. The problem I'm trying to solve while also giving folks a taste of my personality. It doesn't need to be this long drawn-out epic saga to be effective. I want my typical customer to associate the following with the Korean vegan. Healthy plant-based recipes, authentic Korean flavors, fun and easy. Take a little bit of time. Jot down a few ideas for your own brand story. Who are you? What problem are you trying to solve? Why are you qualified to solve that problem? How does your product or service solve that problem? What do you see in your head when I say the word Apple Inc? An iPhone, a silver apple, a man in a black chordeleg? All of these things, it's all a part of branding. The stronger the brand, the more instantaneous the association, the easier the images pop up in your head. A brand is the image your company elicits in consumers. According to Kristopher Jones, CEO of SEO, your brand is actually the entire identity of your business. Not only does a strong brand facilitate a strong and recognizable identity for your customers and your employees, a solid brand allows you to build relationships with your audience, which can eventually turn them into loyal customers. In other words, a striking logo and a catchphrase may cut it, but it certainly won't set you apart from all the other companies out there clamoring for your customers hard earned cash. What do you have, though, that none of those other companies have? Your story. Not only is your brand story an opportunity to create a meaningful connection with your customers and potential customers, one that will keep them coming back, it's a way to set yourself apart in a way that's completely uncopyable. Once you've sketched out, at least the rough contours of your brand and brand story, it's time to think about how to amplify that story. It's all good and fine to have the best logo, the best catchphrase, and the best brand story but if no one's going to listen, it's not going to do you much good, and these days, the barriers to entry are far lower. You have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Threads, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Etsy, eBay, and more. Many of these platforms are absolutely free. All you need is access to the Internet and take minimal effort to get started. For instance, I created the Facebook page for the Korean Vegan Cookbook in 10 minutes on my phone while sitting in a plane on the tarmac waiting to deplane. It now has over 14,000 users posting photos of the recipes they've made for my book, answering each other's questions about shopping for certain ingredients, or simply applauding their efforts or trying something new, and guess what? They're all really excited for the publication of Cookbook Number 2. Other avenues of brand messaging will take a bit of an investment. For instance, it costs money to host a website, something I believe that all entrepreneurs and side hustlers need in order to solidify their brand, emit a sense of reliability and professionalism, and ultimately sell stuff. These days, there are plenty of hosting options that are designed to be cheap and relatively easy to use. There are also freelancers who can help design your website from top to bottom for a flat fee. Another excellent avenue for building brand loyalty is newsletters. Those who open and read your emails will be your most loyal customers. Begin cultivating that email list early and aggressively. One note about branding. Now, before mass producing stickers or your spanky new logo and slapping your brand and all your merch, run a search on the US Trademark and Patent Office, and better yet, make sure to trademark your brand. The last thing you want to do is use a brand that gains recognition over the next couple of years only to find out you need to change the brand name because of a trademark issue. For this lesson, I want you to jot down potential brand names, along with the three things you want to have associated with that brand name. I also want you to research potential ways to amplify your brand story as well as the likely costs associated with those methods, for example, host state fees, website development fees, mailing lists. For our next lesson, we're going to get uncomfortably comfortable with the numbers. 6. Get To Know The Numbers: Financial planning and budgeting constitutes one of the main pillars of any successful hustle and/or business. If you want to earn money, you have to learn how to manage money. There are all sorts of apps out there that claim to help you through the process, but for me, I've always found a simple spreadsheet to be the best tool for figuring out how much money you need to spend in order to make money. Now let's turn to our worksheet. That first one S1 and let's go to the tab monthly budget. Here you'll see many of the items you put in that first sheet right here at the top left corner marked as income. These are categorized that way so that I can keep track of where the money is coming in. Some of these will, of course, be projected since unlike paychecks, business income will fluctuate from month to month. This is one of the reasons it's important to keep track of what they actually turn out to be i.e, column D, which is projected amount, versus column E, which is the actual amount. You can see here in column F. I even keep track of the difference between those two. Now here's the thing. The more and longer you do this, the better sense of what your projections should be. Now, how did I actually populate the spreadsheet? Well, I didn't just do it by thinking about it. I literally went to my bank statements and went through them item by item to identify, well, what are the usual suspects? If you look here, sample bank statement. I've actually included that here. Just so that you can see, this is what I was working with in order to create that monthly budget. I downloaded multiple months of spreadsheets from my actual bank. I categorized each and every expense and literally cut and pasted the repeat items, my electricity bill, my phone bill, my Internet bill, into my budget. For those items that are aggregated, for example, ground transportation, I estimated based upon an average of my monthly spend. By the end of the year, I was able to use the filter function. You can see this here at the very top of column G in my spreadsheet. I can filter by all the different categories, and then I was able to track all of my expenses by category. If you go to the sample annual spend sheet, you can see my aggregate spend for each of the categories I include in not just my budget, but that I use for my monthly bank statements. Every month I do two things. I plan out the budget for the following month, and I compare the previous month's actual spend to that month's budget. If you continue doing this regularly, you should be able to produce an annual picture of your spend versus your income, which will be crucial to sustaining your side hustle or business. As we talked about earlier, it's important to make sure that you're also socking some money away in savings. Remember, the longer the runway you give yourself, the more likely it is your dreams will take off and soar. Whether it's a small savings account, investment account, or just money you hide in your freezer, I don't recommend this, but to each their own, the goal is to save enough to fund your basic living expenses for at least a year. Speaking of a long runway, the more data you have, the more accurate your projections. It makes no sense to make life altering decisions with only days worth of data. Instead, make sure you have at least six months of accurate and complete numbers before you start making a budget that incorporates projected income and expenses. For today's lesson, download your bank and credit card statements. Put together a spreadsheet that itemizes all sources of actual income, as well as actual expenses, including any existing expenses that you already have for your hobby. Although you will want to do this for several months before preparing projections based upon the projected income list that you prepared in lesson number 4, now prepare a budget with projected income and projected expenses. For our next lesson, we'll talk about developing a growth strategy. 7. Develop a Growth Strategy: Before we get into this lesson, I want to share a story about a woman named Cassie. Cassie was working a full-time job in fashion on the East Coast. She was excited about working in the fashion industry, but she didn't really like her job. As a way of coping with the stress from her 9:00-5:00, she started taking Pilates classes. She liked Pilates so so much, she began teaching some of her friends. Then one day she randomly applied to teach Pilates classes on the side. She felt so confident and empowered when she taught these classes, feelings she didn't have when she showed up for work. She began a YouTube channel so that she could teach people Pilates from wherever she went, and before she knew it, she had thousands and then millions of people doing her Pilates classes. She started selling water bottles and workout tank tops to her students. She quit her full-time job and decided to pursue a small business full time. She expanded from water bottles and tank tops to leggings, hoodies, and sports bras. Today, Cassie owns not one but two thriving businesses, each generating eight-figure incomes with her products sold in retail locations across the country. As we talked about before, one of the most important assets you'll have at your disposal when evaluating growth strategies is data. As we talked about in Lesson 6, the longer you stay in business, the more data you have, the more accurate your projections. For example, Cassie started giving Pilates classes all the way back in 2008. She launched her first product line a couple years later. She launched her first fitness wear company in 2018, and began selling her products in retail in 2022. As you can see, her success, it didn't happen overnight. Growth is often a function of recognizing where you need to make improvements, the areas of your business that merit additional investment and capital, and identifying as yet untapped markets. For example, I've been thinking about whether or not I should get into non-alcoholic spirits, a very big market right now and something that I'm actually really interested in. However, if you operate your hustle differently from months to month, the data you need to truly understand these things will be of, well, limited value. This is why it's critical to develop a process for your business before you start evaluating potential growth strategies. Last year, I started a podcast, and in the beginning, as is often the case, I didn't really have a set process. I was still learning how to record, edit, and market a podcast. I knew that before long, I would burn out. Earlier this year, we relaunched the podcast, however this time, I had a very set process, one that I developed after spending the year before learning what worked, what didn't work, and what was sustainable. Luck is just another way of describing what happens when opportunity meets preparation. Unless you're ready to not just recognize the opportunity but to take advantage of it, fortune can turn into regret or FOMO. Let me give you a good example. Linda was trying to turn her small hobby, handmade earrings into a small business for years, but she only made pieces when she felt like it. Every few months, she'd participate at the local farmers market with a group of friends, and once in a while, if someone at work asked her for a custom job, she'd agree to make the jewelry for her feet. One day, she propped up her phone on the wall while she was making a pair of earrings for her supervisor at work. She posted it on her TikTok account, and the next morning, she discovered it had gone viral, accruing more than one million views. All of a sudden, her emails were getting clogged with inquiries about her earrings, how much they cost, how long they would take to ship, and whether they could order more than one pair. One of the emails was from a local retailer who wanted to discuss whether they might be able to sell her earrings and possibly other jewelry like bracelets and charms. Now let me ask you a question, which Linda would be better off in this situation? The Linda I described in the story or the Linda who's been selling at a stall in the farmers market on a weekly basis and thus has a business bank account set up to accept payment, an e-commerce plugin on her website, a network of suppliers who have been working with her for years and will increase their volume on a dime for a substantial discount. This is why you want to build systems and processes into your business as early as possible, so that when opportunities come knocking, your house is ready to welcome them. Another key to avoiding FOMO is to act with intention. Preparation is, of course, part of that, but knowing what you want, fixing your vision firmly on the prize ahead is also important. This will ensure that you don't get distracted by any number of things along the way, opportunities that seem attractive, but don't really do much to forward your mission. I started my TikTok account in part because I thought it would be good to grow my social media following in the year leading up to my book publication. My TikToks went viral though, and I quickly grew distracted by the success of my social media presence. I started to care way more about views and whether my videos were going viral than I did about the actual book. I started to question my identity; am I an author or am I a TikTok star? I also started to question my worth; if I don't get a million views on a video, do I just suck? I had to spend some time sitting down with my spreadsheet and really identify what my business goals were, what my brand was really about, and reinforce the pillars of my business identity. I wrote down what I wanted to accomplish in furtherance of my overall business objective in one, three, and five years, allowing myself to grow more outlandish as I went further out. I wrote a detailed description of my target audience, their age, dietary prefaces, ethnicity, gender, etc, based upon the demographic data I accessed on my social media accounts. Speaking of social media, instead of viewing my TikTok account as the end in and of itself, I refocused on using my social media accounts as a way of strengthening my brand and promoting my book. I know I have a very large social media following, I know that I spend a lot of time making YouTube videos, I also do a lot of speaking engagements and cooking demonstrations. Last year, as I mentioned, I even started a podcast, and on occasion, I still do lawyer stuff. But I don't let any of this distract me from that fundamental business identity, the one that helps me identify the milestones and goals along my path. Now, a quick word on pivoting. Your business plan, it isn't written in stone, neither is your business identity. It's just as critical that you learn to adapt and sometimes pretty quickly in cases of things like, I don't know, global pandemics. This should not, however, keep you from sitting down and going through with the exercise of actually creating that business plan. What is your mission statement? What is your one year, three year, and five-year plan? How much revenue, how many sources of income, brand recognizability, number of employees for those one, three, five-year milestones? Who is your customer? How old are they? What gender are they? What kind of products do they like? What kind of products do they not like? Who are your biggest competitors? What can you learn from them? How can you set yourself apart? Who are some of the folks who can help you as a mentor or just as a good connection? Now, let's build a roadmap together. For this lesson, we've actually put together a template business plan that allows you to answer these exact questions. For example, you're going to see a tab here called Company Description and Goals. You'll also see a tab for Market, that's going to identify your ideal consumer, as well as some of the points from your market research. You're going to have a tab for Competitive Analysis, who are your top 3 competitors? What can you learn from them? How can you set yourself apart from them? Finally, a tab for Network Development. This is where I really want you to identify those people who can help you with your side hustle or business, and I also want you to set a date to contact them. For our next lesson, we're going to talk about how to take that side hustle and become a full-time entrepreneur. 8. Transition From Hustler to Full Time Entrepreneur: Remember back in Lesson 4 when we talked about all the different ways your hobby can generate income? Well, now is the time to start thinking outside the box. What are some nontraditional ways your hustle can derive income? Let me give you a great example. Nieman's first job when he came to the United States was as the host of a restaurant in Chicago. Within five years he became the General Manager. He decided to take everything he knew about the restaurant business and start his own restaurant. Within a few months, his restaurant was by all measure, a complete success, generating profit its very first year. To support his new business, Nieman started a Facebook and Instagram account for the restaurant, where he would post really fun videos about the food, the employees, and really happy customers. His social media accounts also did well, and he quickly amassed a sizable following. One day, a brand reached out to him to see whether his restaurant would be open to working with them, incorporating their sauce in the menu items and posting about them on the restaurant's social media accounts. Not only did they offer to provide the restaurants full supply of that sauce for free, they would also pay the restaurant thousands of dollars per social media post. Today, the majority of the restaurant's income comes from strategic brand partnerships, providing a great backstop when restaurant traffic is soft or cost of goods skyrockets due to, I don't know, inflation. Now, a couple of things to think about when you're considering adding verticals or another source of income to your business portfolio. Don't limit yourself to straightforward streams of income. Do lean into your strengths. What are you good at? What are your friends always say God, you're so good at this. What were you really known for at your nine-to-five? Nieman was always great at creating fun, engaging videos, so developing a social media community was something he excelled at. That may not be for you, you need to find what is. I wanted to share a story on navigating, being a full-time entrepreneur. Amy was working full-time for an ad agency. After years of a successful career in marketing, she decided to quit her full-time job and start her own business as a digital marketing consultant. Day 1 of her career as an entrepreneur rolled around. She got out of bed, and she was absolutely paralyzed. Eventually, Amy was able to come up with a game plan, and today her business generates tens of millions of dollars per year. Amy's story is not uncommon. When I finally withdrew from full-time law, it was hard for me to find my rhythm, and that's what a nine-to-five does. However much you may dislike your job. The structure of it allows you to go on autopilot when you need it. When you're an entrepreneur, it is way harder to go on autopilot. You do not have supervisors, bosses, and colleagues who are there to tell you what to do. You have to be your own boss. What does that look like? Well, remember back in Lesson 7, we talked about the importance of process. This is when process will become your ally, your comfort blanket. It's the thing you can rely on to be so habitual, so ritualistic. Maybe you can go on autopilot for bits and pieces of your day, your week, or even your month. When I first started out as a full-time entrepreneur, I wasted a lot of time just debating what should I do today? Because as an entrepreneur, you feel like you could do a lot of different things to move the needle in the right direction. All of these things in nor to the bottom line of my business. Which one was more important? Which one deserved my limited resources? When you have that many things to choose from, the analysis involved with answering that question can be a huge time suck in and of itself, especially if you're distracted. I found myself wasting precious hours, puttering around the house and getting, I don't know, 20% of the things I wanted to get done per day. Eventually, I went back to my very best friend from my legal practice, my calendar. I started to fill in all the empty spaces with purpose, starting with my morning run all the way to my very last meeting of the day. At first, I severely underestimated the amount of time and energy it would take to do things. But over time, I was able to put together schedules that I knew I could complete. I did this on a weekly basis. And guess what? I even scheduled the weekly scheduling day, every Tuesday after my podcast went live. I knew I had a bit of a breather, so that afternoon at 4:00 P.M. I sat down at my computer and gave myself an hour to plan out the rest of the week. Now I realize not everyone is a calendar person. When I successfully completed the tasks I laid out for myself, I felt like a million bucks. If you're not a calendar person, use a list. Every week, list out the things you'd like to get done and do the same thing each morning. There is nothing quite as satisfying as crossing things off that list. If someone tells you that every day of the life of an entrepreneur ends with satisfaction, you should ask for your money back. Remember Cassie, the one who went from being a certified Pilates instructor to a business mogul with products and retail shops across the country? My favorite story about Cassie was about the time she decided to make a yoga bag. How she finally had the yoga bag of her dreams and was so darn excited to share them with her community. Guess how long it took for her to sell her yoga bags? Three years. For all intents and purposes, taking three years to sell 300 bags isn't the stuff of entrepreneurial legends. As an entrepreneur, I can guarantee that you will encounter failure, so let's get that out of the way. It's going to happen to you and it's going to happen to everyone. Thus, it isn't whether or not you fail that will set you apart from everyone else. It's what you do after you fail that's going to make all the difference. Here's the hard part. It won't be enough for you to get back up and try again. That while difficult isn't always going to cut it. The really hard part is learning from your failure. Wouldn't it be great if we could just forget the unsold yoga bag and never think about it again? But that's not what Cassie did. She had the courage to yes, get up, dust herself off, and then examine what went wrong. Did she price the bag too high? Did she overestimate the loyalty of her YouTube following? Did she beer too far from her sweet spot of her connection to them? A big mentor of mine once told me something I will never forget. She said, I've had the most success in my life when I had at least one person around me who believed in me just a little bit more than I believed in myself. It's time to put everything you've learned from this class together and find that one person in your life to do that, believe in you a little more than you believe in yourself. Now, in order to find that person, you need to share your dream with them. Not in that vague, hazy way that you do over a mug of coffee and a plate of cookies. I mean, in that specific way that will allow your dream supporter to really understand the stakes. As I mentioned at the very beginning, at the end of this class, what my dream for you was to put together a final project, a deck, a pitch to your future investor. For that final project, we've put together a template that allows you to input everything that you've learned from this class to share with your Dream Supporter. This pitch is designed to explain to your supporters, this is my dream and this is why it deserves to soar your pitch, it's going to include the following, the three words that describe your brand. It's also going to describe your brand story. What problem does your business solve? How is it different from your competitors? Who is your ideal customer? It's also going to talk about the plan for how your customers are going to find your brand. The list of ways your brand will generate income with actual income snapshots along with projected income supported by detailed history of budgets and financials. Your pitch will also include a one-year, three-year, and five-year plan for growth. All of this should sound really familiar to you by now. It's also going to include a list of potential partners, investors, mentors, and other important figures in your network. It's also going to include one powerful success story. For example, a happy customer, a big investor, a big event that went really, really well. Finally, it's going to include probably the most important thing, your Dream Supporter is going to want to hear. What you want your brand to be in five years. Now that we've put everything together. Next up, I'm going to leave you with my final thoughts. 9. Final Thoughts: Sometimes the time needed to build your safety net isn't necessarily for saving more cash, analyzing more data, for coming up with a backup plan. It's the time you need to realize that the most enduring safety net in all the world is you. I hope you took from this class all the tools that you need to start that strategic dream chase with purpose and confidence. I encourage you to upload your final pitch to the project gallery so that I can follow along. I'm at The Korean Vegan on virtually every single social media platform, and you can also email me at joanne@thekoreanvegan.com. I want to thank you so much for joining me in this class. With that, I want to wish you all the very best in the journey ahead.