Episode 93. My Top 3 Tips from 3 Years of Side Hustling

I’m so excited to bring to you some of my favorite tips and lessons from being a side hustler for three years!

Now that I look back at those first three years, I have such fond memories.

But oh my God, I can tell you it was not pretty. There were moments if not months that were rough!

I can’t wait to share my top favorite tips with you from my side hustle days. Also, for each tip, I will share some practical action steps that you can actually consider implementing and kick you into making things happen.

In This Episode:

Time management as a side hustler who’s doing this on top of your full time job or other life priorities
Start becoming known for your unique thought leadership ASAP
Side hustlers can make just as much money and impact as someone who is “full time” in their business
Everything you do has value and relevance, and it can help someone

Time management as a side hustler who’s doing this on top of your full time job or other life priorities

Tip 1: Time management as a side hustler means being creative with the pockets of time you do have and really turning up the impact of your actions, rather than trying to make more time to do more manual labor.

One thing that helped me as a side hustler was that I very rarely, if not ever, felt like I didn’t have enough time.

That’s one distinction I have noticed between myself and fellow side hustlers who really struggled in their business.

A lot of my side hustler peers would often feel like they don’t have enough time. And that thought alone would discourage them. Whereas for myself, that was not even a question that came up for me. And if it did, I didn’t let it control my emotions.

I think this is important for me to share because we have all heard time and time again about how mindset is important for entrepreneurs. This was one of them.

Even if someone and myself might have the same amount of free time in a week, because we both work a full time job and we have other commitments like family, sleep, whatever.

Someone could look at their weekly schedule or calendar and just feel exasperated by how they don’t have a solid four hour time block available on any given day of the week, or even weekends.

Whereas the way I looked at it was that I have so many pockets of time every week.

That’s why if you look at my old Instagram stories from 2019, 2020 and 2021 when I was side hustling, I would use any pocket of time available. These include:

Walking to the bus to go to the office
When I’m brushing my teeth and getting ready for work, and in my mind, I’m planning what I want to talk about in my stories for the day.
When I’m walking to the bus stop or subway or wherever, I would record the video. Or I would take a photo or boomerang or something, and type the text onto the Instagram story, or add captions to my video during my commute. Or I would literally create or record some content right outside my office building.

As you can see, I got creative with where and when I created content. And it didn’t intrude into my usual responsibilities. I was still able to neatly compartmentalize different parts of my life so it didn’t seep into each other.

All that to say: There are pockets of time available to you.

But here’s the thing. The execution of your action plan is probably what your brain is resisting.

In your mind, you might be thinking your Instagram stories have to be done in a beautiful room in your house or somewhere with a nice background. And you have your makeup and hair done, and you sound confident and look bright on video.

You feel like you need to have the most optimal environment in order to allow you to create your best work. Because hey, that’s what all these other business coaches’ Instagram stories look like, right?

Those expectations alone are what holds back so many side hustlers. The expectation of what you think your content or marketing is supposed to look like. The expectation of how you’re supposed to create or implement your action plan.

Because it’s not that you don’t have time at all or don’t have time to create content or talk about your offer.

Be very careful of the stories you’re telling yourself. Especially right now as a side hustler who might be in the stage where you’re not really signing clients “consistently”.

Your emotional capacity as an entrepreneur is probably very shaky, so I really need you to be intentional with the stories or expectations you’re feeding yourself. If anything, you gotta be creative with your thoughts.

Now, for side hustlers, apart from the thought of, “I don’t have enough time”, another very common thought that happens concurrently is “I need to do more”.

For me, that was the thought I personally struggled with especially in my very early days as a side hustler. I’ve shared this on many different episodes on the podcast before. In my first five months of becoming a coach and entrepreneur, I was hustling on top of my full-time job.

For those five-ish months, I also worked with 1:1 clients, posted on Instagram stories every day, posted several times on my Instagram feed every week, had a private Facebook group where I did weekly and monthly challenges and livestreams. I also sent out weekly email newsletters, participated in other people’s Facebook groups, posted on LinkedIn, started a podcast, and even posted a few YouTube videos before closing that down because it was just too much for me. That’s a lot of work, especially for a side hustler.

As you may know, I burnt out. And to the point where I actually just shut down my business for seven months until March 2020. That’s when I started creating content again.

And it was not until the fourth quarter of 2020 when I rebuilt my confidence to again sell a high ticket coaching program. That’s how shaky my belief and mindset was after the burnout.

For me, it wasn’t necessarily the physical part of the burnout that shook me up. But it was my lack of belief that I didn’t have to do so much in order to create results.

The lack of belief that I could actually turn up the quality and energy of my actions and thoughts, rather than turning up the frequency and quantity of my manual labor that could create results.

I was really shaky in this belief. But as a side hustler, I understood that I really don’t have 24 hours in a day to work on my business.

And if I really wanted to keep going in my business, I had to be open to first thinking differently, and secondly, operating and doing things differently.

That’s why for most of 2020, after my seven month hiatus, I had to take the time to rebuild my belief and sense of identity and belief in what I was doing. And start operating my business differently.

And by the end of the year, we created two back to back 10k months and then a six-figure year.

How exactly did I do this even as a side hustler and didn’t increase the amount of time I was able to allocate to my business? Well, I focused on doing the same thing, but doing it better and turning up the energy and impact of each thing. Not necessarily doing anything new or different, but doing it better.

Throughout 2021, when I was still side hustling, I did some new things for fun like launching a paid workshop and a free webinar. I honestly did it for fun and on a whim. They did not yield noticeable results in my business and I didn’t really expect it to.

I did them because I had an itch that I really wanted to scratch. And I know that if I really want those things to yield results, I have to keep practicing them and repeating them. But they were not the priority for me at the moment.

Rather, it was the impact of my podcast and Instagram content, my marketing and selling, as well as my own mindset and sense of belief in what I was doing. By turning these things up like ten notches, that really resulted in 10x the results without having to spend more time on the business or do more things or anything new.

But why do you need to do more things? And why do you need more time to do more things?

A lot of people will say they want a simple business. But when I tell them okay, it’s really simple, you just need to do XYZ, it feels too simple for them and they’d go buy another course about some other strategy for their offers.

You say you wish you had more time for your business or you want to do more things for your business, but do you really want that? Is that even what you want or is that even aligned to the lifestyle you want?

For myself and our clients, we don’t want the business to feel like another full-time job.

We would much rather be living our best life and still allocate sufficient and ample time to work hard on the business. But not in a way that feels like just another job we dread.

That’s why our clients, whether they’re side hustlers or full-time entrepreneurs, focus on “doing the bare minimum” number of things in their business but doing each thing really, really well to sign clients.

That’s why now, when clients first join our program, and this is especially for those who have already been trying to grow their business for months but still aren’t seeing the results they want, what we do is that we’ll map out your bare minimum business plan for the next six months.

Here’s something practical I encourage you to consider implementing in your own way. Right now, if you’re in a stage of your business where you’re still figuring out your own workflows, time management and even energy management + mind management, I suggest focusing your content, marketing and selling only on ONE social media platform.

Most of my clients choose either Instagram or LinkedIn because of the range of mediums they can create for those two platforms.

I also once worked with a client who found a lot of success on Twitter. And that’s because her target audience are fellow professors and academics, who tend to congregate on Twitter.

The reason I suggest focusing your time and energy on just ONE social media platform for now, until you start signing more clients, is because, first it takes time to build up your muscle to create for one platform and to build up that “consistency” muscle.

Secondly, because it takes time to really hone your voice and your confidence when it comes to communicating your story, your values, your thought leadership, and so on.

Give yourself the room to both practice the physical act of creating content and to practice building your own confidence and belief in what you have to say.

Later on, I suggest adding on a long form content platform in addition to your social media platform, and/or repurposing your content from your first social media platform onto more social media platforms.

For me, this is exactly what I did in 2020 and I am very confident that this is why our podcast was able to create so much results in our business in the first 12 months, despite not having the largest audience size.

Around the summer of 2020, I knew I was about to start my PhD in August and I would have to readjust to a totally new schedule and also a new mindset. Because now I’m in a new and unfamiliar setting, learning totally new things, and so on.

I knew I had to be intentional about how I use my cognitive capacity and how I use my time. So I made the decision to just work on one skill set for the time being, until I’m ready to move on to another skill set.

That specific skill set I chose was Instagram Stories. I decided that right now, I want to really practice my ability to create Instagram stories quickly, efficiently, powerfully and confidently.

Almost every day, I would give myself twenty minutes to do video Instagram stories in the morning, before I started my day as a PhD student. That usually resulted in three minutes of video Instagram stories, which I would then repurpose into carousel content for my Instagram feed

And you know what happened? My confidence in my content skyrocket, because I zoned in on that one skill set. I saw my ability as a communicator and public speaker shot up because I just focused on one skill set.

I also made offers and talked about my program with so much more excitement. I realized I actually have so much to say!

So much so that two months after I decided on just practicing this one skill, I started this podcast. And this podcast really accelerated the results in my business.

So as you can see, focusing on one skill set and really getting good at that one skill, can protrude out into multiple areas of your business.

That’s why, especially for side hustlers out there, I really recommend picking one skill set to zone in on and really master it. And start seeing ripple effects from that one skill alone and of course, start signing clients, even as a side hustler.

Start becoming known for your unique thought leadership ASAP

Tip 2: Start becoming known for your unique thought leadership ASAP. Knowing how to stand out in your space and become known for what you bring to the table isn’t important only for marketing and sales, but also for your own sense of identity and belief in what you do.

The more you play around and look at the business coaches that you really like, and consume a lot from other coaches and try to see what they’re doing, what they saying and what seems to be working for them, the less likely you’ll actually build a brand that is going to visibly stand out in your niche or industry.

I know this because I’ve been there. I can compare the months where I looked and sounded like everyone else because I was paying so much attention to everyone else.

Versus when I really leaned into my own brain and looked at what is already inherent inside of me, what I really believe in, the skills and perspective I bring to the table. When I started building a brand and thought leadership around that while continuing to hone my skills and gain more awareness and knowledge so I’m not staying stagnant. And of course, becoming better at my craft as I work with more clients because now, clients actually want to work with me.

The first time I really believed I had something to offer my industry was around the first quarter of 2021. This was soon after I created my first two back to back 10k months as a side hustler, without launching.

The reason why I brought up the word “launching” is because my clients would ask me, “Cheryl, how do I plan a launch? I see all these business coaches doing launches. Can you help me plan my pre-launch and launch content?”

And I would just think, wait, I don’t even launch. Not the traditional way launching is defined, at least with a whole build up during the pre-launch and then an open cart and close cart.

When I go on Instagram, I would see all these big business coaches selling a course or program specifically on launching. They’d even say you can launch for 1:1 coaching spots, which was not what I did.

At this time I was just thinking, why does selling your 1:1 program have to be so complicated? My clients are already overwhelmed with life, work, and now they gotta worry about creating this whole launch plan? Nah. We’re not doing that.

So I had to reverse engineer what I did. I discovered that my approach and what I am really good at, is “soft launching” for my own 1:1 coaching program.

I started talking about soft launching in my content. I even decided to do a whole paid masterclass workshop thing back in April 2021 because I was like, “Oh my God, people need to stop thinking they have to do a big splashy flashy launch for their 1:1 coaching program!”

I think I sold around 12 or 13 spots for that workshop. But that’s not the most interesting thing. What was most interesting was that all of a sudden, I was known as the soft launch coach. On my application forms to work with me and on sales calls, clients would say they want to learn soft launching from me.

Even to this day in 2022, I have clients who say I want to learn soft launching even though it’s no longer what I position myself or my offer around.

People with bigger businesses than me have even told me, Cheryl, you’re the queen of soft launching.

In other words, people were associating me with my own unique thought leadership, opinions and views about business and marketing. That blew my mind.

I am quite certain that becoming known for something was a reason why my own business results snowballed and got bigger and faster by the end of 2021.

I continued to identify what I really wanted to be known for, built brand awareness for that, and really became known for my own thought leadership in the business coaching space.

And since then, I developed a whole process to teach and coach my own clients to start honing in on their unique thought leadership.

In many of our client testimonials, they literally cite “thought leadership” as a huge contributor to how they created results from our coaching together and why they’ve been signing clients.

This came from both clients who were starting their business from scratch before working together, as well as clients who were already trying to grow their businesses for many months prior, but still didn’t see the results that they wanted.

Thought leadership is a game changer!

Also, the goal when I work with clients is to lean into their unique thought leadership. It is NOT to copy and paste my own content strategy and put it into their own businesses.

Instead, our clients are challenged to literally explore and use their own brain. For example, we look at where they disagree with other coaches, including me!

If you want a sneak peek of what some of our clients have created, there are two particular client spotlight episodes that I would suggest checking out, Episode 66: Client Spotlight: Thought Leadership & Being a Leader for Introverts with Jennifer Ho and Episode 68: Client Spotlight: Building a Coaching Business on Top of a Career + Other Creative Projects with Betty Xie.

We interviewed both clients and they talked about what they bring to the table and shared a bit about how our work together helped them bring this to life.

This is important because first, I rather you be working and coaching with clients ASAP, and also second, this helps you really build a name and reputation in your niche in the long term and as soon as possible.

Because as side hustlers, I get that your preference is likely NOT to add more to your to-do list. So how can you really maximize each piece of content or marketing that you put down?

To do this, please start honing in on your unique thought leadership and building your content and marketing or soft launch plan, around your unique thought leadership.

Start attracting clients who recognize and understand what your unique take on your industry and how you can help them with their problems.

Stop doing what others are doing. Stop choosing a niche based on what you think is trending or will make you money.

Stop posting sentences or content or utilizing Instagram trends because you think that’s gonna make your post get more engagement.

Instead, lean into what you’re confident in, what you genuinely believe in and what you want to be known for. Lean into your confidence in your own thought leadership, rather than a particular copy or CTA (call-to-action) or niche.

That is what will drive results in your business – your belief and confidence in what you have to say and how you can help. You’d be surprised how much that matters more than you’d think. And hey, that’s why they say your thoughts create your results, right?

A lot of you might be thinking right now, “Okay, but I haven’t been in business for that long and I haven’t worked with many clients yet. So I’m not sure what my thought leadership is.” A more practical tip I want to offer here is that, well, first come join us inside 1:1 coaching because I’ve coached so many clients who were in this exact position.

Second, right now, if believing that you have unique thought leadership feels like too much of a stretch, then I encourage you to just focus on helping people.

Just create content that helps people and also, help people through your coaching. I don’t care if it’s for free or in your paid container. Just help people.

Because eventually, when you help people, being able to clearly identify and hone in on your own unique thought leadership will come even more naturally.

But right now, if it feels like too big of a stretch, just go help people. You can never lose or miss out on clients if you just focus on helping people. Helping people is exactly how entrepreneurs and coaches get paid, right? So lead with that intention.

In addition to the mindset of thinking about how you can help someone. For example, when it comes to your content and marketing, you could look at it from the perspective of:

What does my ideal client need to know about my offer?
What are teeny tiny questions that they have about my offer, and they’re pretty much on the fence about working with me, but they are simply not sure about one thing?
What would it be and how can I help them out by addressing it in my content?
What sort of awareness or understanding about their situation would be helpful for my people to have, right now?
How can I create content that offers them that newfound awareness about their situation so it’s like “Oh, no wonder this problem is happening”.

Oftentimes, having just the awareness about why our problem is even happening can be so profound. Once we have that awareness, then we have more cognitive and emotional capacity to take action on that problem, right?

All of these content and marketing ideas or all these ideas about how you can talk about your offer – they all stem from the mindset of wanting to just help your people.

Side hustlers can make just as much money and impact as someone who is “full time” in their business

TIP 3: Don’t lower your goals or standards of your potential or capacity to be an entrepreneur just because you’re a side hustler. Side hustlers can make just as much money and impact as someone who is “full time” in their business.

One thing I personally grappled with as an entrepreneur is feeling like because I’m a side hustler, my business is not as legit as those who are doing it full time as their main source of income.

When I asked myself why that was such a prominent belief for me at one point, honestly, it’s because so many business coaches and established entrepreneurs are like , ”You’ve got to take your business seriously and not treat it like a hobby or a passion project or side hustle.”

Whenever I spoke to people who are not entrepreneurs or business owners, they’d also ask me about my job or PhD, and not really about my business. Or if they do ask about my business, they would ask if I was an influencer or how is my YouTube channel (which, by the way, I didn’t have a YouTube channel, not during that time frame at least).

So, the energy I kinda felt like I got from people around me, whether it’s in person or even people I follow online, seemed like side hustles simply aren’t perceived as legit.

I also want to share something that came up recently, even after I became a full-time coach. This year, 2022, I noticed a very peculiar thing that would happen every time I was with my husband’s friends and they’d ask me what I’m doing now that I’m in Singapore.

I noticed that my response would be very different from how I would normally introduce myself to someone I might meet organically through my own networks, especially someone I meet through my own business and they were a fellow entrepreneur.

Here, in front of my husband’s friends, where most of them are in a traditional career, I would default to saying something like, “I’m just doing my online business because I recently had to leave the PhD to move here to Singapore.” Whereas if I was talking to fellow business owners, I would talk about my business in a much more convicted way.

When I developed the awareness of how I was talking about my business to non-entrepreneurs, I cried. Honestly, I teared up. I was so sad because my business, my “cute little side hustle”, changed my life.

And for me to talk about it in such a condescending way because I was worried about what these non-entrepreneurs would think, made me so sad. Because the truth is. I am damn proud to be a coach. Coaching changed my life and I am able to help so many people because I am a coach.

All that to say, being a full-time entrepreneur doesn’t mean shit. Your identity as an entrepreneur and even as a whole person, is not based on whether you’re a full-time entrepreneur or not.

Who you are, your sense of self, all that has nothing to do with whether your business is your main source of income or what your “job title” is.

You are an entrepreneur but you have to decide that this is you, first. And this belief might not happen overnight.

I never tell my clients to “just believe it”. Rather, I understand that your sense of identity as an entrepreneur, as a coach, takes time, repetition and creating evidence in order to really be ingrained in your brain.

But, for the purpose of this conversation, I just really want to emphasize that there is no need to play down your business just because you are a side hustler.

Since we’re on this note, the opposite applies to. Just because someone has a business does not make them more legit or better than someone who doesn’t have a business. And vice versa, just because someone is super successful and happy in their career does not make them more valuable than someone who is struggling to grow their business. Or any other scenario on the spectrum of possible scenarios.

No one scenario is better than the other. But you have got to decide that your work matters. You have to define success and define your identity for yourself.

Please stop taking up other people’s definition of success or what their definition of a “legit entrepreneur” is.

Define it for yourself and recognize what you’re doing, even as a side hustler. Because it matters.

Everything you do has value and relevance, and it can help someone

As you move forward from this episode and onwards with your day and your week, I really need you to remember that what you do has value, it has relevance and it can help someone. That’s all you need to remember.

Even if you don’t believe it 100%, you can still operate out of just 5% confidence or belief in what I just said. You don’t need to be 100% confident to create results and to be successful.

Just a tiny ounce of confidence can get you started. And if you need a bit of guidance on what to get started on or what to focus on, loop back to the first two points we talked about in this episode:

1) Pick one or two areas of your business to really work on mastering. Turn up the quality and energy of those skills, rather than the number of things you do or the number of hours you clock in.

2) Give yourself some time and space to think about what is your own unique thought leadership. What are your opinions? What are your own personal experiences and stories that led you to develop these opinions, ideas and perspectives?

Start with everything you’ve already got inside you first, and use that to create something that can help people. And that includes both free content and your paid offer.

Eventually, when these “basics” are on lock, the more advanced things like doing a group program launch or starting a podcast will be much easier and make much more sense for your business.

You can create a beautiful, highly impactful business even as a side hustler. I really believe we each have the potential to be successful entrepreneurs if we are leading with the intention of wanting to create amazingness and help others.

If you’re listening to this podcast, I am very confident that you are also someone who wants to create amazingness and you too have a deep desire to help others through your business.

And that is why I believe you have what it takes to build an impactful and profitable business.

Sounds good? Awesome. Let’s get to work.