How to Turn Your Side Hustle into a Full-time Gig

Fifty percent of millennials have a side gig, according to a study by Experian.

This is often the perfect way to jumpstart your financial goals, including debt freedom, moving into your own apartment, or funding that dream vacation. A side hustle can also be a big motivator to launching a full-time business and achieving financial freedom.

To help you learn more, take a look at seven tips to turn your side hustle into a full-time gig.

1. Be Realistic

The truth is: Not every side job can be turned into a full-time hustle. For example, mowing your neighbors’ lawns every weekend probably works really well as a side gig, generating a few hundred dollars a month. But you would need to put in a lot more effort to transform this concept into a full-fledged business. For example, you’d need to consider advertising costs, the seasonality of a lawncare business, and the existing competition in the market.

Putting together a financial forecast to determine your total revenues and expenses is another important part of your research at this stage.

2. Stop Treating Your Side Business Like a Hobby

Leah Gervais, founder of Urban 20 Something, says that if you want to scale your side hustle into a full-time gig, you need to treat your side business “like your job, because it is.”

“This means scheduling out your time to work on it and making those meetings unbreakable. Be honest with yourself; this will be an intense time period with long hours and lots of sacrifices. But it’s just a chapter. The more dedicated you are, the faster you’ll be able to make your side hustle your full-time hustle,” says Gervais.

Another way to up your commitment level is to formalize your business structure. Tasha Cochran, one half of the YouTube channel One Big Happy Life, recently quit her job to pursue her blogging hustle full-time. As she noted on her website: “We became an LLC, signed a partnership agreement and started to be more strategic about what we were doing.”

3. Look for Ways to Work Smarter

A side hustle can be hard to scale but it’s not impossible. One way to grow your side hustle is to transition from a one-to-one business model to a one-to-many business model. Translation: Figure out how to earn money while you sleep!

One booming market for doing this is the e-learning industry. According to Forbes, e-learning will climb to $325 billion by 2025.

Just be aware: In order to scale an e-learning business with a host of online courses, you do have to hustle.

For example, Robyn Parets migrated online with her branded Pretzel Kids Yoga Teacher Certification Course in 2016. Pretzel Kids still offers live trainings and kids yoga classes, but the online school allows the company to grow its reach globally. Pretzel Kids nows sells a host of courses via its online kids yoga training school, such as How to Teach Mindfulness to Kids and Yoga for Kids with Special Needs. In addition, Pretzel Kids instructors can join a membership community where they can access branded materials, download teaching resources, get booked for teaching gigs, and more, says Parets.

“The ability to offer online trainings and a membership community has been pivotal to the growth of Pretzel Kids. We also offer our trained teachers a way to immediately start their own side hustles using our curriculum,” she says.

4. Invest in Yourself

Have you ever heard the saying the best investment you can make is in yourself? This is especially applicable to scaling your side hustle because you are your biggest asset.

As a full-time entrepreneur to-be, the learning process should be a continuous one. In the early days of scaling your hustle, you might have to invest in tools and courses to beef up your skill set. For example, you may need to learn more about email marketing or social media. Yet, in the long-run, this will save you time and money.

You can also fast-track your success by finding a mentor and connecting with other like-minded people who can help your business thrive.

5. Wait Until Your Side Hustle Earnings are Consistent

Before you make the leap from full-time employee to full-time entrepreneur, your side hustle earnings should either equal your current income or be sufficient enough to cover your living expenses.

Don’t forget to include a line item in your new budget for those intangible benefits that your current job provides, including health insurance, 401(k) contributions and the like. For example, if you have to say goodbye to free lunch on Fridays or free daily coffee, make sure to add these as new expenses each week.

Another tip is to wait at least a few months in order to determine whether your side business will produce consistent earnings. This is exactly what Gervais did. Once her side business started regularly bringing in more money than she made at her 9 to 5 job, she had the confidence to turn it into her full-time job. Today, her online business generates more than $10k in sales per month.

6. Boost Your Emergency Fund Before Taking the Plunge

If you have a healthy savings account, then you’ll have peace of mind to go all-in on your side business. To help you boost your emergency fund faster, you can try automating your finances.

With a Chime account, for example, you can save when you get paid and automatically direct a percentage of every paycheck into your Chime Savings Account. This way you can put your savings on autopilot and reach full-time entrepreneur status sooner. As a bonus, if you use your Chime Visa Debit Card to make purchases, Chime will round up each purchase you make to the nearest dollar, and transfer the round up amount right into your Savings Account.

7. Schedule in Self-Care

When you’re working to scale your side hustle into a full-time business, it’s easy to put health and wellness on the back-burner. But taking care of your physical and emotional well-being is more important than ever at this stage. The good news is: Self-care doesn’t have to be expensive. It can be as simple as scheduling in a 30-minute walk each day to get some fresh air and mental clarity, reading a book or enjoying a long bath.

Ready, Set, Go!

If transitioning your side hustle into a full-time gig is something that you’ve been on the fence about, we hope these seven tips will give you the push you need to start living your dream!