The Side Hustle

If you haven't read the start, you can pick it up and then head back to this.

Before you got summarily appointed to the Corporate Startup by Boss, you were pretty much like everyone else. Go to work, doing a job, getting a paycheck. Rinse and repeat. But Corporate work has been dragging you down lately. You’re busier than ever, being busy. You’ve just paid off your college tuition loan. It’s starting to feel like you’re finally over a hump. You’ve just got married, maybe, having kids are in the 3 to 5 year Plan. But with today’s hire and fire job culture, you’re seeing your senior co-workers get laid off after a restructure. You’ve dodged the bullet this time. The reorganization doesn’t affect you. But you have this nagging feeling that one day, it will be your turn. You either stay the course, cash in or check out, find another job while you’re still marketable. You need an exit plan before you turn 35 or you might become like Miserable guy down the hall that has been in the company for 35 years and 5 levels higher than your pay grade. He never smiles, is always grumpy, and pretty much says ‘No’ to everything. All he does all day is attend meetings. Back to back meetings. He’s never interested in anything. He needs you to be brief because he has the attention span of a fly. You often wonder, if you could survive in this Company for another 10 years, you would probably wind up like him. Miserable. An incredibly sad thought.

You’re not sure if it’s the mid life crisis, but you feel trapped at work, never given the big opportunities, always the small insignificant ones. You fail to recognize that the chemicals in your brain start acting up every 10 years of your work life. See, that other guy down the other side of the office - High Potential, he gets all the big opportunities and even when he screws up, he gets promoted to mess up more. His cubicle has a view of the car park. Yours doesn’t. All you get is a view of the loading bay, and even that is half a view, obscured by a load-bearing pillar the size of High Potential’s ego. But he has a skill that you don’t. A mega-watt smile, an Ivy League education, and the ability to fake it till he makes it. We all know that guy. The ‘High Potential’. He can talk the legs off a table. He talks but doesn’t really do anything. He gets other people to do his nice little presentations, with all these fancy charts. He is always the guy that moves up. Not you. 

You’re the one that everyone likes to have on their team. You’re the steady Eddie, the ‘Strong Contributor’. The one that cleans things up after that guy messes things up. You’re the cleaner, the janitor. Keeps things in order, organizes the chaos. You’re reliable, trustworthy and hardworking. But you’re never going to move up. Management needs you to make sure the ship doesn’t veer off course. You’re the steady pair of hands, a team player. The full back of the football team. All the knocks, none of the glory. Just a few more years in your role, Management says, and you’ll be ready for your promotion. Don’t worry, they’ll take care of you. Worry now - this is when you’ve plateaued. 

The Company keeps you so busy that you don’t have a life. Rushing to work, rushing from meetings to meetings, rushing to finish your lunch, rushing home for that after dinner conference call with workers from a different time zone, rushing to sleep, rushing to wake up, to get to work. Every day is a rush. Emails on your phone, emails on your computer. You’re so busy sitting in meetings during the day, some nights you stay up all night ‘clearing’ your emails. They pile up so quickly during the day. You sit on 500 emails a day in your Inbox. And when you don’t reply to one particular one within a day, and you get a nasty email from Miserable guy and High Potential jumps on you, nudging you with a ‘gentle reminder’ to reply next time. Yeah, right. Like as if he replies to his emails. High Potential probably spends more time at the water cooler than anyone else you know. Emails will be the death of you. You’re Malcolm In The Middle. You’re Middle Management.

One night after a few drinks with a couple of work friends (you don’t actually have any friends, you realize; all your friends are from the Office - it’s a sad part of reality), complaining about your Boss, loose lips, talking about how ridiculous the Company has become, moaning about missed opportunities, stupid decisions made by the Invisible Hand of the Company, the idiocy of High Potential guy, the sharp remarks of Miserable guy, you have an epiphany. You’re going to start a company of your own, and when you’ve built it up to a certain size, you’re doing to quit this terrible mess of a Company and hopefully, it will turn your currently miserable life to a wonderful life of rainbows and unicorns. You will be calling the shots for yourself. You will be earning a handsome seven figure income. You will solve life’s most difficult problems, world hunger or peace in the Middle East, and get everyone to pay you $1 for it. You will be richer than Jeff Bezos and crazier than Elon Musk. You’ll marry a weird but super hot wife and call your son X ? A-Xii. Whatever. But it has to start somewhere, but you’re going to do it while still in the Company, earning your measly salary. It’s called a Side-Hustle.

So, you jump into action, devoting yourself to be a semi-entrepreneur. You get a brand new Kindle and buy all the books on self-help, motivation, time management and fancy Harvard Business School guides on strategic business models. You watch every Youtube video on how successful YouTubers make tons of money just by selling or being influencers on the Internet. You soaked all this knowledge profusely, lapping it up like a beagle fresh on a hunt - on the train, in the bus, in waiting areas at airport berths, on those dreadful work flights. In your sleep, you listen to audio books you’ve bought from Audible, hoping that the knowledge will somehow seep into your already stressed out brain through osmosis. You’ve had a million conversations with different people, ran your concepts with your work friends. You’ve figured what you wanted to do. You have an idea. You’ve created a Plan. Now you put it on paper. It’s the spring of possibilities. You’re determined to succeed.

You write a business plan, decide on a cool name for your venture, incorporate a company, start a small business bank account, and like Phil Knight, you ask for some seed money from Dad, source some products from a cheap location, build a website using some offshore Polish developer you find on a crowd sourcing site. You’ve decided to start a Direct to Consumer eCommerce business. You’re your own boss now (of a company of one, but still). Finally, after 6 months of hard work negotiating with Chinese suppliers, offshore web development, you launch it while juggling with your day job. You start some online advertising with Google and Bing and start accepting orders through credit card payments. It’s selling, maybe like 5 or 6 orders a day. Then you scratch your head and wonder, what happened? The money it makes in a month is not enough to pay for your drinks with your work friends and feed your need to moan about the Miserable guy down the hall in the Office, or how High Potential always gets better opportunities.

Then you go into despair, complaining about how life is unfair to you. There is no God. You’ve definitely put in the hard work starting your business. You’ve sunk some money into it for startup (ok, it’s Dad’s money, but it still counts). You’ve applied everything that those multi-selling authors have sold you through those books, and yet you don’t have a breakthrough. You go back to your winter of discontentment after sinking 6 months of side hustling without anything to show for. What went wrong? A million blames float through your head, from the guy that told you it was easy to source from China – just buy low and sell high, to that Youtuber kid that told you to buy some keywords on Google to promote your site. You doubt yourself and wonder, surely, there’s an easier way to make money.

The reality of life is that probably millions of people around the world would have gone down this route, in the hope of becoming an entrepreneur, starting a Direct to Consumer eCommerce business, or a Drop Ship business and making some decent money. There is also a whole industry of people that thrive on providing advice, mostly motivational, on different ways of starting businesses and writing great business plans. They are there to feed in your need to start something, capitalizing on your mid life crisis. But, they never tell you the truth. 

The truth is, you realize, most of you fail. 

Starting the business is the easy part. Everyone in the value chain of entrepreneurship would have made some money from you in the process of helping you go after your dream, or part thereof. The self help books, the strategic business guides, LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Audible, Amazon, life coaches, inspirational speakers and the list goes on. Somewhere inert of human beings, once you have done some time in Corporate life, you’ll get into this mid-sectional life crisis. No one knows how long it will last or how much time will pass till the chemicals in your brain settles down and you go back to your submissive self. It’s like your body clock is screaming for you to try something else. So you go out and try something new and when it doesn’t succeed, you quickly sink back into what you know. CORPORATE LIFE. You would have spent six to twelve months (that's 3.5 to seven dog-years) trying it out and the outcome was making a few self-help multi-sellers richer by reading their stuff. But it didn’t do anything for you. It made you even more miserable and your Dad poorer. The difficult part of starting a business is growing it and making enough money for it to be your main hustle. Not having a ‘positive’ attitude or finding your zen from within to do the amazing.

What you really need is growth. Exponential growth. Ten X growth. Some of the ethos of growth cannot be learned in a book. It must be experienced for yourself. Growing a business, not just starting one, is incredibly difficult. It is incredibly intense. It requires attention to details. It requires you to measure everything. If you can measure it, you can improve it. In traditional companies, they like to measure This Year vs. Last Year performance indicators, sometimes to account for yearly seasonality. They strip out the impact of foreign exchange and measure like-for-like growth. However, the Internet business is a daily business. Seasonality is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Not This Month of This Year versus This Month of Last Year. The speed in which you execute is sometimes like day stock traders. You have to be completely aware of what’s happening inside and outside of your business. But once you’ve worked at it for a few tough years, it might get easier and more sustainable. But will you make it past the first two or three years?

Some people say Side-hustles, unfortunately, would not work in this sort of business. You have to be in it to win it. You can’t be having two legs in different boats going down a river. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to make a choice. Or it’s going to split you apart, literally, in half. You’ll end up burning the candle from both ends, and with nothing to show for. Perhaps you should quit your job, and do this full-time in a fit of inspiration or rage. It’s quite fashionable these days to ‘Stick it to the Man’, lose your Corporate job and start a company of your own. But you do have bills to pay, kids along the way and perhaps a home that you’re going to downpay. Quite the contrary, you should really think this through. It’s not for everyone. You have to decide if this is for you. Some people have meaningful careers with Corporates, climb the ladder successfully, get that Gold Watch after 35 years. Some people jump from Company to Company, until they retire. Some people make that transition to creating a company of their own and have become self-made millionaires. You will always hear stories like that. Who’s that Youtuber, Jenna Marbles? How did she do it? For every Jenna Marbles, there's a million more... You. Would you even make enough money even to have a meaningful life, send your kids to college and retire comfortably, before you become that Miserable guy?

So many questions, so little answers. Maybe not today. You have a headache just thinking about it. Another thing to moan about. You decide to take a couple of Advils, drown it with Coke and watch some Netflix. It’ll blow over.

Head over to the next part of the story.