Few people have summed up the challenges and payoffs of following your entrepreneurial instincts quite like Chris Guillebeau. The blogger responsible for New York Times-bestselling books such as The Art of Non-Conformity and 100 Side Hustles has spent his career empowering the most ambitious among us to carve out trajectories beyond our day jobs. The phrase “do what you love” has become a modern-day catchcry.
Guillebeau believes the most successful side hustles are equal parts ambition and execution. “Inspiration is good,” he writes in 100 Side Hustles, an “idea book” that profiles 100 everyday people - from tour guides to coders to families - that have turned fleeting ideas into profitable businesses. “But inspiration combined with action is so much better.”
Thea Mendes knows all about the highs and lows of side hustles. Back in 2017, Mendes’s 11-year-old son Marcus dreamed up the idea of DOMUTS, a line of doughnuts for dogs, while helping his mother at the local markets. Mendes was inspired to make her son’s brainwave a reality. She says the first batch - available in varieties such as raspberry and peanut butter - sold out almost instantly. But soon her side hustle eclipsed her ambitions, taking on a life of its own.
“I was a working mum baking DOMUTS throughout the night and when my oven would ding at 2am, I would wake up and put in the next batch,” she says.
“I felt like I had a newborn baby and fatigue quickly set in. The other challenge I faced was making the DOMUTS in a cost-efficient way. I was making them by hand, using fresh ingredients. After a year of baking, I quit. I loved the business but couldn’t find a way to meet the demand.”
Ten years ago, Mendes’s hopes of starting a side business around the demands of her day job could have been perceived as unusual. But these days, countless workers are juggling business endeavours around office hours, motivated by everything from the chance to create new and exciting revenue streams to the opportunity to fuel their own creative growth.
According to a 2018 survey by financial services company Bankrate, almost 4 in 10 Americans maintain a side hustle, earning an average of $US686 a month. Research from the AMP Foundation in 2019 revealed that 67% of Australians are working on a side project that they aim to monetise in the future.
Brooke Marks knows what it takes to transform a passion into a business prospect. Marks is the founder of the High End group, an invitation-only Facebook community that’s one of the social media platform’s best-known marketplaces for vintage designer fashion. More than 80,000 members flock to High End to sell hard-to-find pieces from designers such as Hermes and Prada. But when Marks started High End around her day job, she learnt the ropes as she went along.
“I realised there was a gap in the market to sell high-end pieces,” Marks says. “At first, I wanted to sell some of my wardrobe and then it turned into a passion project.”
Despite the fact that she was still working a day job, Marks initially spent five hours a day moderating the community and fielding customer service requests. “Customer service was always really important to me,” she says.
Marks has since hired a customer service team. She’s also joined forces with Reggie Obey, and together they have launched The Consign, a private luxury consignment service that serves women in Melbourne and Sydney, with a view to expanding in the coming months.
“High End has expanded our team and has targets to hit 240,000 members by 2022,” Obey says. “Because we run High End on Facebook, we have limitations in terms of what we can automate, so time is our biggest obstacle. We’ve had plenty of barriers, but we’ve used them to grow.”
Commercial aspirations can be a powerful entrepreneurial motivation. But the biggest payoffs can involve new opportunities to solve creative problems and test bold ideas. For Oli Sansom, a respected Melbourne documentary photographer, starting The Arbourists - a side business offering wildly imaginative, custom-made wedding arbours - offered the chance to reinvent an aspect of a well-worn industry.
Fifty-three per cent of Australians dream of starting a business or side hustle but only 6% have actually done it. Sally Kiernan
“We wanted to bring one small thing that’s a little bit different to an industry that’s based around this idea of ritual, because this space is changing dramatically as folks change what tradition means to them,” says Sansom, who runs The Arbourists on weekends with business partner Matt Hedrich. “I lean towards going vision first at all costs and then everything else works out.”
Every year, nearly half a million ABNs get cancelled. And with them, the ambition to start those businesses is lost.
For Sally Kiernan, marketing director of CGU Insurance, ambition and bravery deserve to be encouraged.
“Fifty-three per cent of Australians dream of starting a business or side hustle but only 6% have actually done it,” Kiernan says. “Thea Mendes is part of that 6% and we wanted to back her ambition and get DOMUTS back on track.”
As part of its ABN Rescue campaign, CGU Insurance provided Mendes with a business mentor, a food technologist, an industrial kitchen, a website, and a new marketing plan, including a TV ad scheduled to run during the AFL grand final.
“My business mentor, David Stefanoff, has helped me draft a clear business plan with timelines,” Mendes says. “The food technologist has helped me reformulate the recipes to ensure the products are cost-effective but also have a longer life.”
Initially daunted by the financial risk of scaling her side hustle, Mendes now feels equipped to achieve her off-the-clock ambitions.
“My mother always told me that if you want something and you work hard enough, it will happen,” she says.
Ignite your ambition today and apply for a CGU Insurance Ambition Grant
