How to Start a Side Hustle: A playbook for a new economy

By Nic Haralambous

Everyone has an idea that they believe could be a business. Very few people take the leap but with the economy turned upside down by Covid-19, there is no better time to get started on your side hustle – to experiment and generate extra income. Nic Haralambous has spent 20 years building businesses and learning hard lessons. In this book, he helps you take the first steps towards that side hustle you’ve been dreaming about.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Jan 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780624092162

Nic Haralambous

Nic Haralambous is an obsessive entrepreneur and motivational speaker. He has successfully started and sold multiple companies over 20 years. His speaking career spans almost a decade and includes events across the world including SXSW in Austin and the Rutberg Conference in London. His first book was Do. Fail. Learn. Repeat. 

Book preview

9781776190690_FC

Nic Haralambous

HOW TO

START A

SIDE

HUSTLE

The playbook for a

new economy

Tafelberg

INTRODUCTION

Over the past 20 years I have built many businesses, startups and side hustles. I started at the age of 16 and haven’t stopped since. Some of my ventures have succeeded; many have not. I have learnt an incredible amount through building, failing, succeeding and repeating. I published my personal story of lessons in my debut book Do. Fail. Learn. Repeat. This is how I live and how I build things: I do, I fail, I learn and then I repeat until I’ve found some kind of traction or failed.

I have never met a person who didn’t have an idea for a side hustle – whether they wanted to build an app, turn a passion into a side hustle (more about that later), earn money from a hobby, or just find a way to make some extra cash on the side to help cover the bills or save for the future. Everyone wants to do a bit better financially, even the billionaires.

Many people believe they have the talent, the drive, the hunger and the perfect idea to build a side hustle but very few people actually do the work and build the business. Why? Most of them are afraid to fail. Most people sit on the sidelines with a crippling fear that if they try they are going to fail in a very public and very shameful way. There really is nowhere to hide in the age of information and social media.

During the first month of South Africa’s COVID-19 lockdown I tried to start a new side hustle because one of my existing side hustles took a massive knock. For ten years I have been a keynote speaker as a side hustle. I give keynote addresses to businesses and at conferences about startups, business, technology and innovation. This revenue completely dried up and I decided to launch an online marketplace for speakers like myself to list their talks and to address clients digitally over video calls.

It took me and a business partner about two weeks to build the website, formulate the revenue model and contact the first 20 speakers we wanted to list.

The business went live and unsurprisingly nobody arrived to book the speakers. The world adapted faster than I had expected and clients went directly to the speakers and booked them to give keynote addresses to their teams via Zoom, Hangouts and all the other video conferencing solutions that cropped up. After three months the business had not made a single sale. Luckily I’ve learnt how to build the first versions of a product or business in the leanest way possible so I didn’t lose much, other than the time invested in building the business. After three months with no sales I decided to shut the business down. It had failed but I had learnt a lot.

Can you guess what people thought about me when I closed the business down?

Nothing.

Nobody said a thing. Nobody cares. If they do care, they didn’t say anything to me. I tried, I failed and I learnt something new. That’s the process of things. That’s how you build a side-hustle life; you get comfortable with building, failing and learning.

This side-hustle playbook is for those of us who are tired of sitting on the sidelines watching people less talented, less driven, less intelligent, less street smart and less deserving than we are create extra income streams. You think it’s more difficult than it is to get started. The first step is, without doubt, the most difficult. I am going to help you get over the hump of fear, self-doubt and trepidation. Everything you need to get that side hustle off the ground is in this book and I am thrilled to be helping you launch.

Almost universally the number-one fear that I have encountered when helping people start a side hustle is the fear of failure. Let me start right now with your first lesson:

Failure is not the opposite of success.

Not trying is the opposite of success.

Failure is not an end point; it is a through point. Failure is an imperative part of figuring out how to make your side hustle work. Right now, as you read this line, I need you to start to reframe failure. You cannot be scared of failure and build a successful side hustle. Failure is part of the process, an integral part that you must embrace. This is probably the single most important lesson that you will need to learn to build the kind of side hustle life that you want.

I have never really had a fear of failure and I owe this lack of fear to the adults in my life when I was child. My dad is famous (in my family) for being an ‘ideas’ guy. For as long as I can remember he would have the most incredible, innovative and disruptive ideas. Once when I was very young he was driving us somewhere on a Sunday afternoon and we stopped at a traffic light on a busy corner. To the left was a school called Sandown High School. My dad looked at the school, then stared ahead. As he pulled off when the lights turned green, he said, ‘You know what would do well on the empty corner we just passed across from that school? A Holiday Inn.’ That’s it. That’s all he said and then we carried on going.

I thought nothing of this statement from my Dad until a couple of years later when a sign was erected on that very same corner and it proclaimed that a Holiday Inn would be built on my Dad’s corner in the next 12 months. As we drove past this sign my father turned and said words that I will never forget. He said something like: ‘Those bastards, someone is building my Holiday Inn.’

His words struck me like a bowling ball to the face. That Holiday Inn wasn’t my Dad’s. That idea wasn’t unique and he clearly had no ownership of the idea. It was in that moment and the subsequent years of watching good ideas follow bad or no execution that I realised that the opposite of success is not failure, the opposite of success is not trying.

By not trying, my Dad had the perfect excuse: He couldn’t have failed if he didn’t actually build the hotel. This is the thinking that I am going to help you overcome because I know many of us battle with this line of thinking and living: If I just don’t try then nobody can mock me for failing.

I remember this feeling intimately: the feeling when you know you are going to lose at something so you stop trying to save your ego from embarrassment. I played a lot of sports very competitively when I was a teenager – from tennis tournaments to athletics meets to provincial rugby trials and matches throughout high school – and I remember the ‘no try, no loss’ game. Specifically, I remember myself giving up in the 100 m sprint and in tennis tournaments.

The 100 m was my all-time favourite ‘no try, no loss’ situation. We’d all line up on the start line, the gun would cock, our muscles would tense as we leaned over the chalk line of the starting blocks and as the starter gun would fire all the sprinters would tear out of the blocks towards the finish line. Instead of putting my head down and running for all I was worth I would occasionally glance to the side to see where I was positioned towards the finish. If I was not in the lead, or in a close second, I would stop sprinting in the final 20 metres. That’s 20 per cent of the race that I just gave up on because I knew I wasn’t going to win.

Do you know why I would do this? I did this because it was easier for my ego to say that I wasn’t beaten or didn’t lose because I wasn’t really trying. I hadn’t trained hard enough, I wasn’t mentally prepared for the race, I had no big match temperament and I was saving myself from my lack of effort.

That’s what I’m going to help you with: preparation for the big game.

Starting a side hustle isn’t as simple as coming up with an idea, telling people about it and having them throw money at you. You need to prepare properly. You have to get your mind right, you absolutely must set up your life for a side hustle and you need to refine the idea and get ready to build it.

This book is condensed into four sections that are going to give you the best shot at building a side hustle into your life that reaches the success triggers that you set out.

These four sections are:

1.Mindset

2.Lifestyle

3.Idea

4.Hustle.

Each section in this book will help prepare you and your life for the side hustle you want to build.

Most people think that an idea will fit into the life and the lifestyle that they are currently living. That’s like thinking a baby will arrive and just fit into your life without anything changing and you’ll still go clubbing, sleep for eight hours every night and not have to worry about it because the kid will just come along. Starting a side hustle is like bringing a baby into your life. You need to be prepared. You need to be mentally, emotionally and physically ready for the fun, the struggle, the challenge and the changes that you are about to experience.

That’s why the first half of this side-hustle playbook is dedicated to your mindset and your lifestyle. I have spent 20 years learning the following lesson: No matter how good your idea is, no matter how hard you work, no matter how smart you think you are, if you don’t get your mindset right you are screwed.

I have learnt the hard lessons so that you don’t have to. I have figured out through years and years of trial and error (and lots of physical and emotional pain and suffering) that, if your mindset and your lifestyle haven’t been set up for success, your side hustle will never succeed either. I’m giving you the cheatsheet; the most important and undoubtedly most surprising first step to building a successful side hustle is getting your mindset right.

Your gut will tell you to skip to the second half of the book and dive right into the Ideas section. Don’t do that. That’s a fatal mistake in the life of a side hustle.

It’s impossible to start a successful side hustle if you aren’t prepared and this book will guide you through the four very distinct areas that you should be paying attention to in order to grow your side hustle from idea to revenue, starting with your mindset and ending with your hustle.

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