Starting Your Side Hustle and Making a Profit Part 1: Your Value Proposition

Many startups and entrepreneurs come to our organization for legal and business advice, related to monetizing their business ideas and establishing them as legitimate enterprises. In this series of blog posts, we aim to help aspiring professionals, workers, business people and individuals to understand what it takes to turn their skills and efforts into a monetizable asset. This may seem very daunting to those who enjoy a stable job, but the Covid economy has also made many formerly stable jobs far less stable than before. The side hustle process is also a lot less daunting than many people think. It does take hard work, but with a structured approach and the right legal and business procedures, you may be turning up the volume on your side hustle soon!

Part 1: Find your Value Proposition and Put it in Writing!

Oftentimes, many people have broad catch all job titles, which include vast skill sets. For example, operations managers, HR professionals or accountants typically handle a variety of different jobs. These jobs can often be broken down into easily identifiable subsets of skills. When you want to start a side hustle in the service industry, it is important to be able to breakdown and address the skill subsets you possess. For example, an accountant will have bookkeeping skills, mathematical skills, proofreading skills, writing skills, an understanding of business laws, and some finance knowledge, among other things. An HR professional will understand office administrative procedures, a certain amount of human psychology and a good deal of employment law compliance procedure. If you are planning to freelance or utilize these skills as a consultant, you must be able to list the subsets you possess, and clearly define them in a written form. This means identifying what these skills are, how you can use them, who will find them useful, and how they can be utilized in a standardized, mass produced form. Once these subsets are documented, you should also describe an ideal project, which would utilize one or a combination of these skills in a written form. By following this simple process, you will have built the initial framework for establishing your scope of work with any prospective future clients. This is the crucial first step to starting your business, as it identifies and delineates your value proposition i.e. what you offer and why a client should pay you to receive this offering.

You don’t have to be highly skilled to undergo this process either. Even those described as “unskilled” can utilize this approach of documenting their value proposition to start to monetize their efforts. For example, let us look at someone who is unskilled and starts their own personal “car washing service” (where they personally wash cars). They can calculate the number of hours it would take to wash a car, how much they would need to cover their costs, and the desired level of income they wish to receive. After this, they can create an offer, like “$15 car washing.” The next step is to go out and get customers (which we will address in our next post), but by taking these steps, this individual has gone from “unskilled” to defining a “car wash” service as something of value they can offer in return for payment.

Many business people also engage in the trade of physical goods. The process one should follow when trading goods is similar when starting out. Defining the value proposition for goods is also essential when creating your “selling point” for buyers and customers i.e. what is special about the good you are selling, which warrants a cash payment. A very simple example will be that of a homeless man who only has access to public resources. He may decide to go to a local park and pick flowers. Using public rivers and streams, as well as rudimentary utensils and cutlery, he may make these flowers suitable for sale, and sell them at a centrally populated market, with a sign board that reads “flowers for a dollar.” By creating this simple sign board, this individual has documented their value proposition. Though not the entrepreneur people are accustomed to seeing on linkedin, this individual would have created a clear and concrete value proposition by engaging in this process.

Therefore, it is very crucial to get your business idea in writing, while addressing the form, structure and process of monetizing it. As you continue to work, these offerings and value propositions will naturally change. However, the first step is to keep everything structured and transparent, as doing so will help you make concise, effective and precise changes to your value proposition when needed, to increase your profits and revenue.

In the next blog post, we will address part 2, how to put your value statement out to the public in a convincing, comprehensive, and legally secure manner. We will aim to address some basic marketing and legal risk management principles which can be used to begin turning your idea into cash in even a short period of time. This may take hard work, but if you are up for the hustle, it can be rewarding and enjoyable!