Bola Sokunbi - Clever Girl Finance - The Side Hustle Guide

If you find yourself using your side hustle as an excuse for diminishing performance at work, that’s a red flag. After all, you likely still rely on your full-time job to cover your bills and sustain your lifestyle while you get your side hustle off the ground. It’s important to make sure you are meeting (and even exceeding) expectations to avoid being called out or even let go for performance reasons, which could put you in a bad financial situation.

When you get to the point where your side hustle is pulling in the big bucks, you can decide to work part-time or leave your full-time job altogether. In the meantime, you want to ensure that you’re minimizing any negative impacts to your job while you still need it to pay the bills.

This means prioritizing your to-do lists and creating a schedule where you dedicate focused time to work on your side hustle and focused time to meet your work obligations. If you work 9–5, don’t borrow time from your work schedule to brainstorm about your side hustle (except on your breaks or other downtime).

Finding more time in the rest of your day could mean spending less time on your favorite hobbies, waking up earlier, and going to bed later than normal, meal-prepping easy foods to cut down time spent on cooking, etc. You’ll probably have to make sacrifices, but remembering your “why” will help you stay motivated for the season in which you have to do this.

People often make the mistake of assuming that having a profitable side hustle business equals financial success and is the solution to all money problems. Now, don’t get me wrong, a side hustle can bring incredible financial gain if executed the right way. However, simply having a successful side hustle is not the end-all, be-all or magical solution to your wealth-building strategy.

Wealth building happens when you are being intentional and working with a plan that accounts for all elements of your financial wellness. This means not just earning more money but also budgeting, creating a plan to pay off debt, saving for emergencies and short-term goals, and investing for the long term.

You should be actively considering your financial plan alongside your business. Otherwise, the profits you earn can easily slip away, unaccounted for. The last thing you want is to put in all this effort to build your business, and start earning profits, only to realize you have no clue what’s happening to all the money you are making.

Your journey to a successful side hustle is unique to you and what you ultimately want to accomplish. That said, there are four characteristics that I see over and over in the most successful entrepreneurs:

1 Patience, because great things need time.

2 Focus, because distraction deters from success.

3 Perseverance, because you’ll need to manage your emotions, make sacrifices, and keep going when it’s hard.

4 The right mindset, because all those dreams and goals you’ll accomplish start first in your head and in your heart.

These characteristics are core to your success, so keep them in mind as you work on your business. Create a plan to nurture them by reviewing your goals, working on your plans, staying motivated and inspired, and learning from the experiences of others.

1 Plan out your personal finances. If you haven’t already, make time to lay out your financial plans while you work on your business. Include plans to budget, pay down debt, save, and invest. (If you need help, check out my first book: Clever Girl Finance: Ditch Debt, Save Money and Build Real Wealth.)

2 Create a priority list. If you are employed full-time, create an ongoing priority list of your work to-dos, keeping your deliverables and deadlines in mind. This way you can ensure nothing important falls to the side and threatens your employment status. Work on your side hustle around your full-time work schedule.

Camilla is a lover of all things home, as the founder of The MUTED Home ( themutedhome.com) and HollandLUXE Properties ( hollandluxeproperties.com). For over 10 years, she has consistently centered her life on the subject of home. Today, she runs both of her businesses with her husband, making it the perfect partnership. Their goal is to have their businesses work for them so they can pursue their hearts’ desires, and to that end, they are leveraging their skills and talents in business to live life on their own terms.

You run two successful businesses that both started as side hustles. Can you share a bit about them and why you started them? How did you make time while working full-time?

My first real business as a custom furniture designer in 2009 started off from my passion for wanting to create unique and exclusive pieces—I wanted to deliver the ideas I had in my head to other people. I worked on building my business during work (guilty!) and also after work, making deliveries in the evenings and working on marketing late into the night. Managing a business while doing my best to stay focused on my corporate job was very hard. Some days I’d be so sleepy and live off of coffee. Other days I’d be gentle with myself and work on my business for a few hours after work. I kept a pretty tight schedule. On the weekends I would actually rest, no phone calls, no consultations, and I was very strict on that.

Since then, my husband and I have rebranded our custom furniture company, now called The MUTED Home, into a quality beautiful home goods company.

I started my second business in real estate in order to create a secondary income and follow my passion for educating my clients on what it takes to get into their dream homes. Literally, the moment I was ready to sit for the state real estate exam, I was let go from my full-time job. I had never been so at peace being let go from my job because fortunately, I was already set up to make money to sustain myself since I had built my clientele over four years. It was just God’s divine timing. I remember my tax lady even threatened that if I came back one more year making the same money that I was making at my job, she’d refuse to do my taxes. Lucky for me, getting fired was the perfect push to make that leap. I remember telling a client that I was finally working as a full-time entrepreneur. She was blown away; she said she never knew I worked a corporate job because I was usually pretty available and attentive. I just always worked around my job.

Collectively, every day my husband and I are always busy running both businesses, but we work on a schedule to be most productive. We get up at a certain time, and we stop at a certain time. This helps to keep our focus on work during the day, and family time in the evenings.

What were the biggest fears you faced when you first got into business and how did those fears impact the progress you made initially?

One of the biggest fears I had, as I think with most people, was failing. I thought people would ask for all these qualifications (that I didn’t need) and I considered going back to school, which I’m glad I didn’t. I would spend as much time as possible trying to make everything perfect, but it was really procrastination out of fear. And then, of course, there were my money fears. I wasn’t confident that the money I was spending on the business would be worth it. Another fear I had at the time with my first business was that the industry was very male-dominated and oftentimes, I received crazy looks or people just didn’t want to work with me because I was a woman.

What did you do to tackle your fears as a new business owner, and how do you deal with fear now?