We are all on the hunt for extra money and trying to figure out the puzzle of how to do it and juggle a full-time job. Last month, I told you that I received a job offer and I decided to take it because I knew it would help me accelerate my goals. I am able to do this because I have built up my online business, so it can run even though I am physically at work. If you don’t have an online business, it’s time to start thinking about how to monetize the skills from your day job.
Let’s get one thing straight! If someone is willing to pay you for a job, it means that you have value.
Keron Rose
In order to make multiple streams of income, you need to stop thinking like an employee 100% of the time and you really need to boss up and start thinking about the operations of the business you are employed by. This might not work for every job (ex. government positions and services) but for many positions out there, you can start to think about what aspects of your role you may be able to do on your own, that will allow you to earn extra money.
This is one of the best ways to start thinking about how you get your feet wet in entrepreneurship if you aren’t sure about what your passions are or what you would actually like to do. By starting with your job and the skills you have learned from it and learning how to apply them on the side, to earn extra money.
Remember, trading hours for dollars is not the most efficient way to earn money. While it’s a must and this is what we gotta do to start out but we need to constantly think and rethink about how we can take that earned money and let it fuel ventures that we control.
Companies leverage our labour and we offer our time at a discounted rate for companies. Think about it, whatever you are given for a salary, the company makes way more money off of our efforts. That’s why if you can start thinking about how does the business make money off of my labour and how can I leverage it and do it myself, you can start to think up ways to earn extra money.
There are 4 questions you need to ask yourself to figure out if you can begin taking your learned skills from your day job and monetizing them.
Those 4 questions are:
- What part does your effort play in your employer’s success?
- Can you monetize your skillset outside of your workplace?
- How can you create income from your skillset?
- Is the skillset you have scaleable?
What part does your effort play in your employer’s success?
Remember, as long as you have a job, that means you have value and someone is willing to pay for it. Think about someone who is a sales rep for a company, a journalist, an accountant, a janitor.
All of them have skillset’s that will allow you to take the knowledge and skills you have acquired and turn it into a side business. A good sales rep can start thinking about different products he can sell on his own time to earn extra money.
A journalist can decide to open up their own blog or start plying their skills on freelancing platforms and write articles for businesses in other countries.
An accountant could leverage his skillset and start his own side business, say doing taxes.
A janitor could start his own cleaning company on the side and train others, that way he can send them to other jobs without physically having to be there.
So take a look at your current job, start thinking about the skills you have learned in your current capacity and ask yourself, what skills can you leverage to start earning outside of the company.
Can You Monetize Your Effort Outside of Your Workplace?
When thinking about what skills you can leverage, you want to ensure that you don’t have a conflict of interest with your job. So if you are into sales, you don’t want to be selling the same products that your day job is selling.
If you are working as say a mechanic, a smartphone tech or an HVAC Tech, you can take those skills and you can start doing jobs on the side and earn extra money.
Remember, when you are working for a company, you are giving them your skillsets and time at a discounted rate. The sooner you learn to start building your own business on the side, you will then be able to start thinking about an exit plan from the company.
How Can You Create Income From Your Skillset?
This is where you gotta take the time to think out your strategies. Get a piece of paper and start to build a mind map of your skills and then start to think about the variety of ways that particular skill is used to generate revenue.
The best thing to do is start to Google. For each skill, try to find at least 5 ways that people are making from that skill.
You will be surprised how many different ways you can find to monetize your skills by breaking down the skills from your job and figuring out how people are monetizing those skills.
Is The Skillset Scaleable?
This is a very important question. The real money and freedom comes when you can start to leverage technology, systems or other peoples labour in order to scale your business.
If you are a janitor, instead of plying your own time and skills to build your own job, in which your time and money will be limited by how many jobs you do in one day. You should start thinking about how can you train 3 or 4 other people to become janitors and then send them to other jobs and you make money off of their labour.
For me, I have decided to leverage technology. I have built an e-commerce business and I drop ship products. That means, I use my website to sell products and I only place an order for a product, whenever I get an order. So people do not need to physically meet me, I do not have to do the deliveries myself, I do not meet anybody to collect money and I do not have to spend money on inventory.
This allows me to create content from my laptop and sell to anybody within the country (internationally if I choose too) and collect money using the systems that are in place. E-commerce is one of the best scaleable businesses you can build and it’s also a field that has the lowest barriers to entries.
You scale by leveraging technology and systems or learning how to leverage other people’s labour, in order for you to scale your business and claim your time & freedom.
The reason I am so gung ho about entrepreneurship is that the days for living off of a fixed income from a single salary, those days are over. Unless you are being paid a very high premium for your time than it can work but most people are not.
The best time to start that side business is while you are working that 9-5. You have money coming in, that you can use to invest in yourself and your business. Rather than begging a company and doing gymnastics for a company to get your $1.00 raise, the better thing to do is to start thinking about how you can leverage your skills and start earning money outside of your job.
Your genius is the intersection between your passion and your talent. The highest form of entrepreneurship is working within your genius. Someone is already paying you for your efforts, we need to start taking ownership of our effort’s and making it work for ourselves, rather than being dependent on a paycheck from companies who are giving us a fraction of our value.
A job is needed a great place to learn many things and even if you decide to keep your job, you are doing yourself a disservice by not learning, how to take those same skills and make it work in your favour.
Start thinking about how you can monetize the skills you have learned from your day job and making it work for you!