Five signs it's time to go full-time and start your lifestyle-business
Valuable prompts to help you navigate which direction you should take.
Are you at a stage in life where work is seeping into your home life and starting to impact your relationships and ability to create? The boundaries you set up on day 1 at your workplace are starting to crack.
You tend to struggle to commit to the little bit of time allocated to your hobby anymore and start to resent your situation because it feels like all your best efforts are going towards a stranger i.e your boss and not to the things you truly value like family, friends and your projects?
Being financially stable is important, but its not a defining trait for how much you’re willing to give as long as what that effort is going into truly aligned with your values and goals.
Those values are:
Living comfortably from your creative skillset
A sustainable work-life balance
A profitable business with low set-up costs
Personal Growth
✨Taking time to assess your current situation is beneficial
The five prompts I urge you to reflect on are:
Is your hobby profitable?
Are you confident in your ability?
What is your mission?
Do you know your value?
Are you ready to take control of your work-life balance?
By the end of this article, if you can answer each of these prompts with a resounding YES then I believe you can confidently start your transition from hobby to lifestyle business.
👉 Is your hobby profitable?
Every business plan requires background research to help qualify a good idea.
To help you qualify your hobby, it might be helpful to ask yourself:
Is my hobby currently drawing in leads?
If I gave my hobby more time, will it see growth?
Where can I be in 1 year? 5 years? Or 10 years?
For artists and makers, the most common sources of revenue are monetised content creation, sponsorships, products, workshops and private commissions.
In the beginning, I recommend building a primary source of revenue that generates consistent income and earns you social credit i.e. a service that offers great value for your clients in exchange for testimonials and word-of-mouth referrals.
After setting up your primary source of revenue, focusing on a secondary passive source of income that can be automated is crucial.
Once you have mastered these two sources, its best to add additional sources of revenue over time and measure what is working for you or against you.
Don’t be afraid to stop something and try something else. Don’t forget, the ultimate goal for your lifestyle business is sustainability and a good work-life balance.
👉 Are you confident in your ability?
In the beginning, developing a hobby can be daunting.
I spent my early twenties thinking I’d never pull out of that steep learning curve that came with learning 2d and 3d animation. I was swamped with assignments, trying my best to trust the process and unable to see the fruits of my labour till years later.
Now, I feel confident in my skillset. I trust my ability to navigate any project that may come my way and that includes saying no to some projects due to constraints.
When you gain experience, its only natural that your process develops too. You learn what areas of your process need tweaking, where you can grow and what interests you.
In contrast, when you have a lack of experience the way you respond to a challenging situation can be a telltale sign of where you draw your confidence from. Is it drawn externally or internally?
✨Do you draw your confidence internally or externally?
When others validate your feelings, this is known as external validation. When you validate yourself and shift from positive thoughts around your feelings as opposed to judgement, this is internal validation. It's allowing yourself to feel how you are feeling, without criticism.
External validation is a double-edged sword that can make you feel powerful when it’s aligned with your internal validation. And a weak, hot mess when its not. It isn't inherently a bad thing, but can be an indicator of whether you need to hit pause on your business idea until you gain more experience and as a result confidence.
Let’s say someone has recently started a lifestyle business and received their first negative review – how they react to that review can highlight how much confidence they have in their ability.
We can all agree that as artists we are our own worst critics, but to have someone external to you validate that same thought can hit twice as hard.
The reality is, people have opinions.
To subject your creativity to a person’s bias can be the fastest way to oppress your truth, breed doubt and ultimately lose control of the big picture – your desire to build a way of life that supports you and your needs.
So how do you tend to react to opinions? Does the negative external validation make you question your artistic ability or do you accept the opinion for what it is? A comment made by someone that holds no moral truth. 🙌
👉 What is your mission?
When building a lifestyle business, it is important to build a brand with a mission.
A mission gives your brand direction and aspirations. In order to connect with consumers, it is important to build a community around your service or product based on similar values, aspirations, interests and attitudes.
It summarises three main aspects of your business.
Your Target Audience – Who do you imagine buying and using your product? The target audience is the first component that must be created when composing a mission statement.
Your Value – The next component to a successful mission statement is outlining what value you bring to your audience. In short, this is the products and/or services that your business offers.
Unique Selling Point ‘USP’ – The next component to an effective mission statement is your unique selling point. You should be able to tell me clearly what makes your goods and/or services unique and why consumers should purchase it from your business over others that sell similar items in your niche.
Rifle Paper Co. is an extraordinary lifestyle brand that has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. Here is an example of their mission statement:
Rifle Paper Co. is a lifestyle brand that brings beauty to the everyday through Anna Bond's handpainted artwork that can be found on stationery, accessories and furniture.
Australian business Milligram has a longer purpose:
Led by a passion for design, stylish stationery and the finer things in life, friends Scott Druce and Matt Harris launched the business that would become Milligram in October 2007. More than a decade later, Milligram has firmly established itself as the premier destination for cult favourite brands from pen icons like LAMY and Kaweco to local and international notebook makers like Rhodia, Clairefontaine, MiGoals, Field Notes and more.
Issuu has the most concise mission I’ve come across:
Publishing for the creative generation. Join millions of content creators and transform your PDFs into SEO-friendly embeddable flipbooks, social stories, email graphics and more. From one to many - create once, share everywhere.
So what is your mission?
👉 Do you know your value?
The majority of small-business owners rely on word-of-mouth referrals, and the way to achieve them is by knowing your professional value.
Following on from the previous prompt, did you know that by defining your mission statement you can easily determine your professional value? This is achieved organically by identifying your target audience and what problem you help them solve and translating the unique results you create for your client/consumer into social proof of your value ie testimonials, reviews and ultimately word-of-mouth referrals.
According to a study by Roy Morgan Research*, 91% of Aussies over the age of 14 have given or received advice that led to a purchasing decision. Whether you’re a stationery store owner or a pottery instructor, referrals are key to generating both business and revenue.
So the take home here is to know your business’s mission, work with your clients/consumers to meet their needs, achieve those goals agreed upon and request a written review or offer an incentive for referrals.
✨Do you achieve your goals, but still tend to undersell yourself because you fear you might be scaring off clients/ customers?
For those who struggle with imposter syndrome, one method of pricing that has helped me overcome the fear is value-based pricing.
Value-based pricing is where it’s no longer about YOU, but instead it’s about the CHANGE you help your clients make and how valuable that is to THEM.
This is super helpful because it takes you, and how much you think you're worth (and all the fears and insecurities that go with that), out of the equation.
It focuses instead on your clients/ customers, what they are able to achieve and how valuable that is to them.
And that makes pricing conversations a whole lot less awkward and uncomfortable.
When most people evaluate their pricing, they look at it through a cost-based pricing process. That means, working out the minimum you need to charge in order to cover your bills, supplies, labour and hopefully a salary without burning out.
That’s great in a practical sense, but does not address the real value of your services, products (nor does it challenge the imposter syndrome narrative).
In the end, value-based pricing is a great place to start researching to tackle imposter syndrome.
👉 Are you finally ready to take control of your work-life balance?
Work plays a significant part in all our lives. Our earnings ensure that the lights stay on, there’s food on the table and the emergency fund is full.
Many people are stressed, constantly rushing to juggle different commitments. And Australians work hard — with more than 1 in 10 employees working more than 50 hours per week, which is considered ‘very long hours’ by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).
This makes it more difficult to achieve a healthy balance between work and a personal life.
The effects of this type of work lifestyle can lead to less engagement, compassion fatigue and burnout; a state of emotional and physical exhaustion that can occur after a long period of excessive or stressful work.
On the other hand, a good work-life balance means you have harmony between the different aspects of your life. The benefits gained from each area are able to support and strengthen the others.
Many people are learning to take control of their work and personal lives successfully by building a life around what they love ie a family or a hobby. Sometimes that is expressed by setting boundaries in the existing workplace, and other times its achieved by taking the leap and setting up a business of their own.
In short, many people are switching to a lifestyle business because it allows you to take control of your schedule, invest your energy where you see priority and clock off when you need rest – the key to a sustainable and enjoyable work-life balance.
✨ Have you arrived at your answer?
The value in transitioning from being an employee with a side passion to a full-time lifestyle business owner based around your passion is priceless. It motivates us to be clear about our purpose in life, prioritise harmony over stress and overall be better people for those in our care.
Did you find alignment with the prompts in the article? If it was a resounding YES to all the prompts above, then you are ready to build an environment for yourself that allows you to prioritise:
Living comfortably from your creative skillset
A sustainable work-life balance
A profitable business with low set-up costs
Personal Growth
Get started and I’m eager to hear about it when you do!
