How to Balance a Business & a Day Job
I have had a side hustle since…drum roll, please…2014!
Seriously - it’s been 8 years!
And that’s really what inspired this today…
And it’s the first time that I’ve ever explicitly created content around those of us that are side hustlers and business owners who are doing this in the gaps on the side. In a nutshell, it’s all about sustainability, which we will get to, but I also will say this:
I am very pro-side hustle.
I am not a fan of the gurus who tell you to quit your day job asap.
I don’t think that works…
I think we do a lot of things wrong when we dive into full-time business before our business is ready and before it can sustain us. I know that’s contrary to a lot of business advice and, hell, I’ll admit: I’m not a business coach. But, from a burnout perspective, I wholeheartedly believe this to be true!
So, this is really for the people who are building their business on the side, and I have some tangible (and more mindset related) tips and tricks of what I’ve learned has worked over the course of the last 8 years…
#1
Make sure you’re building your business for yourself and not for someone else…
(and build it on the side)
This really is about emotional burnout and harkens back to what I said a second ago about why we should build our business on the side because I think what so many of us do wrong is we listen too much to the coaches and gurus. We listen too much to what everyone is telling us to do in our business and we don’t always make the best decisions.
And it makes sense why we do this: there’s a lot of pressure on our business to sustain us and give us an income before it’s ready. We’re suddenly pressured to “make it work”, even if it’s not meant to. Even if the niche we’re in or the offer that we’ve created isn’t the place that you’re meant to be.
When we go full-time too quickly and we listen too much to others, there’s so much more pressure to choose correctly and I find that we’re less willing and less likely to make changes. We’re not as willing to give ourselves permission to pivot and make changes when things aren’t working when there’s all this pressure to make an income. We feel like we have to make it work…
When we build on the side, it gives us the ability to honestly and vulnerably determine, “is my business on the right track? Am I building the business I want? Or am I building the business everyone else is telling me to build?”
2019 was the year of group programs for me and I made a lot of mistakes that year. I jumped from one group program to the next to the next, and in each group program people were telling me what I should do…and I got confused. People were telling me I should have this niche, work with this client, have this kind of program - and people are convincing as hell! I caught myself saying “you’re right! I should do this”, but as a result I got overwhelmed.
I actually made a commitment in 2021, and I'm kind of continuing it in 2022, that I wouldn’t join another group program. Why? Because I end up just listening a little bit too much to what everybody else is telling me I should do for my business instead of following my gut and building my business for me.
I know this is very counterintuitive to what we are told. I definitely think coaches do need coaches, but there's a big difference between being coached and being told what to do. And I’ve been in too damn many coaching programs that were the latter…
This is particularly important when you're a relatively new business owner. We're kind of susceptible to listening to the more experienced people around us as opposed to listening to ourselves. I think that's valid when it comes to tactics, but not when it comes to the very core of our business, what’s problematic.
People shouldn’t be helping you pick your niche. People shouldn’t be telling you who your ideal client is. I tried that, and it just never felt right.
When I started listening to myself and not what other people were telling me to do, that’s when I really started making decisions that paid off in my business. It was completely, self-generated. That’s what lead to the realization that “holy shit, I should do burnout coaching!” And I think that's a very important thing to consider when you're building a business on the side.
#2
Make sure you’re taking one day off each week.
This is something that I wasn't doing for a long-ass time in my business. I would work my day job five days a week and then I would do random little tasks for my business during those five days. But then I would work my business on my “weekends”. In actuality, I really didn't have weekends and I was tired as hell.
It was actually during that time that I started working with a business consultant, Nicole at Simply Hudson. I really hadn't figured out the bandwidth and the sustainability of having my business on the side. One of the things she realized is “Ellyn, you just, you need to take time off. You need to start spending one day a week not working.” Oddly enough, it was kind of an epiphany for me and that became a really hard line for me. I have religiously taken 24 to 36 hours every single week where I am not working on my business.
I think it's important for all of us who have side hustles to really, really make sure we're doing that. You can't trade in a 9 to 5 for a 24/7, which is, frankly, what a lot of business owners do. It's where a lot of hustle culture comes from. But I am a firm believer from a burnout perspective, from a sustainability perspective, from the perspective of refueling your creative reserves, we need to take that time off every week.
You may not be able to take two full days off every week, but one day off? We can all give ourselves that. I find it very, very important to make sure that we don't physically burn out.
#3
Adjust your to-do list and obligations according to your season
This is really the sustainability thing that I mentioned before. And I've got a good example that’s very current to what I’m experiencing. June is review season in my day job. I am a manager. I work with about 12 students and I have about 22 people on my team that I manage and 18 of them are getting reviews right now. So, it's busy right now. I have a lot of 1-on-1 meetings with my team. On top of that, May was AP season and there was the May SAT, which is a really popular SAT date.
During this season, I made the mistakeof not necessarily adjusting my schedule. I actually took on more speaking engagements. Hell, I had a period of time where I had six straight weeks, basically a speaking engagement every single week, which was a lot. Especially when you're juggling a speaking and coaching business with a day job…
After the first week of May, I was so physically exhausted and that's because I didn't do this. In the weeks after that, though, it was a slightly lower time period, so I was able to do more with my business.
That being said, I also think it’s about weighing the emotional bandwidth it’s going to take. Even though it’s a slower time in terms of hours, review season is also bonus season, and in those meetings, I have to tell some of my team why they're not getting a bonus. It's emotionally really, really draining to have those conversations.
#4
think of your day-job and business not as separate entities but as both part of your career
I think that's one of the things I did wrong for several years when it came to my day job and my business: I thought of them as separate entities. My schedule had day job time and business time.
But the fact of the matter is this: they're both work! They're both career oriented and we can't necessarily think of them as two distinct things. I had to start thinking of them both as being a part of the same entity (career/professional) and lump them together when it came to make sure that I wasn't working too much.
I used to tell myself, “oh, I'm not gonna work past 7:00 PM tonight!” and yet I would let myself do that for my business. I think that's another thing we have to think about when it comes to our side hustle: lump them both together. You can be working too much because you're working too much as a whole—business and day job—not necessarily because you're working too much in your day job.
A big way in which I did that was I had to adjust my to-do list. It might mean decreasing the amount of to-dos I had for my business when I was in a really busy season in my day job and vice versa in my day job and that made a big difference in terms of the sustainability of my work.
#5
Block off certain times of your day (as best you can) to focus on your business
I have a really weird day job. I work Sunday to Thursday and, during the school year, I work in the afternoon from like 12 to 8:00 PM. So, my mornings because my “business time” and then I would switch to day job in the afternoons. Then Friday was very much a business-focused day and I usually take Saturdays off.
These were the rough timeframes in my mind that were dedicated to business. It's almost kind of like a boundaries thing: having those boundaries around when you work your business vs.when you focus purely on your day job. Doing so allowed me to compartmentalize things a little bit and not feel like I had to switch back and forth mentally all day, every day, which I think is really important for like a mental bandwidth.
Mentally, it’s draining to have to constantly switch gears or even make decisions about what you need to work on at any given time, so that’s been really helpful for me!