(#97) How to Build a Business While Working Full Time (The Exact Strategy I Used)

0:00Hey guys, welcome back to another episode. So today we are covering how to build a business while working full-time and I'm going to give you the exact strategy. So you know that feeling when your alarm goes off at 6am and you're maybe already exhausted before the day hasn't even begun, that's like a mental exhaustion. So you drag yourself out of bed, you get ready for another day at your job and you're sitting in that traffic or on the train and that familiar feeling creeps in. You know there's more to life than this daily grind. You have this idea for a business that could change everything but by the time you get home at 6am you are super drained and the thought of working on anything else feels impossible. So you tell yourself you're going to start tomorrow or maybe next week or when things slow down at work. I'm in a hair all the time but deep down you know that tomorrow never really comes. So this is

1:03starting to sound a little bit like your life right now. I want you to know something and it's that you are not alone. This is very, very common and also more importantly it doesn't have to stay this way and I am speaking from experience here because I built my first business while I had a bunch of part-time jobs and retail. It was a promo girl. I basically was taking any odd shifts that I could get. I was 22 years old. I had just graduated from uni living with four flatmates working very, very long hours on minimum wage just trying to build up the money in my bank account. I had no business experience. I had very little startup capital pretty much nothing you'd think you would need to start a business. But the thing that I did have was this burning desire to create something to get out of that situation and I was very willing to sacrifice my evenings to make it happen. So the shape of a business that I started in my spare time, my little side hustle ended up making me three and a half million dollars in my first year and it all began with just a few hours a week after my regular jobs. So I want to show you what's possible when you work with the time that you have instead of waiting for the time that you think you need. So today I want

2:08to share the exact strategy I used to build that business while working full-time and this is the same approach that so many of my students have used to create their own successful businesses while still staying at their day jobs. So the first thing I want you to understand is that building a business while working full-time or having a job isn't about finding more time. It's actually about using the time you already have much more strategically. So most people think that they need huge blocks of time in order to build a business but that is just not true. A lot of the stuff you have to do, the tasks you have to do, you do the little small task and then you actually have to wait for the next step. And some of the most successful businesses in the world, they were built in the early mornings and lunch breaks and evenings and weekends. So I want to tell you about Rachel. She was working as a nurse, she was doing 12 hour shifts and she really felt like she had no time for anything else. I mean 12 hour shifts, absolutely exhausting. She really wanted to start creating ergonomic accessories for healthcare workers but she kept telling herself that she was too busy. So we went and did a time audit together and we discovered that she was spending around two hours

3:12every single evening scrolling through social media and also watching Netflix. Now I am a big fan of Netflix myself. I pretty much watch Netflix most nights I would say I plunk myself down in front of the TV and often I will open it my laptop or open it my phone and just get a few tasks done. So I'm not saying that you should eliminate all downtime. I mean everybody needs to decompress. But Rachel realized that she could reduce that like let's say if she can watch Netflix or a scrolling social media just a little bit less maybe reduce that by one hour per day that's going to give her seven hours a week to work on her business and that seven hours that is enough. So within a month she had launched her first product and she made $3,000 in her first month from her side hustle. So within a year she was able to drastically reduce her nursing hours and focus more on her business. Now the secret is what I call time stacking which means finding small pockets of time throughout your day and then stacking them together to create meaningful progress.

4:13So maybe it's 30 minutes before work maybe it's 30 minutes during lunch or maybe an hour in the evening. I mean if you combine that that's two hours per day that's 14 hours per week that is more than enough to build a successful business. So this is how I structured my time when I was building my first business. I would wake up a little bit earlier and use that time to respond to customer emails. I would check my website sporadically throughout the day so it's great when you are using Shopify to host your website you can download the Shopify app on your phone and sort of just check on it throughout the day. Now during my lunch break I might research new products I might make some marketing content and after work I might spend an hour or two on whatever needed the most attention that day. It's usually marketing activities to try and grow this business. So it could also be things like updating the website or reaching out to potential customers it could be processing orders. Now if I felt like I needed to I would then also go into the weekend. So weekends were when I often tackled the bigger tasks it could be things like planning my next product launch or analyzing how the business was performing. So let me tell you that the biggest mistake

5:18that kills most side hustles before they even get started is trying to build this perfect business from day one. So perfectionism. Perfectionism is the number one killer of a side hustle. So when you only have a few hours per week to work on your business you just cannot afford to waste time on perfectionism. So instead I want you to focus on the minimum viable version of your business idea. What is the simplest possible way you could start serving customers and generating revenue that is the key. What is the simplest thing you can do to start making some sales? So let's say you want to start a coaching business. You don't need a fancy website you don't need a very complex program you actually just need one client who will pay you to solve their problems. Let's say you want to start an online store you don't need a hundred products you don't need perfect branding you actually just need one product that people want to buy. And it's a huge hiccup for a lot of people they think they need this extensive setup when in reality you can start really really simply. So when I started my marketing agency which I started by accident by the way I had a couple of businesses reach out to me and said hey yeah I need help with marketing.

6:23So I said okay I'll just don't fool you. Charge them a small amount I think was $500 for the month that they had two of them. Great that's $1,000 a month. I ended up with 90 clients a month charging them up to $5,000 each and I ended up with 18 staff members. So something very very simple started very simply really really escalated over time as you compound. When I started my shape web business I did not have a professional website I didn't have perfect product for a tour affair. I took everything on my phone. I had a very basic Shopify website that I set up using a free template. The entire setup honestly took me less than a week. I went on Alibaba I imported a few products from let's say two to three suppliers to sortist out the samples check the quality. I was like okay this is good enough put it on the website started selling. It was that was it. Was it perfect? Absolutely not like when I look back at that website I'm like oh that is so bad that is so cringe but I ended up making three and a half million dollars in my first year I saw a hundred thousand units of shape where. So was it good enough to start making sales? Yes

7:24and that is all that matters. So that brings you to something really really important. When you have limited time you need to prioritize activities that directly generate revenue. So there are really only a few activities that are going to directly grow your business and that is one getting new customers that is number two serving existing customers and number three is creating systems so that you can do more both of them more efficiently. So that's sort of automating everything. Everything else is just busy work that makes you feel productive but isn't actually moving your business forward. So I had a student called James who wanted to start a digital marketing consultancy and he was also working full-time as an accountant. So he had spent his first three months building this crazy elaborate website is trying to get it all perfect. He had business cards printed. I mean I feel like you don't even need business cards these days. He was trying to set up all his complex systems so we flipped his approach. So instead of continuing to perfect his systems trying to get it all right he just started reaching out to a couple of businesses in his area. He was offering them free consultations and within two weeks he had his first paying client within three

8:28months he was making an extra six thousand dollars a month on the side. So the difference between people who successfully build businesses while working full-time and the ones who don't. It's not talent. It is not luck. It is not having more hours than the day. It is the willingness to start before they feel ready and actually to make progress over perfection. So the best thing to do is make sure you have a goal. Now my goal when I'm starting out I just had this vision and I hear that one day I want to build my dream home and I think it really stemmed from living in this flat with four other peoples sort of like a dark dingy flat and I just kept thinking to myself this is not my dream life. I wanted to find a way out of that situation so have a think about your dream life. Why? What do you want to do this for? What do you want so badly and then just remember that every step of the way. If there is a will if you want to bad enough there is a way to get there. Now let's talk about energy management because this is just as important as time management. So I would start to pay attention to when you feel the most energetic and also when you feel the

9:31most creative during the day and schedule your most important tasks for those times. So for some people that's going to be first thing in the morning. For other people it's going to be late at night maybe you're not a morning person. There is no right or wrong answer. The key is just figuring out when you do your best work and predicting that time. So I know that I am best in the morning. I wake up. I'm very very sharp and I try to do the most important tasks then and then at night I just know I'm not as productive. So I often won't even bother. I'll just give up on my work tasks. I will watch TV and I'll go okay I'm going to start this in the morning when I'm very very on to it. So be strategic about when you work and also on what you're working on. I would save that strategic work for when you have the most energy and use your lower energy time for those admin tasks like responding to emails or maybe updating your social media. And this way you're always going to be making progress even when you don't feel like doing that heavy lifting. So here is a practical system that really works well. It's what I call the weekly sprint method.

10:33So every Sunday I would spend 15 minutes planning your activities for the upcoming week. So open up your calendar wherever that big maybe it's a Google calendar maybe you have a physical calendar. So if you look at that schedule identified the time blocks you have available and assigned specific tasks to each block. So this is going to help you prevent wasting time figuring out what to work on when you sit down. I like to do it to do list and then I go okay well I'm going to allocate that here. I'm time blocking that for recording podcasts. I'm time blocking that for researching what to create for social media. I'm going to batch create all my LinkedIn posts. Oh I need to tell you about LinkedIn. I have not been on LinkedIn for about a year and then I thought okay I should probably get active on LinkedIn because a lot of the buyers are on there for my coffee and marcher brand and all of a sudden I have actually scheduled out for three months. It's the maximum you can schedule on LinkedIn. I have scheduled out a post a day for three months. I did that all in I'm going to say four to five hours. So if I can create three months with a content in four hours that's just showing you how efficient you can get when you start

11:39to time block and just be really intentional with your time. I'd also recommend setting up some simple systems for the core functions of your business. So that could be things like sitting up templates for responding to customer inquiries or setting up a planning sheet for your social media posts. The more you can systemize and automate the more you can accomplish in your time. And the absolute biggest hack is batching everything. So doing things and batches of time creating content and batches, recording and batches. I do everything in batches and again that is how I can get really efficient with my time. Now one of the biggest challenges of building a business part time is that motivation. So especially when progress is feeling a little bit slow it can be easy to get discouraged when you see other entrepreneurs who just seem to be moving faster than you and maybe they are working full time on their business. So it's hard to always compete but remember that slow and steady wins the race. You might not be able to work 60 hours a week on your business but you can work 10 hours a week consistently and that consistency I promise you is going to

12:43compound into incredible results. Set yourself some small achievable milestones that you can celebrate along the way. Maybe it's going to be your first sale. Maybe it's your first $1,000 month. Maybe it is your first positive customer review. So all these small wins, they're going to keep you motivated during the challenging times. And here's one more important thing I want you to think about is your exit strategy. So the goal of building a business while you're working full time is not to do that forever. I mean that would be very hard to do forever. It is to eventually transition to working on your business full time. Now when you are setting up your business you're starting to get a flaw of it. Everything is starting to run smoothly. I would recommend having a few months of expenses saved up before you make that leap. And also your business should be generating consistent revenues so that you know everything is working. You know you have a working sales funnel and you know that if you focus more time on it you can now scale this operation up. So I'm going to warn you now the setup is the hard part. It's the very annoying part. It can take time to perfect your product,

13:45your service, get your email flow, set up, get your website set up. It is super, super annoying, it's tedious. But once it's set up I mean think about it you only have to do that once. Once everything is set up all you need to do is focus on growth. And most people that don't succeed are the ones that quit before they have even finished the setup. So if you can get to finishing the setup I promise you the hard part is over. The most important thing is to start. You do not need to have it all figured out. You don't need the perfect conditions. You don't need more time. You need to take the first step with the time you have right now. Every successful business it started with somebody who had limited time started with somebody who had limited resources. Nobody starts with that much. Everyone starts with very limited resources. And you need unlimited determination. So make sure you really cement that goal into your mind. The reason why you're doing it. The situation you're trying to get out of right now. The best time to plan a tree was 20 years ago but the second best time is two days. It's never too late. Your business journey does not have to wait

14:49until you have those perfect conditions. You can start right now with the time you have available today. And honestly your future self is going to thank you for taking that first step.