Put your current position in the blanks:
Are you going to be a _______ for the rest of your life OR, you strive to become the person who needs a team of_______, to build his side business aka THE DREAM LIFE?
If you’re thinking about contributing to something bigger than just the menial tasks your boss assigns you day by day, then this guide will help you establish a side business and get rid of the remote gig you have.
Ultimately, create your freedom that you look for so incessantly.
We’ll start with some common problems.
The Problems Of Remote Working
Can you relate?
- You might feel exhausted or burnt out by following someone that doesn’t seem to know where he is going themself.
2. You know better. And now is time to actually DO better.
3. You might be feeling unheard of. Think about how many times your ideas about:
- Handling that task
- Improving the service
- Expanding into a different niche
were so good that you felt inspired and excited to share it with your boss? Not only that but it seemed to be the right thing to do?
But, all of these ideas came to a “maybe later” or “lets focus on growing” and “sounds interesting, let me think about it”.
People are born to constantly create new things and become a better version of themselves. Sheep follow the rest of the herd because they can’t create.
Who Is This Side Business Not For?
You are just starting out and looking for your first job. If this is you, then visit this guide here https://viktori.co/applying-for-a-job-online/
If you’re not sure what you should do in life – Check this article first.
Who Is This Side Business Guide For?
If you’ve been remote working for a few years doing:
- Lead Generation
- Accounting
- Social Media
- Sales outreach
- Backoffice
- Scraping
- Research
- Front end back end
- Whatever remotely
This guide is your lottery ticket. It will teach you on how to grow a side business (become a solopreneur) and become your own boss, AND will show you what businesses you could do.
Otherwise, if you’re not interested, feel free to join this club…
Examples: Best Side Business Ideas You Can Use
The step by step approach on how to reach out to new clients, you’ll find here in my guide on how to apply for remote jobs.
Before I show you how to make a side business while working remotely, I will dive into some of my ideas on what your side business could be.
Each of the following ideas, gives you the name, one sentence pitch, avenues to find clients for that business and tools you can use to kickstart that idea.
Side Business Idea 1: If you’ve been doing lead generation VA…
Side Business name generator: Gleader
Title: I help individuals generate a number of leads for x industry with the help of x process.
Where to find leads:
- Go to Linkedin activate sales nav premium one month free and find individuals that fit your ideal profile description
- Go to job boards and apply to jobs that fit your profile
- Go to fiverr and upwork and pitch jobs there
Protip: Focus on one avenue only, when reaching out to potential leads and one specific niche.
Tool that could help you speed up and improve your offering: LeadPal
The best thing about these Appsumo deals, is that you can buy them once, and then charge a monthly fee for using the service the tools offers.
Side Business Idea 2: If you’ve been doing accounting VA….
Side Business name generator: Accounter
Title: I help small accounting firm owners within x industry offload some of their daily bookkeeping..
What you’re doing is taking the load off these companies – it could be the daily bookkeeping activities they do for their clients, or anything related.
Where to find leads:
- Find accountants here: https://find.icaew.com/ (UK only)
- Then visit their website and use hunter.io to extract emails
- See if the owners are on linkedin and add them there
Linkedin Message For Cold Leads:
Hey {name},
I’m a certified {whatever your industry certification is) and I help companies like yours, offload some of their daily tasks like x y z and help them save time and money.
I’d love to talk more.
Linkedin Message For Warm Leads that are already looking for someone like you (can be found on the same job boards you first found your job)
Hey {name}
I saw your job ad for {x position}. I can help – been working as an {modify your current position to sound more closely related to the one the job ad is looking for} and helped {save 1000’s of $$$? OR Prevented a ponzy scheme?)
Side Business Idea 3: If you’ve been doing general research…
Side Business name generator: RADD (research and development dude)
Title: I help x target within x industry do various research for x type of projects..
Definitely build a landing page. You can use some of the content from here or here.
Where to find leads:
- Go to google and search for “hiring web research assistant”
- Or variations: Hiring {x service} assistant
- Usual results will lead you to:
- Apply at these jobs. You should have your CV ready if they ask for it.
- Add the key HR people (usually directors) on Linkedin and let them know that you’re interested and already applied.
Tools you can use to help you streamline your work:
- Molo9 – this tool researches for you. If you ever plan on going full consulting, this is a match made in heaven. Why? The tool will do the research for you or at least do 40% of the research for you. You just input specific parameters for the client, and boom, you have the research done with a step by step implementation strategy.
Side Business Idea 4: If you’ve been doing software development…
Side Business name generator: Softonu
Title: I help x target within x industry develop (apps,websites etc…)
And again, you can build a simple landing page with webflow easily and start your business there.
Where to find leads:
- Let’s say you’re looking for companies that use a specific language within their full stack.
- How do you find these: www.builtwith.com – It’s an amazing tool that allows you to see the full stack of each website or app within specific industries. For example if you’re a dot.net developer and you want to show these companies that dot.net is better than Java and ultimately implement it for them, Builtwith is how you find them.
- After you define a group of 100 sites, add the owners on Linkedin.
- Also, check if they’re hiring. Because if they are, there is a big chance that you can sneak in and present your idea about improving their business as part of your application.
- Go to google and write: {company name} jobs
Tools you can use to help you streamline your work, if you’re also wanting to help these companies improve their UX/UI:
Side Business Idea 5: If you’ve been doing Social media
Side Business name generator: 4GET.IT
I help companies generate and manage a year’s worth of optimized, evergreen social media content that convert leads into customers. BOOM! (the boom is mine, don’t use it)
Motto: Set it and forget it.
Where to find leads:
- You want companies that use Buffer, Hootsuite and the rest of the AI uneducated tools. You can find these through builtwith.com
- Build a list of these companies
- Find the key social media executives OR marketing directors through Linkedin
- Get their email addresses from the company website with Hunter
- Pitch them
Why should this work: You’re essentially telling them that the manual work their marketing team has been doing, scheduling, creating and posting content every day, can be substituted by just a few clicks. Talk about ROI and unemployed social media managers, right?
Tools to use:
- FeedHive – AI helps you create sm posts and distributes them throughout your sm’s.
- Ocoya – AI powered social media post creation and publishing – with a few clicks you could easily have a month worth of sm content to distribute throughout your sm channels.
- AIKontent – Paste an article url within the app and have it create x amount of posts automatically and have them posted over a certain period of time. It’s that simple.
Combining these three will give you an even crazier effect and ROI for your clients.
Now that you’re inspired, let’s see how you can actually use this idea and put it in motion.
The Timeline Of How Things Will Evolve For You
Ok so you saw what type of side businesses you can start, with the knowledge you got from your current work. Here’s the quick step by step approach to do that:
- SOP your VA work – everything you can find on how you’ve done things – this will serve as the basis of your business documentation for your side business. Why create new SOP’s when you already have them?
- Find an apprentice (CRUCIAL)
- Delegate all current work to the apprentice for a fraction of what you do
- Monitor apprentice and deliverables
- Build the side business by pitching a second job (be it through lead gen or applying to job ads
- Repeat 3-4
- Pitch a third job
By repeating the steps from 2 to 7 you will be able to build a side business within a year. Don’t expect to grow like crazy. You might need to focus on 1-3 new jobs in the first year and then scale up faster. Slow and controlled.
The Problem With This Approach
There’s a threshold you’ll encounter where you can’t spend any more time monitoring because you’ll be full time supervising your apprentices. Which means you can’t pitch anymore clients. So what do you do? Do you quit your first job so that you focus on the existing ones?
Can You Quit The First Job So That You Can Focus On The Side Business?
Ethics and morals are virtues that few people follow. If you do follow them then you will question whether you can continue your other gigs simultaneously with the initial gig.
The threshold in numbers:
- Until your initial remote job salary becomes 20% of your income OR
- Until you make the same amount of money you’ve been making in the first place.
Opportunity: Find Your Doppelganger
After you get to a comfortable level (income wise) you should find someone else that mirrors your capabilities. Why do you need a doppelganger?
You will help that person apply for a job for which they have a fraction of the required experience – and your experience will close the gap between the job requirements and what that person has to offer.
This way when your doppelganger CV appears in front of the employer, the employer will be seeing a Rockstar that he should not pass.
Then (assuming he gets the job), you do steps 1-4 with that person and treat him as you treated yourself when pitching new jobs..
After a while, that apprentice will be able to do what you did, and this way grow the side business even further.
Critical Rules: What You Need To Good At
- Delegating and coaching
- Teaching monitoring and recognizing potential fault in the process
- Pitching and actually offering value
- Being patient and consistent
Let’s go into each one.
Delegating
If you can’t delegate you can’t grow. If you don’t master delegating, you limit your growth.
The best part about your current job (I’m assuming it is) is that you have SOPs for each task you do. Which means, you can use those SOP’s and give them to your apprentice to learn from them.
PRO TIP: Copy them before using and make sure the files are invisible to your current employer
This is the first part.
The second and final part, you need a simple project management tool to timely and efficiently track the development of the tasks. Trello, Asana, Wrike, Clickup.. Any will do.
Ideally you should replicate or clone the tasks in the same PM tool that you’ve been working in so that it’s easier for you to track, monitor and adjust as necessary.
Teaching
This is probably the most difficult part of growing anything. Usually the master teachers are those with years and years of experience, but also, humility, empathy, patience and understanding.etc…
If you have these traits as a person, outside of your work, it will probably ease the whole process of teaching, because that puts you in the best position to produce great students. A great teacher is the one who makes their students better than them.
So, how do you bridge that teachableness gap?
Here’s how:
Hack: Let your employer teach your apprentice. If your apprentice has a question regarding the current process, just ask your employer.
You must ask in a way not to seem as if you have no clue what the hell you’re doing.
Pitching
If you can’t sell yourself, who will buy you?
You have to be able to sell yourself to your already established buyer persona aka your potential new client. If you fail at pitching your best sides, who will pay for them? Nobody.
(your mom probably)
It’s crucial that you constantly update and upgrade your own pitch with the new skills and expertise you have and learn along the way.
A good old form of that is an updated CV.
A great, upgraded form is sending a personalized video covering who you are, which solutions you can offer, and how you can change the game of your potential client.
In a nutshell, explain how you are able to help him elevate his business, wish for your established processes and expertise.
Find out more about how to pitch yourself here.
Being Patient
I can’t state enough how important this is. Healthy pressure is part of almost every job ever done on earth, and learning to master patience is a key to any business. Be it a start-up, or a 100 year old company launching a new product.
If you were pressured by your employer, now you’ll get pressured by your apprentice and by your vision – the one that you will achieve soon enough.
What I mean by Apprentice pressure is they will most probably be less proactive than usual since the work will be new to them. Their inability to pressure you, will put pressure on you to pressure him to be more proactive.
That requires a lot of patience.
How do you maintain patience?
- Exercise. Do strenuous activity 1 hour per day
- Walk – do at least 10k steps during the day
- Breathe and stretch in between work intervals
- Drink mint, valerian tea
- Sleep well
Mentally: Expect the worst so that you can experience a bit better reality when it hits.
This way you prep yourself for the situations that just pop out of nowhere and break your daily rhythm.
Choosing The Right Apprentice
Someone you trust, knows well, knows the language, understands concepts and the big picture, can be taught and hasn’t worked on anything related to the industry at hand. More on that in an upcoming article. Will link to it here when it’s due.
Last Words
You think this is too much hustle? I think you’re just comfortable here:
But since you’ve come to the end of this guide, you could be also very hyped and wanting to establish something on your own.
Or just an avid reader of my blog (in that case kudos bro!)
Whichever case you are:
It is a lot of work. And it does pay off at the end.
