I always tell people this. There are no such thing as useless skills. There are such things as underutilized skills however. When you are able to, learn as much as you can but do spend more time focusing on skills that are complementary to your overall strategy in life. For example, if you like collectible cards, there is a good chance that you are already learning valuable business lessons like buying and selling, supply and demand concepts, opportunity costs, metrics, macro and micro cyclical trends, analytics, etc. If you already had business acumen would you have spent all your money buying ultra-modern Pokemon cards that are experiencing a significant correction knowing everyone was doing that as well? Would you have spent all your money buying cards instead of investing a portion of your money somewhere else or saving some for rainy days? These types of cash flow management skills you don’t just innately have without having acquired them somewhere else first.
The framework is important but so are the contents and structures within the framework. If you like collectibles, you probably need to understand the market, the demographics, it’s cyclical nature and skills such as an eye for aesthetics, knowledge of history, knowing how to authenticate and grade these assets, etc. I think the best side hustles are legally compliant activities that you can do passionately and relatively easily that have a large potential market for. Nowadays no matter what you do it’s all about marketing a brand that will accumulate brand equity. Brand equity at its very core is basically market trust. People who trust your brand will have a basic comfort of everything you do within a given industry range. This trust will eventually translate into lower customer acquisition cost, higher margins via premium pricing and higher sell volumes lowering average cost.
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Best sustainable side hustles businesses that build transferable skills and brand equity.
All things being equal and presuming you have very little in capital to start a sustainable side hustle, I think the best thing you could do are of the following:
- Brainstorm about things that you could be good at and is passionate about.
- Know what resources and how much resources are needed to start the business as well as future resource needed to expand the business. Resources are both financial like cash flow and non-financial like prior skills and experiences.
- Take inventory of how much of the required resources you either have or can get and their opportunity costs.
- Once you have decided to start that side hustle business, take incremental, compartmentized steps to achieve your goals such as developing a business plan, register a domain and create a website, get financing, tap into your network, marketing, file for intellectual property protection if necessary, register as a company etc.
- Start small before you scale. Your business model might change over time or several times in a month.
- Once you have laid the fundamentals and have a steady stream of business, then take your time to scale and secure whatever resources needed in whatever legally compliant manner to achieve that scale.
If you understand business, you know cash flow and risk management are super important. The most successful business groups are usually well-diversified even if they don’t appear to be on the surface. There are cycles in every industry hence it’s important to protect your cash flow from both downside and upside risks. Diversification, arbitrage and hedging could be effective tools to do so. Contrary to popular belief, I think the best business models are the ones that anyone can do. I know there are many billionaires and possible trillion(s) in high-tech, oil and gas, real estate, hedge funds, banking and whatever. What is the problem here for most people? Most people don’t or/and can’t get that kind of cash flow to do any of that and even if they can probably can’t do it in scale. Most of the world’s businesses are small businesses and small businesses employ nearly 50% of the US workforce and over 70% of the global workforce. Apparently, low or lower barrier to entry didn’t stop small businesses from doing business, making payroll nor generating income for its owners.