Turning your hobby into a business

Isaiah O’Connor

One of the more common ways I have seen people start businesses is to take a hobby and find a way to monetize it.  This is what I have done with my current balloon business. I took my hobby of making balloon figures and turned it into a business. You can read more about it on a previous post here.  In this post, I only briefly discuss how I turned my hobby into a business and more focus on where I got some information to help me along my way. This time I will be going into some practical tips.

One of the first things I can suggest is to not rush to get your business launched. I think I went from business idea to business launch in under a month. I think it was only around one or two weeks.  Take a bit of time to do some proper research. I will use myself as an example I thought all I needed was a website, some business cards, a pump, a bag of balloons and a balloon apron. I got some “free” business cards and set up my website through the same company I got the cards from.  This was not well thought through. I’ll say this much, a company that specializes in printing, does not make a great web host. A bit more research on something as simple as web hosting would have saved me a lot of headaches.

Second, make sure your skills are up to professional standards. I have seen many a hobbyist-cum-professional make the leap with less than professional skill set. This can hurt your reputation, causing you to either go out of business or perpetually compete on price alone, making very little to no profit.  This can also hurt the professionals in your industry as well as people can associate your work with as an industry standard, even if it is sub-par. I have seen this over and over again.

Do not get me wrong, I am not saying that you need to wait until you are the top person in your field. We all need to start somewhere, and as your business grows and you use your skills on a more regular basis you will find your skills will grow along with your business.  

This is again where some research comes in. Do a little digging online, in Facebook Groups, etc, to try to see what a professional standard looks like. If your work is equal or greater than what you find, good you are ready to go.  If it is not then you may want to reconsider doing this hobby as a business or see if you can do something to improve your skills, practice, taking a course, listening to podcasts, watching videos or finding one on one instruction. Do not be afraid to pay for training. Sure you can learn almost anything on YouTube, but I have found I have learned so much more from the training I have paid for. Paid training is well worth it, as it was the paid training that I took that helped save my business. If I had not taken the money for that training I would not be writing this right now.  

This leads me to my last tip. Try to find a mentor or a team of mentors. I have been blessed with several in the industry that took me under their wing and helped guide me along the way. If you cannot find one in your industry, try to find another entrepreneur in a similar industry or hire a business coach.  

Now of course if your reading this blog you may now that we offer that very service. We call it the “Bootstrap Business Startup Service”  We have real-world experience in starting up from scratch, and so we can help avoid making the same mistakes we did, saving you a lot of headaches and a  lot of money in the process.

One more important thing that is very hard to do in business is pricing for what you are worth. This can be very hard for a hobby based business. This is a large enough subject to be worth its own post, so my next post will be on pricing.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Entrepreneur

Isaiah O’Connor CBDO Atheoz.com

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