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Start your consulting business as a side hustle

Guest post by: Greg Miliates

Article Overview: Don't quit your day job just yet! Start your consulting business on the side as a side-hustle so you can test the waters before deciding to quit your day job.

Start your consulting business as a side hustle

Aspiring consultants wrongly think they have to ditch their regular day job, and go full-time into consulting. Unless you're extremely fortunate to have clients banging down your door with work, you won't be quitting your day job just yet. And quitting your day job without having a backlog of consulting work is extremely risky. Another problem that stops aspiring consultants from starting their business is the fear of not having enough, or any, income, benefits, etc. Not having any income or health benefits can be pretty scary.

But instead, there's a low-risk way to start a consulting business: start it on the side as a side-hustle. For those of you not familiar with a "side hustle", it's something you do for money aside from your regular day job. Starting a part-time consulting business is a great side hustle, since it's low-cost, and can typically be done outside your normal work hours.

Starting your consulting business part-time is a great way to lower your risk. You won't be freaked out about how you'll pay the mortgage while you're scrambling to get clients and do the billable work. By consulting as a side-hustle, you won't be desperate for work; potential clients can smell the fear, and if you're desperate for work, you'll probably end up lowering your rate and/or taking on ANY clients-including problem clients-which could waste your time.

By consulting on the side, you'll be testing the waters, seeing what works best, and deciding if you can-or want to-ramp up your consulting business to replace your day job. And in the meantime, you have your salary from your day job to pay the bills, while you can save your consulting income for your emergency fund.

I have tons of tips, tricks, tools, and techniques along with concrete steps you can take for starting and running a successful consulting business on my blog.

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Article Tags: quit my day job, side hustle, start a consulting business
Referred by: http://www.consulting-business.com



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Joint Ventures - It all depends on what your skills are. What kind of help do you need? Do you want someone to help you with the marketing side? do you need help on the financing side? Do you need help producing the product or delivering the service? Watch out though - a lot of people start off in business with a partner, then someone ends up doing more work and the other person resents it and the business falls apart.
Re: Looking for partners to start career consulting business - Are you still into this business? What has your firm to offer to those who need career consulting?
Re: Fashion - Nana, At you choice you may choose to research the fashion industry a bit more. There is obviously a Business side to it as well as a creative side to it. Find out all the types of roles that exist in the industry. Some that come to mind merchandiser, Window dresser, floor plan organizer (someone needs to determine the layout of a retail store to best sell the goods), fashion consultant (Yorkdale mall has fashion consultants that take you around and tell you what looks great on you - you also get a cut from the sales). This is what I've observed from the business side, you may know more. All these roles I've written about will help you grow as a business person and make the contacts in the industry...possible stepping stones. But further more you'll also notice that you need to develop some business acumen possibly tailored to the fashion industry. When I was at Ryerson I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur someday too. I knew I needed some basic business courses to get a foundation to build from. I was in a Tech/Business Major (I'm sure Fashion has something similar - Fashion/Business Major) and then started to create my own minor. Here are some of the courses I took: Marketing, Law, Entrepreneurial, Management, consulting.. and a few more . Also, I'm sure that within the Fashion Major there are also courses you have to take where you can use your creative side and create designs. Typically within a Major there are focuses you can choose - ask the program coordinator. Your next step is to do some research. 1. Visit Commercial retail outlets like H&M, Banana Republic, or jacob. Tell the Manager your doing some research for University and would like to know what types of Corporate roles exist aside from the roles on the retail floor (like sales associates). If she asks you to elaborate then you can use some of the roles I mentioned above. 2. With this information in hand you can visit the Ryerson Fashion department and inquire with the Program Coordinator on what focus within the Fashion Degree would help you the most. In my program there were 5 different focuses within the Tech/Business program. Just a quick aside. A good friend of mine too has a dream of fashion. he want to create a niche fashion line tailored to skinny men (I can't mention the style). He's in Business school but not in the Fashion program... He's in International Business but all his Minor courses are tailored to running a successful business ... similar to the ones I mentioned above for myself. I have no doubt in my mind he'll make it 'cos his vision is that strong.
Re: What are your March Goals? - Thanks GT, Good news! I took all my papers to the tax office today and they were very helpful. In fact, the whole thing was made to look very easy and straightforward, even though I'd been struggling with two separate "businesses" and four different tax forms... I was not the only one there consulting the tax officials, so I felt much better to discover that there were lots of Japanese business people who needed to consult the tax office. They have a pretty efficient system set up that has you shuffling along a row of chairs towards the first floor consulting room. That's the preliminary consultation, then up to the third floor and shuffle along another row of chairs then into the second consultation where you get your figures entered into the computer system. Now the challenge will be not to forget everything I've learnt about the system by this time next year!


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