To ask if you have a side job/business

[Bigtoeslittletoes]

So I work 3 days a week. Not super settled in my current role and in the back of my mind thinking of leaving at some point but I do like the field.

Anyway children are back at school soon and things are super expensive so it’s got me thinking about trying a little side job. Think I’d like to do this on a self employed basis and ideally just a few hours a week. I’m not interested in Avon/ body shop/ pyramid schemes. Just genuine little side job/ business that I could do a few hours a week to start with, then obviously the dream is that it could be an option to ditch the day job and do this instead. Probably completely unrelated to my main job (healt/ social care) . I don’t really have any super skills: knowledge- I’m not a natural cleaner. I do like being out and about….

Has anyone done this? What do you do? How successful was it? How stressful was it? was it worth it and do you enjoy it?

I started a business when DC started school, I was bored and wanted to work, but something that I could be available for school run and all the school drop in sessions in the infants etc.

The flexibility of my working hours was key for me. We didn't pay for childcare. I could be there after school every day and in the holidays

I now work full time on my business and earn a decent income from it. Its more work than I thought it would be. I offer a product that I had a skill for, the making of the product is the most enjoyable bit for me. In addition to that there's the marketing, seo, photography, editing, copywriting, accounts etc. The learning curve for all these is steep! I enjoy the photography and editing now. Hate marketing and doing my accounts!

I still love being self employed though and wouldn't go back to a 'proper' job. I like the independence and freedom I have. No boss. No office politics. It's much less stressful than my previous career. It's always different day to day, never boring. I like the customer service side. There are times when I get too many orders to manage, and I increase prices to slow them down, and times when work seems to dry up. The inconsistency of income can be difficult to manage. I get around this by paying myself a constant low monthly wage the business can support and topping up my savings when there's excess.

Day to day, it can be lonely. I miss not being able to have coffee or lunch with co workers. But when the DC were young I met up with the other mum's at school pickup and we'd pop over to the park. I also used to go to a coffee meet up with other home working self employed people once a week.

It's very very very rare that your side hustle will make you rich, but very possible to make it something you can live on if you take it full time.

Do you have any ideas on what you'd like to do? Offer a service? Offer a product? Re-sell?

Thank you for your response. That’s really interesting.

The one idea I have is using skills from previous job to work privately in the field I formerly did but to be honest I’d have to relearn so many things and I looked into this at the time and the insurance/ IT/ security side of it was so expensive i would need to really commit. And also I got out of that for a reason!

I also know a lady who does virtual PA work so wondering if I could do a bit of stuff for her or set up similar but not
sure how that would work because I could realistically only do it on my off days.

. I would love to get out of the office politics and just knowing that what I’m doing day to day is working towards something .

Thanks again!