Five Tips For Turning Your Passion Into a Successful Small Business

In Chamber Blog by admin

Do you feel like you have more to offer than what you’re currently doing in your nine-to-five job? Do you have a passion you’d like to share with the world? Are you looking for ways to create additional revenue streams? Then perhaps now is the time to take a chance and dip your feet into the gig economy
 
Today, more and more people are pursuing short-term or freelance work thanks to recent advancements in technology that make running your own business easier than ever before. With so many different platforms to buy, sell, and exchange goods and services, ordinary people have watched their personal passions explode into massively successful business enterprises. If you are interested in starting your own success story or even just creating a small additional source of income, here are five tips to get you started.
 
Find Your Starting Platform
 
Your very first step toward turning your passion into profit will be to take advantage of any pre-existing platforms to give your small business a jumpstart. For instance, if you’re looking to sell your handmade crafts, you should start listing your items on popular websites such as Etsy. For a small cut of your listed price, these sites makes it easier for customers who want your product to find and purchase it. This gives you an incredible amount of reach for just getting started and increases your business’s chance for success when compared to trying to market and sell locally.
 
Similarly, if your goal is to sell goods online, you should look into dropshipping options from existing platforms. For example, if you want to sell clothing online (women’s clothing is an especially lucrative option), working with a dropshipping service allows you to sell your product without keeping any inventory on hand, saving you money and stress while allowing you to reliably send your goods directly to your customers’ doors.
 
Stay Organized
 
When just starting out in the gig economy, most don’t quit their day job. Therefore, most small business owners are juggling two or more different jobs at the same time. To ensure that you are able to successfully manage the baby steps of your small business, you need to keep organized in how you go about your daily life. By efficiently managing your time, you will have a better understanding of how much time you need to dedicate to your small business and how that fits in with your current job.
 
Maximize Your Efficiency
 
Another part of maximizing your new business’s potential is by creating your own workspace to operate your business from. When just starting out, many choose to simply work from home. The benefit of setting aside a room of your home for your small business is that it will help keep you organized and maximize the efficiency of your work. Keep all of your materials and work-related documents in one space, and you’ll be ready to immediately get back to work without wasting any time.
 
Market Your Passion
 
While large platforms such as Etsy will give you a great starting point to reaching new customers, there are other ways you can share and market your small business. Social media is a great way to stay in touch with friends and family, but for small business owners, it’s also an incredible resource for interacting with customers and creating new business. Start by creating a Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook page specifically for your business. By regularly posting, following, and interacting with other pages similar to your business, you can reach a huge population of people and potentially a few new customers.
 
Slow and Steady Wins the Race
 
One of the most important things to keep in mind when starting your own business is to remain patient. You might hear about wild overnight success stories, but the truth is most companies find success through discipline, dedication, and slow and steady growth. Don’t feel like you need to move your business in leaps and bounds. Even if the market is ready for your business to explode, you might find that you are not ready to manage a large customer base in so little time.
 
The best advice is to grow with your business. If you are passionate about what you do, then you will gladly take the time to do it right. Over time, you’ll be amazed at how far following your dreams and investing in your own business can carry you. Just stay patient, and always keep moving forward.

By: Julie Morris