Search “side-hustle ideas” and you will find thousands of suggestions.
Start an ecommerce store.
Become a virtual assistant.
Sell printables.
Start affiliate marketing.
Create a YouTube channel.
Walk dogs.
Deliver food.
Become a content creator.
Some of those may be great opportunities.
But I think there is something slightly strange about telling someone with 20 years of professional experience that the first step towards creating another income stream is to go and learn something completely unrelated.
You’ve already spent years becoming good at something.
Maybe we should start there.
The problem with asking “What’s a good side hustle?”
It’s too broad.
A great side hustle for one person could be completely wrong for somebody else.
The better question is:
“What side hustle makes sense for me?”
And to answer that, we need to look at things like:
What have you done professionally?
What problems do you understand?
What industries do you know?
What do people ask you for help with?
What can you do faster or better than someone without your experience?
What knowledge have you accumulated?
What outcomes could you help someone achieve?
And importantly:
Would anybody pay for that outcome?
That’s where a business opportunity starts becoming interesting.
Don’t confuse familiarity with lack of value
This is something I see repeatedly with experienced people.
They dismiss valuable knowledge because it feels obvious to them.
Imagine you’ve been involved in procurement for 18 years.
Understanding how to prepare for a major tender might feel completely routine.
To a small business trying to win its first major contract, it isn’t routine at all.
Perhaps you’ve implemented CRM systems across several organisations.
You may think, “Everyone knows how this works.”
They don’t.
Perhaps you’ve spent years leading teams through organisational change.
Or managing compliance.
Or recruiting.
Or building financial models.
Or creating marketing strategies.
Or designing operational systems.
Or negotiating with suppliers.
The fact that something has become easy for you is often evidence that you have developed expertise.
It isn’t evidence that the expertise has no value.
You probably don’t need another 50 ideas
You need to identify the right intersection between:
what you know
who needs it
and
what they will pay to achieve.
That could lead to a service.
A consulting offer.
An audit.
A workshop.
A program.
A template.
A resource.
A subscription.
A small advisory practice.
Or something completely different.
The format comes later.
First we have to identify the value.
Your experience can shorten the path
Someone starting an entirely new side hustle may need to spend months or years acquiring skills before they can provide meaningful value.
An experienced professional starts with something different.
History.
Pattern recognition.
Judgement.
Context.
Experience of what works.
Experience of what doesn’t.
Those things are difficult to acquire quickly.
They are also precisely the things we often fail to put a value on because no certificate arrived in the mail every time we learned them.
Your expertise accumulated quietly while you were busy building your career.
So before you search for another business idea…
Stop.
Look backwards for a moment.
What have the last 10, 20 or 30 years actually taught you?
What problems have you solved repeatedly?
What would your younger self have paid to know?
What do inexperienced people get wrong that you now understand instinctively?
What could you help somebody achieve more quickly, confidently or effectively?
There may be something commercially valuable sitting in those answers.
Your side hustle might not be “out there”
It might already be sitting inside your experience.
That’s why I created the Expertise Monetisation Quiz.
Rather than giving everybody the same list of side-hustle ideas, the Quiz starts with you.
Your skills.
Your experience.
Your career.
Your goals.
And from there, we look at what your expertise could potentially become.
Before you go searching for your next idea, find out whether you’ve already spent years building it.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.