My part-time venture: How to juggle a job with your own business – Page 2 of 2 – StartupSmart
Carly Jacobs admits she also works non-stop, often from 8am until 4pm teaching, then works on her lifestyle site, Smaggle.com until midnight. Ultimately, she’d like to quit her job and run her business full-time. For the first time last year she earned 60 per cent of her income from her day job and 40 per cent from her website, so the signs are promising, she says.
“I’m concentrating on making 100 per cent of my income from my blog this year, fingers crossed,” Jacobs says.
Full-time Fairfax journalist Sheree Mutton runs fashion jewellery Styleu.com.au in her spare time, which makes up around 15 per cent of her total income. “It’s a relatively new business, so I’m hoping that figure will grow to around 30 per cent in the next six months.”
Shirley Be is another professional time juggler, working four days a week as a pharmacist. After years of planning, she launched a skincare business in September 2012, www.youthphoria.com.au.
She spends two full days working on her business. Ultimately, she wants to run her business full-time and hopefully retain a pharmacy job one day a week. To do this, she’s working to grow her stockists and distributors.
Be says she has less time to procrastinate when she’s busy.
“Sometimes when I’m tired at night, I find it’s best to sleep and then wake early in the morning when I feel energised and refreshed,” Be says.
Christine Kardashian runs two businesses from her home office. She’s been a public relations professional for six years, running Dash Public Relations. She dived into a second business in December 2012: Women’s fashion line, Christine Kardashian.
Dash PR brings in about 75% of her income, and the remaining 25% comes from sales from her clothing line.
She uses a time management tool to track her time in her PR business. She spends mornings handling orders and logistics for the clothing line, and the rest of the time on research and development, strategy and liaising with suppliers.
“I’m an organised person by nature and I keep ‘to do’ lists, though sometimes it can get hard to keep to it and tick off items with so much going on.”
Laughing is good medicine for Julie Tierney, who works as a bookkeeper four days a week, studies beauty therapy, works as a beauty therapist, is a bookkeeper for her partner’s business and started an online business selling wholesale beauty and nail products in July last year.
She hopes to be able to afford to employ someone to help her this year.
In the meantime, it’s a constant juggle, but she loves it.
“I’m generally a calm sort of person, but when it does all get too much and stress starts taking over, I’ll basically sit here and giggle to myself.”
Eventually, the leap into your start-up makes it worth all those hours.
Louise Glendon spent three years building her Boudoir Photography business while also working for the RAAF in Adelaide, where she managed a team of 30.
“In order to juggle between my day job and the business, I would only schedule clients on the days I didn’t work, and then would often work until midnight editing images or get up extra early to package orders and email clients before going to work. If required, I would use my lunch breaks to return calls or emails whilst sitting in my car in the office car park.”
She took two months long service leave to run her business as a trial and discovered she earned significantly more than her usual wage. She was also much happier and more relaxed.
So, she made the leap into her photography business a little over a year ago.
“Having the financial security of paid leave and then income from the business to replace my wage was certainly a big deciding factor in my decision to resign, however I also invested a lot of energy and finances into researching and studying the business side of my venture.
“But ultimately, my business was never going to expand when I was playing in ‘safe’ mode.” Glendon says.