As I learn to evolve how I hustle I realize bigger money requires more preparation and upfront effort.
Here’s an example. This upcoming weekend I have a show with a community organization. I have two separate hour long sets. This is in public and at a street festival. I’ve also offered to help with sound and effectively I’ll be there all weekend. This means my Uber weekend time is getting slashed by a lot.
Now I can compensate for that by working more all week, however it comes with a real time cost. In order to do this show right, I must do Uber less. Uber is guaranteed immediate money despite what the haters on Reddit think. This show is a maybe I sell merch kind of money situation. Because I'm part of a not for profit playing with their not for profit, it goes against my not for profit role to ask for money, but they do play fair, shoutout BizNDG.
Doing this is portfolio points and other not for profits that aren’t affiliated with mine can happily pay me for anything with that lovely grant money. Holla you systemically funded legacy institutions, I got skills and I never liked thinking in the box.
Back on track the idea of not making money that I really need right now freaks me out.
The idea of making a lot more money down the line meaning I can sleep during night time again isn’t worth scoffing at either.
There are definitely periods to hustle and stack to prepare for the winter
In my case this isn’t hyperbole or me being cutesy and poetic.
Uber is pretty good before New Years Eve. There are holiday parties. People are shopping. The money is still being spent. The festive energy is pushing back responsibility and snow is fresh and fun. Then somewhere around the first Monday of January everyone starts going back to work.
People start budgeting and financing in ways to cut costs and recover. They go out less and they spend less. Ubers are definitely hit by this phenomenon.
Snow is less cutesy, less mindful and not very demure by then.
Most sales cycles have a seasonality to them. If you are wise you will push when it’s hott and chill when it’s not. I know I can take more days off in January and February. It simply won’t be worth it to be out there on a random Wednesday.
Knowing when to push and when to pull back is going to help you avoid burning out. Unfortunately this kind of wisdom requires some bumps and bruises to learn. But pay attention and get that experience in.
When those down periods come there’s still work to be done.
A lot of the “business” really comes down to writing and making excel files
You need to communicate your value clearly.
This requires some well written information. Your goals, your successes and why people should give you money. Sometimes you want some good graphs and other visuals that support your thesis.
Once you have your pitch ready, you need to go find people to pitch. In my case it’s sync licensing people, festivals and various promoters and clothing brand opportunities. For each pitch I will need more excel sheets and more writing.
To get the information needed to write and to track everything after the fact will be a lot of copy and pasting and research. People make it sound vague but most of doing business is the following few steps:
Define your goal clearly
Research stuff
Determine where you goals can create money based on the researched stuff
Plan
Execute
While a lot of that may include meetings. The bulk of that is going to be you, in front of a screen, plugging away and reading excessive stuff. Thankfully ChatGPT can summarize and help, but in truth you need to know your stuff.
That in person part is still real.
All of this work takes time and more importantly it takes focus.
Having too many hustles can mess up the long term bag
Scott Galloway frequently tells people to not have a side hustle.
As I have two main hustles I kind of get where he’s coming from. I miss out on some primetime Uber hours because of my food promo gig. By doing Uber I know it affects my focus during the Uber hours and my weird sleep schedule makes it hard to jump right into intellectual work.
Music related stuff is an afterthought that I am winging based on finding time when I can. If you check my blog frequency, I gave up on daily writing a little bit ago and have been trying to force myself to maintain this habit. At a certain point you need to decide what is important to you.
Or at least I need to take the time and decide what my business will be and how I will make my living. I’m addicted to hustling but taking my hustle energy and focusing it on the boring minutiae I will build my businesses. I am still on my immediate debt clearing mission as my minimums are too high but by the spring I may be able to reassess my priorities and increase my risk threshold.
In the meantime I’m left to ponder and plan as I slowly grind away each opportunity in a scatterbrained way.
Appreciate y’all for reading.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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