Progress Update January 2019
It’s difficult to review the progress we’ve made with our side hustles after only a month of thinking and planning. In any event, it has only been less than a week for us to do any actual blogging, but we did make a plan for the kinds of things we want to share each month.
At least this monthly “progress made” blog post will help us hold ourselves accountable for what we have (or haven’t) done.
Live Side Hustles
Iron Carrot
Matt set up Iron Carrot in July 2016 to sell his skills as an Identity Management Consultant. As a result, he left a permanent job to start the consultancy. This is not an unusual thing to do in the IT world.
At any rate it is not the norm for an Information Professional and not for an Information Manager who’s changing career. CJ became a consultant anyway at the end of December. In mid-January she started a 6 month engagement as a Data Governance Consultant.
The next step was to update the Iron Carrot website. Specifically, it now talks about the new capabilities on offer. CJ added her biography to the website too. New draft contract and scope of work documents were prepared. CJ’s work products are mostly visual and pretty much always in PowerPoint. We designed new template pages which are in the Iron Carrot brand colour palette.
Side Hustle to Freedom
How do we motivate each other (and ourselves) to put as much effort into the side hustles as everything else? We realised that we both put the effort in when 3 things happen. When we:
- draw up a plan
- share it with other people
- make a commitment to them that things will happen.
But with a side hustles how could we mimic the “pressure” of having made a commitment to someone else? In reality, the answer was simple. Obviously, create a blog. Subsequently, the commitment is made to the “readers”. We simultaneously keep them updated and involved in the lessons we learn on our side hustle to freedom journey.
The next step was to purchase the domain name, choose a hosting service, install WordPress and set up this blog. If we get some readers that’s fantastic. If we don’t the pressure will still be on us to make progress.
Ideas for Side Hustles
- Resurrecting the web shop(s)
- Buy to let property
- YouTube channel