Early in my career, the title of this post would have been rather unrelated as I spent a large chunk of my time beating the rest of the rats in the so called “rate race.”

I work hard at absorbing as much information as possible and applying my self in order to get ahead of the other rats. Except I imagined my self as a super rate with a red cape.

Six years into my young career, I started to realize that I was limited on how much I could possibly earn in any given year. Essentially I was relying on a solid performance review, and even then at the very best I would get a 3-5% raise. I wanted more though. I knew I had more in me to offer than what I was doing in my day to day job.

Repeating my job several times over from project to project, even in several different variations, made me quicker, more efficient and more skilled at my specific trade, but didn’t necessarily make me a more diverse and rounded business person.  I can imagine this is true for many companies, positions and professions.

I wanted to grow professionally, and financially. I eventually came to the realization that I could only grow so much, and that my growth was directly related to someone’s view of me. I knew for sure that I wasn’t born to be limited by someone else, and I knew I wanted to do something about it as well.

I realized that I had to find other ways to take my skill set to the next level professionally and financially.

It’s easy to say that you would spend an extra hour on your day job to increase your chances of getting a promotion but what are you going to do with this hour?

Instead I stuck with the same rationale, and decided to apply an hour(s) to building a side income.

What would you do with an extra hour?

I’m curious to know what you’d do with an extra hour. What steps would you take to free up an hour in your schedule or do you even need to take any step? How are you going to separate your self from those time-wasters in your day to day encounters?

Here’s what I did with an extra hour!

I decided not to invest anymore time at my day job, and that I’d only put in my hours per day. Now that I had extra time in my day, I worked on creating what now is a successful commercial cleaning business and a pretty successful personal finance blog.

Now, almost two year later with Finance Fox and almost three full years at building up Father & Son Cleaning Services, I’m proud to say that all the time invested was well worth it and then some.

The key is non-conformity!

This is that you need to measure work in output and not hours. Anyone can spend all day in front of their PC. What does this mean though? It’s not about time, it’s about output and what you actually produce.

Rather than just using an extra hour to work, you want to maximize that hour or hours on your side business by creating some value. 

Answering emails or doing research would not be considered as creating value in my books, but for example if you are:

• Writing blog posts
• Searching for new business
• Arranging advertising
• Working on a product or service

These are just some of the examples how you can create value in your business. I’ll use my self as an example; in 2011 I increased my income 23% from the previous year. This was done through the combination of my blog business and commercial cleaning business.

I’m hoping to increase my income this year at least another 15% this year, and thus far I can say that I’m on pace for that. Do I work a lot? Absolutely, at least 60 hours per week. However, I enjoy what I do every minute that I do it.

Final Thoughts

In the end, it’s not how many extra hours you are able to find in your week to work on your side projects, it is what you do with them . Try to outsource all admin work and focus on value creating activities.

At the end of the day, it is you who best knows the boundaries of your company and profession, what you can or cannot do within, how far you can go, what would it take and how long it would take.  Given your knowledge and understanding of your own situation, complimented by the fact that learning curves and professional growth come with inherent limitations, which course of action do you take?

Readers, would you rather invest an extra hour in your profession or into starting a successful side business?

Eddie

As a business owner and as talented as you are, you’ll notice over time that your employees will not be as dedicated and enthusiastic to the same degree that you are. Those who share your drive may leave at some point and launch their own business. Your job as the business owner and the face of the business is to maintain a sufficiently high level of ambition among your staff. This task is no walk in the park, but most driven businesspeople can complete this task more effectively than traditional managers.

Your business is essentially a team, and nothing should be done without your team. Choosing the right people and building a team to work with you is one of the most difficult tasks that every business owner has to take on.The key to assembling the right team is to find people that are opposite of you, because those who are qualified like you are more than likely to find their own route through starting their business. These same people are also much harder to retain.

You need people who understand your business, but also bring their own basket of skills and knowledge.

TEAM ASSEMBLING FORMULA

Assembling an exceptional team and providing them with the necessary environment to share their ideas can be a critical part between the success and failure of your business. Unfortunately there is no one successful formula or path to follow in building an A-Team.

If you talk to any successful business owner, they’ll tell you if they had one piece of advice to help those assemble their team it would be to trust your instinct. If you trust your instinct, you’ll be successful at uncovering hidden talent. And as the years go on, you’ll become better and better at finding hidden talent.

KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF  HIDDEN TALENT

You’ve heard of people talk about someone who’s text book smart and someone who’s street smart. Which are you? Do you want to hire someone who’s text book smart or his counter part? People who are text book smart believe that every business resolution resides in a text book. Maybe that works for your business, but certainly wouldn’t work for mine.

I much more prefer people who think outside of the box. The hustlers of the game, and the same people who are real by accepting that life remains unpredictable and challenging at times.

When bullets are flying, they’re the ones who remain calm and collected under pressure by finding ways to navigate through a sticky situation vs. trying to figure out what kind of bullets they are and assembling a plan on how to stop the bullets. Reality of business is that most of the time there is no time to assemble a plan, and an immediate reaction is necessary.

WHAT IS ENTHUSIASM?

Woody Allen once said that 80% of success consists of showing up – being there to get the job done when the opportunity presents it self. However, you as the business owner need to create an environment so that employees want to show up because they want to, and not because they have to in order to build a paycheck for the week.

Enthusiasm is contagious. There’s nothing like an epidemic of it sweeping through a company to help ensure success in almost any situation.Enthusiasm is also a key characteristic of every entrepreneur, and anyone lacking enthusiasm to build a business from the ground up is not a true entrepreneur in essence.

HOW TO SPREAD ENTHUSIASM

The simplest way to spread enthusiasm is never to ask anyone to do something that you’re not prepared to do your self. You lead by example. If you ask your sales staff to sell $50,000 worth of business this month, you need to be prepared to sell $60,000 worth of your business. Again, you set the example for others.

Everybody wants to belong to something larger than themselves. It’s the basis of family loyalty. Building enthusiasm through promoting a family environment and us-against-the-world attitude. Spin different stories on the competition and what they possibly might be saying against your company.

Creating a sense of pride within your small business, home business or even if you’re a bigger corporation is key to getting everyone on board. The key is not to force your employees, but create an environment they are proud of the place where they work.

I always found if funny when small business owners print job tittles on their business cards. Its a showoff tactic if you ask me. A small business that doesn’t have the titles labeled on the business card shows that anyone can do any job, is willing and able to. Everyone is willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, management or not.

Does your employer print job titles on the company business cards?

Eddie