Nic’s blog
I write about building businesses, failing and building a life, not a legacy.
Why “It’s Just Business” Is Bullshit
For those of us who pour everything we are into our passions, it’s personal.
I am done with people excusing a lack of ethics, moral mishaps and blatantly questionable business practices with the phrase “it’s just business.” It’s not just business. It’s personal.
It’s All Personal
I pour everything I have into everything I do.I work on the things that define me. I work on the things that I am passionate about. I work on the things that I want the world to use, discover and buy.
I work on things that tell the world who I am, how I am and what I am.
My work is the output of my thoughts, my actions and my vulnerabilities. My work is me and that makes it personal.
We’re Not All Hustling By The Same Rules
I don’t have to respect people who choose to build things by different rules. Sure, your rules (or lack thereof) may get you further, faster but that doesn’t mean that I have to like or respect you for it.
I’m going to continue to create by the rules that I believe in.
I’m not saying that I’m going to be soft. I’m not saying that I’m going to lie down and die when someone pushes me too far but I am saying that there are rules that define what is acceptable to me and what isn’t.
Those rules may be different for everyone and in truth, that’s probably what separates the greatest of us from the mediocre.
The Hustle
I have said for ages that every entrepreneur needs to hustle. But the hustle is not an excuse to fuck people over. I believe that it is possible to sincerely to do business in the best possible way for all parties involved.
It’s not always possible, sure, but you can do your best to try to avoid blatantly destroying the livelihood, existence, ego or business of the person you are working with, hustling for or in the face of. There are limits to the hustle.
Also - hustling is not synonymous with questionable ethics. Not to me. Hustling means doing everything you can do, within the scope of what you believe is acceptable, to make your ideas work and to make your work known.
I Don’t Have To Respect You
I’m tired of the back-slapping, hand-shaking farce that is involved in business a lot of the time. I think it’s OK to show an active and healthy disrespect for the way some people conduct themselves.
Taking a stand is imperative.
Draw your lines. Know your rules. Build accordingly.
You Don’t Have To Like Everyone
There is a massive difference between liking and respecting someone. I like a lot of people that I have very little respect for in the world of business and success.
There are also a lot of people that I have immense respect for who I could not bare to have a meal with. I actively dislike them but I can acknowledge that what they have accomplished is respectable.
But then there are some people who I do not like or respect and refuse to lie about it. I think that’s OK. I think it’s OK to not like people or respect the way they conduct themselves and run their businesses.
We all have different rules that we live by and we don’t have to agree.
“It’s Just Business”
I refuse to acknowledge this justification any longer.
I don’t want to hear these words uttered in sequence any more.
It’s not just business to me.
It shouldn’t be just business to you.
If you are building something of value, it’s personal.
Relationships are choices
One of the major roadblocks that people put in their way when starting a side hustle or business is their relationships.
“My partner doesn’t agree with this business.”
“My husband doesn’t want me to work on the weekends.”
“My father/mother/friends think I should forget this idea.”
One of the major roadblocks that people put in their way when starting a side hustle or business is their relationships.
“My partner doesn’t agree with this business.”
“My husband doesn’t want me to work on the weekends.”
“My father/mother/friends think I should forget this idea.”
Or one of the most popular excuses: “People will laugh at me if I fail.”
Let me get straight to the point: You are using these people as excuses for your own fears.
Your fears are driving you away from the life you want and the side hustle that could change everything. The people who drag you down are pulling you away from your success and you tolerate them. You tolerate them. You enable them. You allow them to belittle you and your ambitions because they happen to be your family, your friends or some random person that you told your idea to. That is batshit crazy.
You can choose different friends. You get to choose your family, especially if they’re assholes. Especially if they’re dragging you down to their level and beating you with experience.
You can choose to stop engaging with your family if they are bad for you. It’s OK to admit they are bad for you. All across the world, there are people who have siblings, parents, friends and extended family who hurt them, disappoint them or damage them. You don’t have to be a part of that.
I have had some difficult relationships in my life; an uncle who turned out to be a child molester and drug addict. Friends who I thought were close to me but never really cared about me. A business partner who betrayed my trust and sold a business behind my back.
These are meant to be relationships that uplift you and make you a better person. They didn’t for me and that’s actually OK.
It’s OK to walk away from relationships that are bad or even ones that are just not good enough.
At one point very early on in my entrepreneurial career, I was 19 years old and at university studying journalism. I started an online student publication with two friends. We slaved away building the site called StudentWire. It was a news aggregator for student news and after about 10 months of building this business, gaining traction and doing the hard work to get it live and get ten university campuses to provide us with weekly news stories I realised that my two business partners wanted the business to be a non-profit.
At university, there is always this undertone of saving the world and doing good and this message is often mixed up with anti-capitalism rhetoric that suggests that you cannot do good and make money. I believe you can do good and make money. We were at an impasse. We had fundamentally different ideals and there was really no way around it. I took the lead and decided that I believed the business could go all the way if we made if a for-profit entity. I stood my ground and took over the business from the two partners who were willing to give up their equity for their ideals.
That’s completely acceptable. That’s how things go. You sit down, you have a conversation and you decide if you stay together or move on. In truth, I don’t think our relationships were every the same but that’s also OK. I made a decision based on my world view and I stood by it. Not every partnership is going to work out. Not every friendship remains and not every person in your life is meant to be there forever.
You only have a finite amount of time each day, week, month, year to engage with other humans. You get to decide if you engage with humans that make you better or make you worse.
I choose to surround myself with friends who are the best people I know. They make me better, they support my side hustles, they push me every day to be a better version of myself and they hold me accountable.
Sure, sometimes we get smashed and have a party. Sometimes we talk about nothing and send each other random memes but these are people who I want to be more like and who will help me at the drop of hat and ask for nothing in return.
Everyone deserves this kind of person in their life. If you even have to second guess your relationships then it’s time to really analyse that relationship and decide if it’s more effort to stay in it than to get out. Is it better for you to be involved with these people or to walk away? Do they want the best for you and are they actively trying to help you get there?
Believe it or not, you get to choose. You get to decide who you spend time with. You are not obligated to see people just because they’ve always been around or you share some DNA.
To start a business, a side hustle, a new career or job you need the best people in your corner and if you don’t have them then your task becomes orders of magnitude more difficult.
Find the best people and get close to them.
Building A Personal Brand Side Hustle
Authenticity is key. It’s so much easier to consistently be yourself than to try and be someone else. If you think about your favourite celebs, they’re just being themselves - and it’s so much easier to invest in them and like them.
Authenticity is key. It’s so much easier to consistently be yourself than to try and be someone else. If you think about your favourite celebs, they’re just being themselves - and it’s so much easier to invest in them and like them.
If you are wanting to start a side hustle, one of the first things to consider is how to position yourself, whether you are the “brand” or your product is the brand. For side hustles, where you are brand, the only way to make it work is to put yourself (and not someone else you are pretending to be) out there.
“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
This quote comes from Jeff Bezos. And as much as he is controversial, he is a business mind and he’s managed to make a pretty massive success, starting Amazon as an online side hustle.
Your personal brand is what you do and how you do it. Since it’s centred around you, it’s not something you can (or should) try and fake.
The best side hustles that pay you to be yourself
YouTube Video Streaming
More and more people are interested in making and consuming bite-sized content. This means authentic homemade videos have skyrocketed in popularity.
Vlogging and YouTube channels are now sitting on potential pots of gold with niche, loyal followers available for each industry. With a little effort (and a lot of consistency), it’s possible to start a pretty lucrative side hustle with a focus on video production.
Consistency is key if you want video content to be a serious income stream. You also need to be comfortable behind a camera and have some skill editing video (but that you can easily learn “on the job”).
For example, Casey Neistat is one of my favourite YouTube vloggers. His authenticity and consistency won me over completely.
Even though Casey does things which are simple in practice, the fact that he does them daily is what makes him impressive. He often messes up, stumbles over words, slips, slams doors, cuts open packages that end up cutting through his products. Whatever. Push on and be consistent.
Remember, with all content-related side hustles: Done is better than perfect.
With video streaming, revenue is possible through ads (either paid through the platform or by partner advertising), selling products or merchandise or by crowdfunding in your video content.
Instagram Influencing
So many people grow up dreaming of a life of fortunes and fame. It’s what the media shows us as glamorous, so we’re obsessed with the potential of the razzle and dazzle. The hard truth: So many people want A-lister fame, but so few people get it.
Luckily, you don’t need to have to be in the Hollywood spotlight anymore to have a profitable personal brand. With the world living on social media, the stage is set for you to make a profit from your personal brand from behind your screen. Using Instagram to market your side hustle with a business account, you can monetize the platform by finding the right niche, building a good following and creating a consistent strategy.
Part of the side hustling process is developing the right voice and targeting a loyal customer base or audience, so building (or harnessing an existing) following on the social platform also acts as a great way to focus up and promote your side hustle product.
Blog Writing
Content is king, but it’s not easy to sell, not itself at least. While you might not be able to monetize just the content of your blog easily, you can make use of the platform where it lives.
If you have a blog which you update regularly with authentic educational, informative, and entertaining content and are able to drive readers to it, you’re already on your way to make it a side hustle income. A blog which gets traffic is a fantastic way to generate extra revenue because there are a couple of strategies you can use to make money with it. There is space for advertising, selling merchandise, books, products, services, and coaching on blog platforms. You can also diversify and have affiliate links to make money if you partner with a relevant company to your industry and offer discount codes on your blog’s site.
Twitch Streaming
Like with all content-specific side hustles, consistency is the key to unlock the potential revenue.
Avid gamer and Twitch streamer Jordan Slavik commented on building a following on Twitch: “Successful channels — like companies — are built up over years, not over days or weeks. The most important thing is to keep producing materials.”
Twitch is a platform which has many supportive fans tuning in to watch their favourite gamers. And that support can come in the form of steady revenue. Starting a side hustle through Twitch streaming requires a niche and consistent hard work, but once you’ve got a loyal following - even if you’re not the best gamer - you’re on the path to profiting from your time. Top tips: Make sure you stream with a regular schedule too, so your fans know when to tune in. Once you have a following, don’t pretend they’re not there for you. They are, so engage with them! Ask questions, make jokes, reply to their comments. Provided you stay consistent - and if you’re authentic, this should be pretty easy - they’ll stick around to watch you.
DAVID PEREL - EP. 14 OF THE CURIOSITY CULT SHOW
David Perel started his racing career at a very young age. He's had ups and downs, he's discovered a passion for real-life racing and found success there all the while progressing as a formidable sim racer. In this interview, David and I discuss his entrepreneurial spirit, what it takes to be the best at something, starting side hustles that become business, curiosity, hard work and sacrifice. A riveting conversation with an accomplished sportsperson and entrepreneur.
Starting a Side Hustle - eNCA TV Feature
Last week I was fortunate to be featured on eNCA live talking about my new book: How to Start a Side Hustle.
The book takes my 20 years of experience and distills lessons I’ve learned into a brilliantly useful guide to starting your own side hustle.
If you’re looking to start generating extra income, this is the book for you.
Communication Is Finally Front and Center for Leaders
Open and transparent communication. Easy to write down, easy to talk about but extremely difficult to actually do. Great communication (internal and external) is something that most business claim to have, many wish they had and deep down, most want to have. For whatever reason, however, communication is very rarely a skill that businesses work on consistently and set out to improve. It’s only when communication is horrific that someone will think to step in and attempt to improve.
Communication comes easily to some people while others struggle to verbalise their frustrations or compliments. Leaders don’t realise that their ability to communicate effectively can make or break a business. Whether you are engaging with your team as a whole and telling a clear story to motivate them or talking one on one with a specific person, the way you communicate matters.
One of the surprising upsides of this global pandemic has been a rush to communicate.
I am watching people who hate video chat dive into Zoom calls. I’m seeing people who are shy of social media reach out and post how they feel without a second thought. This new global enemy is giving us the permission to finally communicate effectively and I hope it’s a trend that becomes the norm.
How a leader communicates in times of strife is a clear indication of their ability to lead and their chosen priorities. Leaders who are prone to micromanaging will double down and make their teams insane. Leaders who are clear, empathetic and concise will thrive and really take centre stage.
Right now I believe it’s extremely important for over-communication to become the norm. If you used to check in with your teams once a week then it’s time to start checking in three times a week. Your quarterly financial reviews need to become weekly financial reviews and your annual supplier call best become more frequent or those relationships will start to break down very quickly. Over-communication does not mean micro-manage, there’s a difference so let’s dive into some ways that you can and should be communicating better with your everyone involved in your business.
Talk to Your Team
The Radical Candor motto.
For years I have been practising something called Radical Candor with my teams. The premise is simple; challenge directly but care personally. In other words, address the issue and not the person. You don’t have to call John dumb. He’s not dumb, he just did something silly. Address the thing he did and care about John and his ability to improve.
The key to great communication with your team is that it’s a two-way street. Your team is filled with the people you should trust to build your business and make your vision a reality. They are the ones who speak with your customers, build your products and sell them with all their might. If you have hired the right people then you should be able to practice Radical Candor with ease.
As a leader, you also need to be able to take on criticism and listen to feedback without taking offence.
Now that everyone is forced to work remotely, open and clear communication is even more important and if you don’t know how to take on criticism and you don’t believe that the people you work with want the best for you then you’ve lost the war before stepping into battle.
Tools like Slack, Skype and others are great but they are just the tools. It’s how you use them that is key. If you are asking your remote team to check-in, check out, alert you when they’re taking a toilet break or when they are going to have lunch then you are not trusting them to be the best version of themselves. You’re just remotely babysitting them and micro-managing them.
It’s imperative to have clear goals for the day, week and month that everyone is on board with and understands. Then you must be measuring your team’s performance, not their attendance. It’s impossible to measure their attendance remotely so err on the side of trust.
If you can’t trust your team then you have the wrong team or, alternatively, your team doesn’t trust you and you are the wrong leader for your team.
Another useful tool to set up appropriate communication is to create a “How You Work With Me” document. I always have my “How you work with Nic” document at the ready to share with new team members. This document helps my team understand my expectations around comms and gives them the opportunity to shine. I also always ask them to put their own version of the document together so I know how I should be working with them as efficiently as possible.
Talk to Your Suppliers / Creditors
Your knee-jerk reaction right now might be to go silent on your suppliers and creditors. That’s the wrong move. We are all going through this crisis together and your suppliers are scrambling to survive just as you are. If you engage with them directly it’s more likely that they will be on your side and try to work things out with you rather than against you.
This implies that you have a good pre-existing relationship with your suppliers and/or creditors.
Everyone wants to make it out of this insanity with their businesses intact. That is an unlikely outcome if you shut yourself off to the help that could be out there.
Often our reaction to a crisis is to hide and hunker down in silence trying to shy away from responsibilities until the very last minute, that’s not going to work this time. When the lockdown ends and you haven’t paid your suppliers they’re either going to hold this against you when business opens up or they will have gone under and you’ll have no one to do business with.
Get on the phone, set up a video call or just drop them a message but communicate more often than less often until we all know what the next move may be.
Talk to Your Customers
If you have built a relationship with your customers then they are expecting to hear from. I’ll say it again: We’re all in this together, on a global scale. Consumers, suppliers, brands, businesses, freelancers, the government, NGOs, NPOs, all of us are in this crazy pandemic together. Your customers want to know if you’ll be around when they get out of their homes.
You may not know if you’ll be around and that’s OK. Tell them that. Reach out to them one by one if you have to and ask them for ideas, see how they’re doing and just be present.
I visit the same restaurant around the corner from my flat at least once a week. I love that place and I’ll be very sad if it doesn’t survive this mess but I have no way to reach out to them, they’re famous for not playing by traditional rules of customer engagement and that’s why I love their brand but that is making it difficult for me to support them right now.
I want to hear from the brands and businesses that I love and trust. I want to support you and I want you to make it out OK in the end.
Send me an email, give me a phone call if you have my number, I’m OK with that in these extraordinary times. Give me the ability to opt-out if I want to but for the time being, hit me up. Again, over-communicate don’t ignore that this experience is happening to us all.
Let’s recap:
Talk to your team
Trust the people you work with
Communicate with the people you trust
Practice Radical Candor (Challenge directly and care personally)
Set clear goals for the day/week/month
Measure people by their performance not their attendance.
Over-communicate rather than under-communicate
Talk to your suppliers/creditors
Do not hide from your responsibilities, they aren’t going away
Try to find a fair solution for everyone
We’re all suffering together so let’s all engage and find a middle ground
Over-communicate rather than under-communicate
Talk to your customers
If you’ve been good to your customers over the years, they’ll want to be good to you
Don’t beg but tell your customers how they can support you
There is a person behind the brand/business, be that person and talk to your customer
Over-communicate rather than under-communicate
If you have other tips for great communication in this new world, add them in the comments on this post!
The Three Questions Every Business Owner Needs to Answer Right Now
Photo by Jason Wong on Unsplash
There is a lot of panic out in the world right now and rightly so. It’s a new world. It’s a strange and uncomfortable world. It’s a world that no business owners could have prepared for but all of us wish we had.
Now that this world is upon us it’s time to jump to action and begin planning for the next 12 months of your businesses and lives. Whether you want to admit it or not it’s a bad time to be a small business in almost every industry or vertical. People are holding on to their cash and waiting to see what happens in the world.
One thing is for certain, we will emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. To make it through to the other side, I believe that businesses of all sizes need to be thinking solely on the following three things:
How deep is the damage to your business?
How long will the bleeding last?
What does the recovery curve look like?
This seems simpler than it is for most businesses.
Let’s work through these three questions slowly and clearly.
How Deep is the Damage To Your Business?
Is your business or business model dead?
Have you lost 30%, 60% or 90% of your revenue and customers?
Can you operate at all for the next 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months?
Will your staff stay if you pay them half salaries for a few months?
Can you start again in 2 months if your staff don’t stay with you?
Will your debtors give you a break on what you owe them and if so, for how long?
Will your landlords give you a break on your rent for a while?
Right now, every business owner and entrepreneur should be doing triage on their businesses. If you’re not, it’s time to get serious and get started. Even if your business is booming in this crisis you should still be thinking about what the world and your business will look like over the next 12 months.
The above questions are just the high-level, light touch questions to get you thinking. What you really need to be doing right now is assessing every expense, every income source, every employee, their skillsets and making copious notes on each item to allow you to make informed decisions in the coming two phases of your planning.
This is how you assess the damage and begin to retool your business for the new world. It’s unlikely that you can expect your team to continue to do the same jobs for the next few weeks or months. If they’re great people then you need to start to find them new things to do in your new business.
Once you have the information you need you can then start to think about how long the bleeding will last. But if you can’t find the wounds then you can’t stop the bleeding so dig deep and map it all out. Every inch of your business needs to be carefully analysed. Leave no stone unturned and no spreadsheet empty.
How Long Will the Bleeding Last?
This point in the process requires you to step back and take a macro view of your business and the world.
Is your industry under fire or is it going to kick back into action as soon as the lockdown ends and COVID-19 is under control? Is it going to kick back in immediately or over a period of weeks, months or years? Be honest and ask colleagues or even competitors for their views.
If the bleeding is going to last longer than your cash on hand can maintain then you have a serious problem and some tough decisions to make urgently.
I don’t think that the lockdown is going to be over in a matter of weeks, we’re looking at many months (if not many years) before anything begins to approach normalcy again on a global scale. India has put 1.3bn people on lockdown. No country recovers from this level of action in weeks.
It’s imperative that you form realistic scenarios that you can plan for. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. The next step requires you to start laying out the different scenarios you’re facing.
What Does the Recovery Curve Look Like?
If you think that your business is going to start back up at 100% when the lockdown ends then you are sorely mistaken.
Your business is under siege, the global economy is under pressure like our generation has never seen and it’s going to take time to rebuild.
The Recovery Curve is a way for you to estimate how dramatically your business can recover in the months after economies open back up. Is it a sharp curve from 20% back up to 100% in a matter of days? If so, you’re lucky. Unfortunately, it’s more likely a slow curve fraught with sharp rises and steep cliffs over a two year period. Yes, I’m serious, the global pandemic has more than likely taken your business back two years. Get your mind around this and start planning on ways to change the curve or patiently brace for the long Winter ahead.
Be honest and think about when the lockdown ends, can your business can operate at full speed immediately? What do you think your revenue will be in month one post-COVID? 50% of normal? 40%? 20%?
Plan out three scenarios; The best, the likely and the worst scenarios.
The Best Scenario
If you look at the world with optimistic eyes and all of your plans and preparations work out perfectly, what does your revenue look like in 6 months? Will you be up to 60% of where you were pre-COVID? Then, two months post-COVID are you up another 10% to 70%?
Now that you’re at 70% of your pre-COVID revenue, what does your team look like and how do you plan to bring them back on board? Will they come back? Will they feel safe and trust you?
The Likely Scenario
You have made plans, you are cautiously optimistic but you are still planning for difficult times and very slow growth back to normalcy. You’ll likely have to lay off half of your staff and cut the size of your business by at least half over the next short while. Your suppliers will suffer but you’ll survive and grow new revenue streams once you have made it through the worst times.
Do not be overly optimistic with the likely scenario. Try to pull in people who know your business and industry for some perspective here.
The Worst Scenario
This is the easiest scenario to conceptualise because humans can easily rush to the worst case. The worst-case scenario looks something like this:
The COVID-19 pandemic takes at least 12 months for humanity to contain. In this time your business is unable to operate, the world is in and out of lockdown constantly and your team struggles to make ends meet. The government subsidies are slow to move and only delay the inevitable.
How do you begin to retool your business and your team today? What do you do change the perspective of the world about your business? What will it take to either shut it all down or pivot what you have? Which is more intense, brutal and harsh on you and your team?
This might be the easiest scenario to imagine but is definitely the most intensely difficult to execute on. Lives will be impacted across the board. Suppliers will shut down, staff will lose their homes and you will lose sleep, hair, money and time that you will never get back. It’s tough out there but it could just be your Phoenix moment.
One of the ten Nicisms that I live by is: Sometimes you have to burn it all down and start again.
Once you have your scenario planning complete you need to communicate these scenarios to your team, your customers and your suppliers. Let them know what you are thinking and how you are planning.
By involving your team you give them a sense of ownership over the outcome and you help them plan their own lives accordingly. Bringing your suppliers in shows them a level of respect and trust that most businesses don’t offer in times of distress. They’ll thank you and if they don’t, keep in mind that they are fighting for their own survival, so give them a break.
Nothing about this is meant to be fun. Nothing about this is going to be easy. However, this is the new world that we find ourselves in and unfortunately there is a lot of waiting that needs to be done. There are decisions that will be made in the next three weeks that you have no control over and will directly impact your next move.
Plan out your scenarios and have your next moves mapped and ready for the next big shift in the landscape. Trust me, there is a lot of change afoot and this is the new normal.
Adapting to the New Business Normal - A Panel Stream
I recently hosted a panel discussion with entrepreneurs Manuel Koser, Adii Pienaar and Edward LePine-Williams. We discuss what the new world looks like for businesses in the world of COVID-19.
We also discussed the idea of starting a side hustle while under lockdown. If you’re thinking about then my new eBook is for you!
