How to turn your passion into a business  

Ever dreamed of turning your passion into a business? It can be a rewarding way to make a living.

With the rapid growth of online shopping and affordable ecommerce platforms, some of the traditional barriers to launching a small business are gone. You can potentially make sales without buying a shop or giving up your day job. Here are some thoughts to help you monetise your hobby and turn your passion into a business!

1. Be prepared to lose some love – Once you turn your passion into a business, you’ll never feel the same way about your hobby again. The idealism of doing what you love for a living will collide with the reality of:

• tracking sales and cash flow
• hitting targets
• managing inventory
• watching competitors

2. Balancing creativity and commercialism – When you create something for personal fulfilment, you can make it to suit yourself. But when that creation becomes a service or product you wish to sell, you have to work within boundaries that suit your customer’s needs and requirements.

3. How do you monetise your hobby? – You’re enthusiastic about your hobby and the business idea that flows from it but ensure you fully test ideas within your market to find out what works and what doesn’t. Try to solve a problem or find a product that already exists and find how you can improve on it.

4. Building your brand with free content – Sharing relevant content is a great way of building up your customer base.

5. A pragmatic approach to social media – Find out where your audience spends their time (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and focus there. It sounds obvious but this simple piece of research can save hundreds of hours of lost effort.

6. Separate your personal and professional goals – When you turn your passion into a business, it’s easy to lose track of time. Both the passion and the business soak up a lot of energy – making it hard to get your work-life balance right.

Talk to us about turning your business ideas into reality

Turning your passion into a business is an exciting prospect and you could earn money doing what you love. Talk to one of our team and we can help you to come up with a plan and put steps in place to help turn your passion into a business reality!