Planning for the future of your side hustle is very important, no matter what your overall goal is for the business. That’s why this week’s episode talks about the importance of doing CEO tasks — or working on your business, not just in it.

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Transcript and Links

Hello, and welcome to Season Two of the Grow your side hustle podcast. This is the podcast for entrepreneurs who want to grow a side hustle into a second stream of income or their main job. I’m your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente.

Today, I’m here with another coaching minisode. And I want to talk to you about how important it is to spend time on your business, not just in your business.

It can be so hard to manage your time, when you’re doing this on the side of a full-time job. You know, you may have to be cleaning your house taking care of kids, pets, whatever else in addition to working your full time job. So it’s really easy to only spend the time just doing the tasks you need to do in your business. You know, making the products that you’re selling, talking to sales prospects for services that you’re selling or doing the services that you’ve sold to people already.

But it’s really, really important to spend time not doing any of those things, also. So when I’m talking about working on your business, I’m talking about what some people call the CEO tasks.

First, we’re looking at the planning that you need to do for the future. If you are hoping to leave your day job behind, you need to be planning to make sure that that’s going to happen. So you need to be budgeting. You need to be looking at your marketing plan and your business plan and seeing if you’re on track to achieve the benchmarks that you’ve set for yourself. And if you’re not sure about those, sign up for the email list so that you can get access to the leave your day job checklist, which will really help you figure out exactly what needs to happen before you can leave your day job. If you’re you know in a position where you’re looking to just grow a second stream of income, you still you need to do the planning, the marketing planning.

And the assessment that I think is one of the hardest tasks for us to remember to do is to assess the things that we’re doing for marketing, for working toward our goals for you know, hitting our our budget line items.

This is also the time that you might want to spend brainstorming new ideas. If you’re at a position where you need to make a pivot in your business.

Or if you’re in a position where you feel like you might be on the cusp of burnout. And you need to see what you can do to step back a little bit while still continuing to grow.

This is also the time that you will look at whether you’re in a position to hire some help, whether you need a VA to take on some of the tasks. And these are things that you just can’t figure out very well when you’re stuck in the day to day doing the tasks of working in your business.

So if you haven’t already looked at at time management, I suggest reading the book 168 hours by Laura Vanderkam, and going through some of the tasks in there to see how much time you really have available to devote to your business.

Or just tracking what you’ve done. You know, take two weeks and track what you’re spending your time on. That is a really valuable exercise. And then you can see where you might be able to fit in this this planning or CEO time.

If you have done that, and you know exactly where you know where your time is going. Look at whether you can cut time out of when you’re working in your business, or whether you need to pull some more time out of your free time to be able to do your planning and management tasks.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you get really busy, it’s okay to you know, to put off the CEO tasks for a little while, just while you while you get back on track. You know if you’ve had a real feast month instead of a famine month, you know, you might need to just spend all your time to delivering on the things that you’ve told people you’re gonna deliver and that’s okay. But make sure that this doesn’t go on forever. Like most things that some of us don’t want to do. It’s easy to say “oh gosh, I’m I’m just too tired today, I’ll do it tomorrow, I swear, I’ll do it tomorrow.” Then tomorrow comes, you’re too tired again, and you’ve got too much else on your plate. And that can go on for months. So make sure that if you are postponing your CEO tasks, that you have a solid timeframe for when you’re going to make sure that you get back to them.

So I hope this has been an interesting thing to get you thinking more about how you’re going to get your side hustle to where you want to want to go with it. Whether it’s, you know, just being a solid, steady second stream of income, whether you’re like, “Nope, this needs to be my full time gig. I’m done with my day job,” the time that you spend working on your business is going to be time well spent to help you achieve whatever your goals are.