How my side hustle went from zero to six figures in a month.

A number of years ago I was practicing law on my own and my clients were driving me crazy. I knew that if I was going to maintain my sanity and remain a happy person, I was going to have to change career directions. At first I thought I could maybe change practice areas in the legal profession to maintain my sanity (I was wrong about that), but that meant I’d need some side hustle income to bridge the gap during the transition.

So I started thinking about how I might go about developing an extra revenue stream or two. To my surprise, I was earning more than I had practicing law within two and a half weeks, and was on track to earn a six figure annual income by the end of that first month. These are the principles that I applied to get there so quickly.

1. Use the kitchen sink approach.

I’ve found that people who are thinking about developing a side hustle frequently fall into one of two camps. The first camp is made up of the people who believe they know exactly what their customers want and that they’ve got exactly the product or service to fix their clients’ problems. The second camp is made up of people at the other extreme: they don’t know what value they could possibly add or what problem they could possibly solve.

Both camps have it wrong. The first camp is way too specific. They may be onto something, but chances are they aren’t meeting their potential clients where those potential clients actually are; they’re meeting those potential clients where they think they are. Don’t focus in so much that you miss opportunities that you didn’t expect or perceive.

The second camp is undervaluing their skills and what they have to contribute. They have plenty of skills — they probably just don’t see how to connect those skills to clients. Put those kills out there and you’ll find clients in need of your assistance.

I put this principle into practice but throwing up a website that was essentially a resume or CV or everything I was qualified in or interested in. It was definitely the kitchen sink approach: there were about a half dozen completely disconnected fields. I didn’t know exactly how potential clients could connect with each of those fields, but I eventually got…