Many people aspire to be entrepreneurs, but that wasn't Amanda's story. In fact, she was as corporate as one could possibly be. She dreamed of being the CEO of a major corporation before she turned 40 and spent many years suited and booted. However, life has a way of forging its own path, and hopefully, Amanda's story can help others turn their side hustle into a full-time job (if that's what they want) with fewer bumps along the way.
A Corporate Start
As mentioned, Amanda had a corporate job pretty much out of the gate. She started in casinos when she was 18 years old and grew that into a serious career working in the marketing departments of Paddy Power, Hard Rock Casino, Aspers Casino, and more. From there, she moved to hotels, broadening her horizons with multi-territory marketing and leaning more towards sales. Then she took that full-stack experience to apps and startups. But it wasn't all smooth sailing. There were a few months of lag time between those last few moves, and Amanda looked for ways to keep from depleting her savings while job hunting.
Launching a Side Hustle
Amanda never intended to create her own business, much less focus on copywriting. She made a profile on People Per Hour (PPH) to do a little bit of work for a friend, and after that contract finished, she started pitching for a few of the writing gigs that came up in between sending out CVs. Amanda always liked writing, and it didn't seem much like work. She priced herself fairly low (comparatively) to start with because she wasn't really doing anything else, and she figured if she had a few dozen good reviews under her belt, she'd get more work. That activity had the added benefit of making her look more desirable to employers as well - win/win! It worked like a charm, and Amanda picked up a few regular clients in the lull between her role finishing at The Entertainer and when she started at The Bike Club.
Pandemic Layoffs
Two weeks after Amanda started at The Bike Club, they left the office, and she never came back. She lasted maybe about three months. Perhaps it would have been a better fit if there was more face-to-face time, bonding, and co-working, but with lockdown, that role was pretty much dead on arrival. Not even a heavily discounted TV ad or the £10k of free billboard advertising Amanda secured from Ocean's pandemic fund was enough to keep her in work. She was devastated. It was the worst time to be out of a job, and she knew it. A good friend of Amanda's offered her a part-time gig marketing their app while she job-hunted again. She jumped at the chance, but she also knew she needed to ramp up her own earning efforts because there weren't going to be any roles open for a while, not while COVID-19 raged on.
Side Hustle Becomes the Only Hustle
So, Amanda worked part-time marketing her mate's beauty app, learning a lot of things, making another TV commercial, doing PPC, project managing app development, training people, and more. But time again wasn't on their side. Beauty fell by the wayside during the pandemic, and that business never gained the traction it deserved. Luckily, Amanda had been working hard on PPH at the same time. She'd created a stable of copywriting clients on retainer and was one of the top earners in the Writing and Translation category month after month.
Forming a Business on the Fly
Then one day, a client needed Amanda to join their procurement portal. She'd been a registered sole trader this whole time, but she'd just been trading under her name. Their website asked for a company name. She quickly made one up so she could tick that box - CRE8TIVE COPY UK. She didn't put a whole lot of thought into it at the time. She needed something no one else had, wanted to pay a bit of homage to her 'millennialhood,' and needed to keep it regionally relevant. In retrospect, that's not the best way to name a company, but it was a big contract, her biggest yet, so she thought she should get some liability insurance too. On their form, they wanted a company website. She quickly went on Canva and made one in maybe 20 minutes. Job done. And that sort of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants mentality carried on until it came to tax time.
Getting Serious About the Sales Funnel
At some point, Amanda got it in her head that £5k was a reasonable amount of money to save for taxes, and the government couldn't possibly want more than that. This wasn't based on any math or calculations, just optimism, perhaps. So, she set aside her little lump sum, convinced she'd nailed accounting and carried on. When self-assessment time came, she was in for quite a shock because, after adjusting for expenses, she owed just over £15k. From that moment, something shifted. It sunk in that this was her real job now. She wasn't going back to the office. This wasn't a little side hustle. She was pulling in just under the VAT threshold, and she knew she needed to get serious about making a sales funnel if she was going to keep this up. She tapped into her marketing foundation and quickly ramped up some B2B channels. In days, she had a running LinkedIn business page, a monthly content schedule, newsletter, webinar series, and DM follow-up flow. She started taking even more direct clients and tracking her turnover and expenses diligently.
Thinking About Other Revenue Streams
Once Amanda had her little sales funnel in place, she looked at other ways to make money. She made some new offers on PPH around training people on how and when to use AI in their own businesses. And then she took an even longer view. As a copywriter, how long could she actually do this job? Not forever, so she needed to think about revenue streams that would go on in relative perpetuity. So, she wrote a book. They say to write what you know, so she made her first book about copywriting. If it does well, she'll write another, probably on marketing this time.
Things She'd Do Differently
After three years of working her side hustle as her full-time job, there is just one thing Amanda would do differently, and that's taking it seriously from day one. She cringes to think about all the money she left on the table by waiting until year 1.5 to make a sales funnel or how it took her 2 years to even think of the idea of writing a book. Her advice to anyone looking to launch a small business is to lay all the groundwork at the beginning. It requires nothing but time, and she regrets deeply all the missed opportunities her lackadaisical attitude cost her.
However, you can learn from her and do these things from day one to be even more successful:
Have a good business name and buy the domain.
Create a website and launch it across relevant socials.
Develop a sales funnel and nurture it.
Track all your incomings and outgoings.
Create subscriber lists and reach out to them with any important updates.
Think about multiple revenue streams and have a roadmap.
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