When you don’t want to give up your day job
TECHNOLOGY Savvy millennials have a ‘side hustle’
When Stefanie MacDonald was invited to the 2014 wedding of two women “very dear” to her, she wanted to give them a “simple, quirky, contemporary note card.” But she didn’t have time to seek out boutique card shops and the only images she was able to find were of champagne glasses, wedding cakes, and brides and grooms.
So MacDonald, a 29- year- old from Halifax, designed her own card featuring a simplified illustration of two women, along with the line “Let’s Grow Old Together.” The response from friends and family was overwhelmingly positive and MacDonald began to think she might have the germ of a business idea for a “more inclusive” line of cards.
She wasn’t willing to give up her day job as director of marketing for commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield Atlantic, but she had an entrepreneurial spirit and a creative streak that wasn’t being satisfied. So MacDonald came up with 25 more designs — including “Congratulations Daddies,” “Congratulations Mommies” and “Apartment Sweet Apartment” — based on her own real-life relationships. Thus began Halifax Paper Hearts.
“Initially, I thought it would just be a hobby business, and that I could make cards and prints and sell them at our local farmers’ market on the weekends to break up the long winter months,” she says. “But once we started connecting with our customers and retailers, we just couldn’t stop.”
MacDonald uses Facebook groups to test her creative and keep in touch with fans, as well as to suss out the greeting card and stationary shops that would be good customers for her product. She has a web site (halifaxpaperhearts.com) for retail sales, as well as an online store on etsy, which together generate about 30 per cent of her revenue. The remaining sales come through traditional greeting card shops.
MacDonald is one of any number of savvy millennials who have what 29-year-old Chris Porteous of Toronto calls a “side hustle,” basically “a self- made venture that an individual uses to generate secondary income.” Porteous himself has a day job as vice- president of Toronto- based media buying and PR agency Grey Smoke Media, but he runs several websites on the side to generate a stream of mainly passive income.
The most recent, real estate website CondoMove. ca, launched six months ago and takes him just about four hours a week to run. Porteous launched it with the help of a single assistant, but has since hired a full- time manager, a photographer and a team of freelancers.
Many millennials start a side hustle to provide a creative outlet, he says. But the primary impetus is financial. Jobs are increasingly precarious,” Porteous points out.
Toronto TV director Barry Choi, 35, says he initially started his personal finance blog, MoneyWeHave. com, as a labour of love. But when a company contacted Choi through his blog to offer him a freelance writing gig, he quickly realized the website could act as a kind of electronic resumé and it could actually supplement his income and provide a little mad money for trips and other indulgences.
Within the first two years of its 2014 launch, Choi generated an extra $5,000 toward the downpayment on his Toronto condo and he continues to earn a regular income from it. “I set aside 25 per cent for taxes, save 50 per cent and spend the rest,” Choi says.
Having the website in reserve gives him a sense of safety, he says, pointing out “I’m at the age where I never feel 100 per cent about my job security.” And his costs to run the business are minimal — involving a $1,000 investment in a website designer and an investment of his spare time.
According to Porteous, that’s another factor fuelling the growth of the side hustle. In the internet age, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money to get a business off the ground. Online stores like Shopify and Etsy, and freelancer sites such as Upwork and JobBliss make it fast and easy for tech-savvy millennials to launch.
Geeta Nadkarni, the 37-year-old founder of BabyGotBooked, agrees. She launched an online training course from her Montreal home in August 2014, at the tail end of a two-year mat leave from her job as a guest host and reporter for the CBC.
Nadkarni needed to supplement her husband’s income as a TV director at Radio Canada. So she took what she knew and turned it into a business, creating training videos to help other small businesses do their own public relations and catch the attention of journalists. She markets her videos online, working around her five- year- old son’s and six-month-old daughter’s schedules.
“None of this would be possible if it wasn’t for the online technology that helped cut my learning curve down and get systems up without needing to learn how to code,” says Nadkarni
Eventually, Nadkarni adds, your side business may become your day job. She now generates a “multi-sixfigure” income from her business.
“For me the internet is the elevator that goes right past the glass ceiling,” she says.