Realistic Evaluations of Side Businesses for Entrepretirees

There is an endless unlimited supply of “Profitable Business” ideas and headlines about how you can make a full time income with little effort and little time. But most (almost all) are just high level headlines about someone who has made some money doing something that appears to be an easy overnight success. The idea is to convince you that you too can achieve this same success with little effort, to encourage you to click on the offer or supply an email address and then ultimately buy a product, course, package or subscription so you too can be “successful”.

In actuality, the truth is that while it is possible that you could achieve success with these systems, most of the time the folks really achieving success are the ones selling the course or product or subscription. This is much like the people who made money selling tools (shovels, picks, camping gear, etc.) during the gold rush of the 1800’s ended up seeing more success that the ones trying to find the gold. This is not to say these systems are all scams, they are not but the concern is that they do not present all the details and steps and effort needed to get from step A to step Z. A lot of these systems tend to skip steps B though Y in their sales materials. Then once you start investing in the product or system, and you realize that you do not have enough information to go any further, they try to upsell you with the next level “expert system” or “personal coaching” or “gold membership” or “example templates:” or something else that you need to buy (at significant cost) in order to make any progress towards being successful. And since you have already invested in the system, there is a lot of temptation to take it further rather than losing your initial investment and then starting over with another system.
If you actually know all the steps and efforts the creators of these went through to get the results, then you would have more realistic expectations for these and would be able to make more informed decisions on what might be right for you. No one sets up a blog today and makes $10,000 in their sleep by next month. That’s just not reality. They may be making that much today, but there were some important steps they followed and they understood the path before embarking on it.

My goal here is to save you from being frustrated by getting excited about a new idea, investing time and money in it, getting disappointed when the results do not happen, then repeating the process. It can feel like you are chasing your tail, constantly looking for the next “big thing” and never finding it. We do not want this to be you, and we certainly do not have time to waste on ventures which are not appropriate. Maybe when we were younger, we could afford to do this, but with retirement approaching, now is no time to be caught in an endless loop of spending and hoping “this is the one”.  
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So how do we make realistic assessments of these ideas? In the next article, let’s take some common side venture ideas and break them down into the key metrics that we can use to match our requirements like time required, potential income, startup cost, special training needed, and scalability.