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Turning Your Hobby Into a Business

September 24, 2015

Picture this: You have been making the prettiest bracelets out of beads and metal wire for the past several years as a hobby. You love it so much that you often find yourself creating these bracelets for friends and family for their birthday and holiday gifts as well as making countless bracelets for yourself. Every day people compliment you on your bracelets and tell you they are so beautiful that you should seriously start selling them. Hold on! Should you turn your hobby into a business? Here are five questions you should ask yourself before turning any hobby into what you do for a living:

1. Do you love it enough to do it every day?

When people think of their hobbies, they are generally doing them as a way to escape the daily grind. If your hobby becomes your daily grind, would you still love it?

2. Is your hobby something you could actually profit from?

Let’s go back to the bracelet maker for a moment. Imagine the bracelets cost her $10 to make. For craft businesses many experts say that you should charge triple the amount of the cost of materials to pay for the time and labor. Would someone actually pay $30 for that bracelet?

3. Can you work enough to make a living wage?

If you can only make 5 bracelets a day that means your profits are only $100 a day. Can you live on that daily wage?

4. Are other people selling the same thing you want to sell?

If they are, what are the prices of the competition’s product and can you match that price? It they aren’t, are you sure there will be enough of a demand to consistently sell enough?

5. Finally, do you even want to convert this hobby into a business?

For some artists and crafters they could never imagine charging for their pieces. They consider them gifts from the heart and wouldn’t dream of selling their creations.

We hope the answers to these questions will help you get clear on whether or not turning your hobby into a business is right for you.

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