Roadmap to a successful side venture

As many of you know, I have maintained this blog over the years during my off-time while working full-time as a Software Engineer, MBA student, Management Consultant, and Business Strategy professional. In the past couple of years, I have also launched a series of value-added services, including business services, admissions advisory, career preparation, and career visioning, in addition to sharing my story and offering advice on this site. When I first started offering my services, I planned to make a few bucks here and there, but, over time, these offerings turned into viable revenue streams and have helped me to build up my “rainy day” fund. As a result, I’ve become passionate about helping others to set up side ventures of their own because, in the current economic environment, one can never know when his or her primary job can disappear.

Over the past few months, I’ve been approached by several friends with questions about how they can set up revenue streams of their own outside of their day jobs. Having done this a few times since my teenage years, I have MANY thoughts on the topic, but before these conversations, I’d never taken the time to structure those thoughts. After a few of these discussions, I realized that I was sharing the same advice each time and, being a former consultant, saw this as a great opportunity to develop a structured framework for how to launch a successful side venture.

To make it easier to share my thoughts on the topic, I created the following video, which describes a 5-step process that I developed for setting up and launching side businesses, including tips on how to determine the right offerings to launch, establishing your brand, and building your expertise. I presented the information at a high-level in order to keep the length of the video to under 20 minutes. I realize that’s a pretty long duration for a web video, but, from what I’ve heard so far, my approach has been really helpful to others. In the near future, I plan to develop a full curriculum and video-based e-course to describe the details behind the high-level points mentioned in this video. I will post an entry to announce the launch of that e-course at a later date.

I want this entry and the video to be as helpful as possible, so I haven’t made them password protected like most of my other blog posts and videos. In a perfect world, this video will inspire people to think of ways to make revenue off of their talents as a way to build up financial reserves for a “rainy day”. So, if you think the approach that I’ve presented in this video is useful, please feel free to pass along the link to this blog entry. I created this video to help people and, although it may not be the “textbook” way to launch a side business, it is a method that has worked for me and could serve as a good starting point for others.

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Video:

Roadmap to a successful side venture from Marquis Parker on Vimeo.