The Art of Corporate Espionage (the legal kind)

Last week, we covered the 5 types of revenue streams that corporate professionals are best suited to run, how to choose the right one, what you need to get started, and where to find your first clients.

This week, we’re tackling maintenance: how to stay stable at your 9-5 while gaining momentum in your side business.

🤠 Grab your Hannah Montana wig, we’re getting the best of both worlds (kinda)!

When leading a double life, the goal is usually to not make a splash in either of them, lest one jeopardize the other.

So the following advice is meant for the nebulous space after you’ve gotten a side hustle off the ground and before you prepare to quit your full-time job. Again, read here for the how-to’s of getting started.

This time can stretch on for as long as you want/need it to, as long as your 9-5 work doesn’t suffer. Next week, we can talk about when you know it’s time to go, but first:

1️⃣ Determine your minimum + maximum time split

How many hours per week can you dedicate to your own business? What’s the minimum number of hours per week, and what’s the maximum? Are those hours on weekends, nights after work, the mornings, or somewhere in between? Schedule the hours on the calendar like a work meeting (and you can even up the accountability factor by body-doubling during those hours).

This split will change over time, so don’t get too rigid, but it’s crucial for both your sanity and forward momentum that you commit to a certain breakdown. Without clear dedicated hours to your business, it’s all too easy to spend your precious time deciding “what should I do right now? Should I do anything? Maybe I’ll wait until the weekend and do everything then.”  And boom, that time rarely ever arrives, and you’re still “thinking about” starting your own thing this time next year. We don’t want that.

2️⃣ Cash, Clients, Content

When you boil it all down, any business wherein you’re trading your insights for money, you only have a business when you have revenue from clients. Duh. So, to reduce your daily decision fatigue as much as possible, stability only requires (1) growing cash, (2) serving your clients, and (3) sharing marketing content to bring in more business.

3️⃣ For cash, pick 3 RGA’s + focus there

RGA = revenue-generating activity. The stuff that can actually yield new business and build your golden parachute ($$$) out of your 9-5. 

Revenue-generating activity is not:

• Installing a website design template

• Designing a logo in Canva

• Ordering business cards

• Taking a webinar on how to use your CRM

Revenue-generating activity is (for example):

• Hosting your own webinar or “virtual open house” for qualified leads to learn more about your consulting method

• Pitching a semi-customized project scope to a dream client

• Partnering with a local business to talk about your services in front of their clients, like a registered dietician giving a 20-minute workshop on protein sources at a fitness studio before class

Even after I’d quit my corporate job to go full-time with entrepreneurship, I would spend entire days in a co-working space (an expense!) configuring Zapier automations between my booking page + email inbox. And at the end of the week I’d take stock of my bank account and wonder why it’d only grown by an inch. Because I wasn’t spending enough time on RGA’s.

4️⃣ Context-switch at your own risk

Don’t try to multitask in your business while you’re already multitasking between your day job. Choose either cash, clients, OR content to focus on on any given day.

Here’s what a typical week in my double life looked like in 2021, when I was building my career coaching business in secret while staying on top of my corporate job:

• Mon: Content 

• Tues: Cash 

• Wed: Content 

• Thurs: Clients– stacked all my coaching calls one day of the week

• Fri: Content

• Sat: Cash

• Sun: Try to unplug. Where was Brick back then?!

5️⃣ And finally: have an emergency brake ready in case shit hits the fan.

What does your brake look like? Maybe it's a conversation with your manager about flexibility. Maybe it's temporarily pausing client intake. Maybe it's a hard rule that if you hit a certain stress level, something gets cut. Define it now, while you're still functioning, not when you're already burned out and making decisions from a place of panic. Your future self will thank you.

Remember: the goal here is to build something real without sacrificing the stability that lets you take the risk in the first place.

Here's what most people get wrong about running a side business while working full-time: they treat the two like they're equal priorities. They're not.

This week’s playbook breaks down exactly which revenue-generating activities actually move the needle for each of the 5 C's portfolio income streams— and which ones are just busy work that make you feel productive without earning you a dime. 🙅

(Spoiler: most people are spending 80% of their time on the wrong 20% of activities.)

Inside, you'll find the exact checklists I use to stay organized in my double life, plus copy-paste scripts for cold outreach, biz dev, and pitching that actually work!

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