How To Develop Skills In the Business You Are Passionate About

Discovering a business that you are passionate about can take time. You may have hobbies or interests that you are already involved with such as scuba diving, photography, swimming, writing, and so many other different things. However, just because it is a hobby that you are passionate about does not mean it automatically translates into a business that you can build into a legacy and an income-producing enterprise.

Therefore, the most important question that this blog is going to answer is: How do you develop ability in a business that you are passionate about? How do you convert your hobby into a business that generates income? You can do so by learning the particular unique business abilities that the business requires.

Every business requires an ‘ability’ to run it, and every business ability has a standard template. You do not have to search far to know the abilities that are needed to make your hobby into a viable business. This blog will tell you the 5 key abilities that are required for converting your hobby into a business.

For example, let us assume that you love photography. You are the go-to person in your family for picture taking whenever there is an event. Maybe you even have the high-tech camera to show that you are seriously into photography. However, does this mean that you can open a shop tomorrow and declare yourself as a photography business?

Not necessarily. In order to launch a business in your area of passion, there are some groundbreaking steps to follow. You need the ability to run the business. By this, I mean that you need the knowledge required to make a business enterprise viable, even though the business is in an area that you absolutely love and are passionate about.

Let me show you the steps that I took in converting my passion of writing into a business by finding the business ability required to run it. I read Robert Kiyosaki’s books, Cash Flow Quadrant and Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which provides some information about the in built ‘abilities’ that a business should have in order to run smoothly:  Products and Services, Accounting, Cash Flow, Legal and Systems. These give some initial guidance, but you would need to delve deeper into structuring your business so as to have the ability that will run your passion as a business.

My passion is writing. I have always wanted to make a business out of it. Now, I can. I can do this by having the knowledge to build a business structure around my passion.

These are the 5 structural blocks that I built into my businesses, which made it possible for my hobbies or passionate interests to be converted into businesses:

Who is my customer?: This spot will be filled by that hobby that you love so much. Is it photography? Skiing? Then, this is the product or service that you are going to be delivering. However, take a step further. Ask the question: Who is your customer? Who will you be delivering the product or service to? Is it going to be, for example photography geared towards high school kids? Photography for corporate events? In this case, your customer is ‘high school kids or ‘companies holding events.’ Give your customer a name, and you will know exactly what your product and service will look like before you even start producing it.

Fluid business structure for delivering your products and services: Each business has different legal requirements to meet. Therefore, your business’s legal structure may not be the same as mine. For instance, the legal structure that a law firm has would not be the same that a day care has. The law firm may be better suited as a ‘legal partnership’ business structure, and the day care could be a sole proprietorship or LLC or corporation. See my blog about the different types of corporate structures that you may want to consider for your business. After determining the structure of your business e.g. legal partnership, you will want to have the right contracts that protect the business in every type of activity that it is involved with. For instance, if you are a plumbing contractor, you want your business to include vendor contracts or supplier contracts where you have dealings and agreements with other businesses that will supply you with tools for your plumbing work. If you run a supermarket or restaurant, you need food vendors. For a writing business, the type of contracts that would be needed are different. The writing business may need a contract for a literary agent, and not a vendor supplying tools to it.

A written down system for dealing with each business department: For instance, you want your business to have a marketing area because you need to promote yourself. What kind of system will you have in place to make this area run well? Maybe your system is: Use Pinterest to publicize my business, 3 times a week; or make YouTube videos and about my work and provide reviews about tools I use for my work… and so on. Having a defined system that will guide you on how you run each department of your business is an important part of converting your passion to a viable business.

Keeping the books: Have you considered having a book keeper or accountant that will help you keep track of how much you are making and spending? It will help you wneh you want to file taxes or most importantly, when you want to pay yourself out of your business! You need a structure where the books are kept well.

Income streams: Finally, but not the least, you want to pre-determine where your income will be flowing from. Will it be from one-on-one photography sessions, if your passion is photography? Will it be from your YouTube videos about photography? You need to clearly determine the places where you will be making money from, because you do not want it to be random. You want to have calculations and projections on how much you expect to be making from those areas, how much you will be charging for your services, etc.

With these 5 structures in mind, I have set up several businesses and continue to grow in knowledge about how to run my passionate interests like business enterprises.

Have you been able to convert something you absolutely love doing into a business? Don’t forget to leave a comment below and share your interests!