Side Hustle Health Report

Having a side hustle is great but having a healthy side hustle is fantastic! What makes for a healthy side hustle? And how do you know what to look at when asking yourself if your business has made progress? Well, there’s a quick answer! There are 5 numbers to track in your side hustle that can help you determine your overall business health.

We are going to be walking through each metric and how to use it. No matter what side hustle you operate, you can apply these 5 metrics to your business. And to assist further, explore my $9 Profit / Loss Spreadsheet Template here. This template will give you hands-on practice with these numbers.

What Numbers To Track In Your Side Hustle

There are 5 numbers to track in your side hustle to determine your overall health. These numbers allow you to understand how your side hustle is performing. They can also determine how much income your business is truly earning and what areas you can improve in.

The numbers you want to look at when examine your side hustle health are:

• Lead Conversion
• Overhead
• Expenses
• Revenue
• Profit

Lead Conversion

Your lead conversion rate is the percentage of leads inquiring with your business that convert to paying customers or clients.

If you are a service-based business, perhaps this looks like the percentage of people who book you after a discovery call or after filling out your lead capture form.

If you are a product-based business, perhaps this looks like the amount your 20% off first-time purchase coupon is used. Or how many purchases you see compares to store visits.

Tracking your lead conversion is vital for determining the health of your side hustle. You want to have a very clear idea of how well your business is converting to paid clients, where your paid clients are coming from, and why some leads are not converting.

You can use platforms such as Dubsado or Honeybook to create lead capture forms and track conversions.

Overhead

The next number to track inside your side hustle to determine health is overhead. Your overhead is the fixed expense your business has in order to operate. Overhead is also usually calculated month.

This will look like subscriptions, fixed wages, software, or anything more that your business pays the same amount for each month.

Overhead is an important factor when it comes to your side hustle health because you want to compare it to your overall revenue. Another way of thinking about this is “How much does my business cost to run and what does my business earn?”.

When you examine your overhead you can also see what you are typically investing in each month. Your overhead should yield a positive ROI each month. The subscriptions, software, and/or fixed labor you are using should help your company earn more money, not just be an expense.

Expenses

More numbers to track in your side hustle for examining company health are expenses. Tracking expenses can tell you the spending history of your business. And they can usually highlight any spending issues.

Expenses inside your side hustle will be purchases that vary each month. Examples include supplies, a cup of coffee at a business meeting, hourly labor for contractors, project cost, and more.

Like overhead, expenses should see a positive ROI, or return on investment. We shouldn’t just spend company money to spend it. Instead, we must have a strategy inside our business to see that money return to our wallet.

Looking at your expenses can show you the general categories of spending your side hustle has. From here, you can determine how those categories are financially investing in your business. And how they aren’t.

Revenue

When talking about company health, we of course want to examine revenue. Your revenue is the total amount of income your side hustle is bringing in. And you want to tally revenue coming through from all income streams inside your business.

In order to have a healthy side hustle, you of course need revenue. But it’s also important to note where your revenue is coming from. If your business offers multiple services or a variety of products, we want to track what inside our business is earning the most revenue. And what is earning the least.

And then we want to divert back to looking at overhead and expenses. Is the offer inside our business that is earning the least amount of revenue something we are spending more money on than the offers earning the most?

We want to use revenue to validate income but to also compare to our business investments. Seeing our revenue should highlight and define a return on investment for our offers.

Profit

And of course when talking numbers to track in your side hustle, we cannot leave out profit. Profit is the total amount of revenue less overhead and less expenses. This is the amount of income we have earned after all costs have been removed. This is our bottom line before taxes.

To determine if your side hustle is healthy or not, a great place to start is looking at profit. And ensuring that we are seeing a positive profit and not a loss.

However, we can’t examine profit alone. Your side hustle could yield a positive profit of $1,000 at the end of the month. However what is we worked 80 hours inside our side hustle that month? That would make our hourly rate about $12.50 before taxes. Does that make your business healthy? Or do you need to earn more?

After you calculate your profit each month, be sure to cross-reference it with the amount of time you have spent inside your business. This will give you an estimated hourly rate and help you discern the health of your side hustle.

Start Tracking Your Numbers

Determining the health of your side hustle is so important. We want to run healthy businesses that stand the test of time and make our hard work worth it!

There are 5 numbers to track in your side hustle for doing this. We want to look at lead conversion, overhead, expenses, revenue, and profit. Tracking these 5 numbers each month can help us determine how healthy our business is and show us what areas we can improve in.

If you are looking to track your financial side hustle numbers in an easy way each month, I have just the thing! Explore my $9 Profit / Loss Spreadsheet template right here. This template will give you an easy method to organize your books and see your bottom line.

My own accountant gave this spreadsheet a 10 out of 10 for how easy it makes bookkeeping for side hustlers. You plug and chug, this template does the rest!

You are more than capable of running a successful and healthy side hustle. Explore more methods here for creating a profitable part-time business.