Here's the Thing Nobody Tells You
Module: Is This Real Yet?
Here's the thing nobody tells you about starting something on the side: the money math isn't the hard part. Once you sit down and add up numbers, they just are what they are. The hard part is figuring out whether this thing you're doing is a real business or just you being nice to people, and doing that on purpose instead of by accident.
I didn't know that was even a question for the first two years I catered. I just said yes to things. Somebody needed food for a wedding luncheon or a ward party, I showed up with pans, and at some point I'd hand them a number I basically made up. I never once sat down and asked myself "is this a business yet." It took my wife fanning grocery receipts out on the kitchen counter one night, asking me pretty gently whether I was running a business or just feeding people for fun, for me to realize I didn't have an answer.
I still don't have a clean answer, honestly. But I stopped letting the question sit there unasked, and that changed everything.
Why this matters before you do any of the other stuff
A lot of people want to skip straight to the fun part — pricing, a logo, maybe a business card. But if you don't know whether you're testing an idea or just being a generous neighbor with a hobby, you'll end up doing both at once without meaning to, and one of them will start resenting the other. Usually it's you, resenting the thing you used to love doing for free.
So before we touch pricing or paperwork, I want you to sit with one question: when is this you being a business, and when is this you being a neighbor?
Both are fine. I still cater ward parties sometimes and don't charge full price, and I'm at peace with that. The problem isn't doing favors. The problem is not noticing you're doing one.
A small, practical way to test this
Here's what I have people do, right at the kitchen table, on paper:
- Write down the last three times you did the thing you're thinking about turning into a side business — cooking, sewing, tutoring, whatever it is.
- For each one, write whether you got paid, and if so, how much.
- Now write down what it actually cost you — supplies, gas, your time. Don't skip your time. We'll do the real math on this in a later lesson, but just guess for now.
- Look at the three side by side. Is there a pattern? Are you always underpricing the same kind of job? Always saying yes to the same kind of person?
You're not trying to get a perfect number here. You're trying to notice a pattern in how you already behave, because that pattern is going to keep happening unless you decide, out loud, that it shouldn't.
Start smaller than you want to
Here's an opinion I'll just state plainly: start smaller than you want to. Everybody wants to buy the equipment, get the logo, print the cards. I get it. It feels like progress.
Early on I saw a commercial food scale on a clearance rack for twelve dollars and it felt like the smartest purchase of my life. A steal. I used it maybe twice. It sat in my garage for years — I actually reorganized around it at one point, which tells you something about how committed I was to pretending I'd use it again.
The lesson wasn't "don't buy things." The lesson was: buy for the business you actually have right now, not the one you're picturing in your head three years from now. You don't know yet if this is going to be a once-a-month thing or every weekend. Buy like it's once a month. You can always buy more later. You can't easily un-buy a scale that's been living in your garage.
A word on the "is this real" feeling
If you're sitting here not sure whether what you're doing counts as a real business yet — good. That means you're paying attention. Most people either declare themselves a Business with a capital B before they've done a single paid job, or they never let themselves take it seriously even after years of doing it. I did the second one. Took me two years to get a license for something I'd already been doing steadily, because in my head it was this enormous official wall to climb. Turned out to be a forty-minute form online. But that's a later lesson.
For now, just get honest about the pattern. That's the whole assignment.
Before next time
Bring your three examples — the paid-or-not, cost-or-not list — to our next session. We're going to do real math on one of them, out loud, on paper, and I promise it's less scary than it sounds. Bring a calculator too, my handwriting on numbers is not to be trusted.