The Side Hustle Hustle

I have been thinking for some time now about the value, or necessity, of having a side hustle to supplement income and to provide more meaning in my professional life. Those of us that are active on business oriented social media websites, like LinkedIn, are bombarded with posts from individuals building personal brands and touting their side hustle successes. Articles titled; "Turn your Side Hustle into your Full-time Hustle" proliferate the Internet. I myself, as a fledgling author of Restaurant Management, the Myth, the Magic, the Math, have unwittingly been drawn into this side hustle hustle.

I have a 40+ year restaurant career where, heretofore, I let the results of my work dictate whether I was successful or not and spent precious few moments promoting myself (insert building personal brand.) I now find myself in this bizarre cyber world of making significant, by posting to my community, the daily tasks that for 40 years went entirely unheralded. This current "building a personal brand" environment that business professionals find themselves in is an interesting shift in the capitalism continuum.

Traditionally, within a business organization, individuals were promoted to higher levels based on two primary criteria. The first being actual merit and proving competency in a current role and the second being the perceived competence or the personal brand they were able to build amongst internal managers and peers. And between those two metrics, the person who was perceived by the organization to have a better personal brand succeeded more often in obtaining the promotion than the person whose merit was the qualifier. So, the idea of building a personal brand within an organization has been with us for quite some time. So much so that J. Pierrepont Finch was able to vault himself from a window washer to the upper echelons of the Worldwide Wicket Company by building his internal company personal brand. And who could forget The Bobs proudly proclaiming that Peter Gibbons had, "upper management written all over him" after he re-created his internal company personal brand at Initech!

But now, in the world of the side hustle, one needs to project a personal brand beyond their place of employment. Enter the festering swamp of endless hours drafting posts, creating videos, constructing newsletters, and growing connections on multiple social media sights. Entire marketing companies, former individual side hustlers, have been formed to service the need for building a personal brand outside one's company. Part of this is exciting because the experience of gaining connections leads to more free forms of conversation and knowledge exchanges. Part of this experience is terrifying as the human species is not particularly adept to sticking necks too far beyond the flock for fear of getting the proverbial hook. To lament this building a personal brand on social media mentality in the 21st century is about as useful as cursing the sun for darting into the bedroom window each morning. Personal branding is here to stay.

However, I wonder how much companies are losing by not being the institutions that can provide the income and intellectual stimulus that is derived by those creating side hustles? Think about this, companies go to great expense searching for qualified job applicants. Even more time and money are invested in teaching those applicants how to do their jobs thus bringing value to the company. To sweeten the pot, companies invest in vacations, 401(k)s, life, health, dental, vision insurance and ongoing training. Finally, companies pay for internal HR departments to manage their new hires. In a nutshell, the cost to hire, train and maintain a new applicant is at least 50% higher than their starting salary.

Why then, after all that spent energy, do companies not look to their own employees for inspiration, innovation and expansion? It is sad to witness all the time, money and effort that goes into hiring individuals only to see them immediately pigeonholed into one-dimensional positions where the only hopes of placating them long enough to get a return on investment is to ply them with a bevy of benefits and business platitudes. Every person who turned a side hustle into a full-time hustle waded through this corporate morass, collecting their paychecks, and biding their time.

I speak not as a prophet or soothsayer but as an employee who has experienced both sides of this conundrum. I have been an employee working in a soul sucking company where I watched the clock every afternoon waiting for that that sundial to strike 5 PM so I could Yabba Dabba Doo down the back of a dinosaur and petal my ass out of there. I've also been a corporate leader who spent hours laboring over how to build job descriptions that effectively corral employees into finite boxes - boxes so small that there was no room to screw anything up by having an independent thought. Creating these job descriptions and erecting the walls of complacency also comes with necessary and controllable wage confinements. In retrospect, both experiences were an incredible waste of my time.

The reason I call this issue the capitalism continuum is because what I have just described is the traditional corporate environment grown out of the industrial revolution. With rare exceptions over the last hundred years, little has changed in the process of attracting free range thinkers and creative doers into the collective soul crushing containment of a corporation. I know, from time to time, business gurus talk about how to bust through this corporate monotony. Past terms like "think outside the box," "synergy," and "paradigm shift" were all just smoke and mirrors slogans designed to quell the inner spirit of employees staring out the windows and dreaming of a better tomorrow. Of course, none of these terms have any longevity so corporate leaders are always inventing new ones. Have you heard about "shareholder equity" or "emotional quotient?" Yep, these are just the newest terms, the Jabberwokies if you will, of today's hip lingo issued to cover up an age-old corporate problem. That problem being, how do you placate energetic, creative, and ambitious employees and give them a sense of purpose and reason to accept less intellectually stimulating work with a finite compensation plan? The funny thing is all these newfangled terms and adages come from one-time business professionals and CEOs who leveraged their work into a side hustle of writing books and high-paid speaking engagements outside the confines of the very companies where they were the protectors of mundaneness! As it turns out, the pendulum on this aspect of capitalism swings extremely slow.

I perceive that the successful companies of the future will not to be the ones where executives are contemplating the ROI on another week's vacation, ping-pong and pool tables in the break room and free pizza Fridays. No, the great companies will be the ones that troll their employees’ social media sites and identify the individuals who go home and spend the next eight hours of the day pursuing their true passions and are building their personal brands. The wise organizations will be looking at this incredible treasure trove of talent and inspiration and figure out how they may tap that creative energy and compensate those people they already have within their ranks? Because when it comes right down to it, employees know when they're being placated and bought off with shiny trinkets. All they really want to know when they go work for a company is, is this a place where they will simply exchange their time for a paycheck or is this an opportunity for them to grow their personal brand thus enabling them to build their better future?

Let's face it, the individuals out building their personal brand outside of normal work hours are merely exercising their natural thinking, creating and experimenting energy that was so effectively curtailed by their day-job employer. Because, when it comes right down to it, one can shake off the shackles of containment at the end of the workday in one of two fashions. They can settle into the sofa consuming nectar and Netflix or they can follow Aristotle's advice on leisure by personally improving their knowledge thus contributing to a better life!