The Almanack #9: The Bottleneck Framework

I see so much debate online on whether people with side hustles should quit their jobs to pursue their business full time. On the one hand, juggling a side hustle alongside a full time job is exhausting - and risks diluting your efforts across two hustles instead of having one singular focus (if you want to know why this is important, I suggest you read Deep Work by Cal Newport). However, at the same time, quitting your job to pursue a business that, statistically speaking, is likely to fail is also inherently risky.

One framework that I think can help here is something I call the ‘Bottleneck Framework’. Essentially the thought here is that there are certain bottlenecks that may prevent a business from going - initial capital (money), staff, founder’s time.

When you’re first starting off, money is likely to be your biggest bottleneck, since chances are your business isn’t profitable yet. You’ll need capital to buy supplies for your business - and to support yourself financially (remember, you’re a key component of the business). Therefore, unless you’ve inherited a large sum of money (or already have some money saved up), you’re going to need a full time job to support your business. Even though your full time job will be consuming, you can find spare pockets of time during the weekends, evenings and mornings to work on your side hustle.

However, there’ll come a point where you just can’t squeeze any more time out of your diary to continue expanding. You might outsource some work by hiring staff - but even that will require time on your part (interviews, internal meetings, etc.), so eventually your time will become the bottleneck for your business expanding. Hopefully, your business will be profitable at this stage; it’s at this stage that I’d say quitting your job makes the most sense, since you’ll be freeing up 40 hours of your week which can be spent on the business. The key is to only do this when your time is the limiting factor to the business growing. If the business can grow with you working on the weekends / evenings, then maybe hold off handing in your notice for now.

I’m sure there are some limitations to this framework (there always are) - however, hopefully this provides some insight into whether quitting a job to go full time on your side hustle makes sense.

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Logitech MX Master 3S Review

The internet’s favourite mouse - I’ve been using it since October last year, and have been pretty pleased on the whole with the experience (especially the haptics on the click, which are unmatched). However, I’m still going to be sticking to using the Magic Mouse, mainly because I find the natural scrolling just works better on MacOS (and let’s not talk about iPadOS here!).

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