The Little World

Paying out for the goods, services, and experiences of a hobby is a natural process. You plays your money and you takes your pleasure. If your pleasure slackens or ceases you stops paying and goes onto something else. As long as you does not leave a string of corpses in the street, no-one is unhappy.

But everyone who does a hobby long enough and delves deeply enough into it eventually comes to a point where the idea of getting money back out of it comes up. It might be their own thoughts or it might be encouragement from others, but the dollar signs do eventually come up. You can rest assured that this accounts for 78% of the proprietors of hobby shops and 136% of their employees.

Wise hobbyists do this in a small way. Unwise ones go for a bigger involvement and find that they are losing out in a number of ways:

a. A big hobby business investment never pays a big return. If it is at all viable it pays a small one, and if it is not it merely empties the purse further. Business is business and it is capital, time, and knowledge based. If you do not invest enough of all three you are merely babysitting a failure.

b. A hobby business investment is like prostitution; success is dependent upon other people taking a fancy to you. You may look good to yourself in the mirror, but mirrors don’t spend money – likewise your passion and art and desire is so much canned peas to anyone who doesn’t fancy it, or you.

If you are a real salesperson you can sell disease and despair to people who only want happiness. If you are not, the stock of disease and despair will remain upon your hands. Find out if you are a salesperson before opening the shop door.

c. Cottage hobby manufacturing will never make big money. That is what manufacturers make in factories. Until you can command ten acres of covered shed and the cringing fear of two dozen people, you are just knitting by the fire. Go big or go home.

d. You will be robbed. By other people who buy your goods and resell them, or who copy them and sell the copies. By your employees and your customers. By your suppliers. By local government and insurance agencies. By landlords. By your family.

Unless you can stand the robberies, do not open your purse to the business. By all means kill the robbers as fast as you find them but be aware that others rise to take their place.

e. Your success may be meteoric if you have a product that captures the imagination. Look at the first action cameras. Now look at all the current ones and their imitators. The initial big money has run away like water into sand. A good idea – like a bad one – only stays in one form for a limited time. Get in good and get out good.

f. If you monetize your hobby it disappears and is replaced by the hobby of making money. You might be a signal success and a joy to yourself in the first instance and a nagging failure in the second. But either way, you will never have that initial hobby as a joy any more. Be careful what you sacrifice to the gods.