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The industry has expanded in such a way that actors can have careers and fully support them through side hustles that make real income and give you the flexibility to pursue your creative life. Don’t believe me? I brought Kristine Oller, creator of Cashflow for Creatives, on to tell us how to do it! Plus Kristine has generously given the Actor CEO community a discount on CashflowforCreatives.com so you can start making income even easier! Just use the code ACTORCEO. 

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

Mike: What’s the benefit of building a side hustle for an actor?

Kristine: It’s not that you have to do every single little thing that you hear about that you’re able to do. That’s not my approach at all. But you have the tools to reach more people, right? It was very hand to hand, word of mouth, boots on the ground when I was doing it. So the thing the thing about having this accessibility to creating your own income streams is that it allows you to start building your business muscles, your show business muscles, because business muscles or business muscles, they’re the same, before you actually even get into the situations in show business where you would need some business savvy.

Mike: How is Cashflow for Creatives built for actors?

Kristine: I think that this is a distinction of why I’m so passionate about talking about Cashflow for Creatives, and why I’m getting this information out there is because there’s a lot of wonderful general business building guidance out there that you can get for free and a lot of it is great, but a lot of it is geared towards someone who’s in a full time job that they don’t like, and they want to create a little side business with the hopes of building that into their full time replacement for their full time job. That’s what the advice is helping them do. But that is NOT what creatives are trying to do. Creatives want their full time job and full time income to come from their creative pursuits. What they need is a short path between them and some cash. And that is what I’m help people do. It’s building a side business in a different way so that it’s a lean, low overhead, simple path to between you and your cash.

Mike: What are some great side hustles for an actor?

Kristine: It’s really interesting because I have, I have this free mini class that I offer for Cashflow for Creatives. And it’s called the Seven Big Lies to Keep Creatives from Making More Cash. And one of those lies, and by lie I just mean stories that we tell ourselves, we’re lying to ourselves, or we’re believing something we’ve heard. One of those lies is “I don’t have anything that people will pay me for.” And I look across the table at this amazingly talented creative who has been educated and has life experience and I’m like that is not true. What we don’t do though is we don’t sit down and examine our skills and our strength because it’s some combination of those with a pain or a problem that someone needs solved. And once you get that little combination you have a side business.

I would say to people you know sometimes it’s hard to sit down and go, “Uh, my skills and my strengths…” Ask other people like what am I good at or what do people you know commonly ask you advice on all the time or ask you help for there’s something in there that you are already able to do.

A great resource for expanding your mind on what else could be a side hustle is Chris Guillabeau’s podcast Side Hustle School.These are little tiny short episodes and he’s done like 200 plus of them of all different weird little side hustle that people are getting paid to do. My favorite one that just like blew my mind was this woman is paid, has a little side hustle, being a bridesmaid for higher because sometimes a bride like her best friend who would be your maid of honor and kind of help her coordinate stuff lives in another state and can’t do it or isn’t really up to the job. And so you can hire this woman and she will be like your right hand man and like really do all the things that are necessary and supporting you through this special time. It’s just like, “Whoa, someone’s getting paid to do that!” That’s amazing. So his podcast is just a just a font of ideas. And once you start listening to it, you might find something but also, like, you’ll be in the shower one day, and the synapses will just fire and you’ll be like, “Ah, I see it all clicking, here’s what I could do.”