Doing Side Gigs on Company Time?

Side gigs are all the rage for millennials in today’s world.  With high student debt, salaries flat versus inflation for years and an increasingly regimented and unfulfilling corporate work place it is no wonder that people are looking for more.  More satisfaction and more money are on almost every worker’s wish list.   Having a second job that is flexible, that you can do where you are and when you want, that pays great and makes you feel good about yourself sounds pretty good doesn’t it?  And being able to do that on your current employer’s time clock so that it doesn’t require a lot of additional work hours sounds even better. 

“Wait”, you say, “that’s dishonest.” If I try to run a side business when I’m being paid to do something else, by someone else, it is kind of like stealing isn’t it?   That would get me fired!”  No, in fact if you do it the way I did, it is more likely to get you promoted and to get you some really bountiful raises.  So, listen up, and I’ll share a novel way to start your side gig up today while you are at work and already being paid.

How can you morally and honestly set up a side hustle during working hours?  It is the easiest thing in the world but it does have some short-term drawbacks.  And a really big one is that you cannot get paid for doing it, at least not at first because you’ll be doing it as part of your regular job.  Let me give you an example.  Early in my career I started volunteering to represent my company every chance I got.  My company was a chemical plant that was a big employer and particularly a big science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) employer.  That provided opportunities to judge science fairs, speak to high schools on career day, tour school kids though our plant and give talks to civic clubs.  These were things nobody else wanted to do because they did not see them as part of their job and because many of our engineers and chemists were introverted types who were terrified of speaking in front of groups.  That was an opportunity for me to do something I enjoyed, and since nobody else saw it that way I got to do them a lot. Sometimes they fell on my own time but I considered it an investment in my future.  I was actually starting a side gig as a corporate spokesman even though it was not anywhere in my job description and nobody asked me to do it. 

Over time I got to be a pretty fair speaker and learned how to read my audience and adjust my presentation to not be boring.  Believe me if you can talk chemistry to high school kids for ten minutes and not have their eyes glaze over you can handle nearly any group of adults!  I also met the movers and shakers in our little city. I became friends with the Mayor and the principals of the schools and the visiting politicians.   The other business leaders began to see me as the face of my company.  First that was just local, but in time it grew to where the Governor, our congressmen and the other leaders in our small southern state got to know me as well.  I found myself giving keynote presentations to thousands of other tech nerds and testifying for and against legislation in front of senate and house committees in D.C.  I got on YouTube doing stuff that mattered a lot to my industry leaders and I became friends with many of them.  Company spokesman, lobbyist and public speaking were side gigs I enjoyed but I never billed a penny for doing them. 

We were highly regulated by an alphabet soup of local, state and federal agencies.  Nobody liked the regulatory work.  It could be tedious and scary since individuals could be held to civil and even criminal penalties if the agencies decided that your information was wrong or misleading.  That sounds fair enough except in most cases even the regulators could not explain what the regulations meant or how to comply with them.  They could come back a year later and second guess any permit you had applied for or any reports you had made.  But because it was absolutely necessary to have a good relationship with the regulators and to be trusted to report honestly and accurately, I volunteered for just about every regulatory problem that came up.  I built a reputation with agencies like the EPA and OSHA and also with state agencies that helped our company avoid unnecessary conflict or penalties.  Not in my job description but it built me a network of valuable contacts and gave me negotiation skills that led me into other areas.  The company began to use me to testify in civil cases, to negotiate contracts with our union, to set up business deals with other companies.  None of that was in my job description when I took it on but after a while, I was the go-to guy at making deals, particularly regulatory ones.  It become another side gig.  I didn’t get paid to do it but I did it on company time and it was fun. 

The final area of personal growth I enjoyed was being on the committee that handled our profit sharing and 401K plans.  Again, no extra pay but I got years of free education from financial industry experts, and a charlatan or two, and experience at managing portfolios in the tens of millions of dollars.  I was witness to the wise and insanely stupid moves people made with their money and gained an understanding of what diversifying a portfolio looks like and of the importance of compound interest.  All for no pay, but I considered it a great side gig. 

So that was how I executed my plan.  I volunteered unceasingly for assignments outside of my job description as long as they were in my sweet spots of talent and passion.  And instead of becoming an experienced chemical engineer with some management experience I became a multi-talented corporate representative who could comfortably appear in a television business show, write an Op-Ed for a national magazine and testify before Congress in our nation’s capitol.  I did not turn my back on my engineering skills, I was as good as they came on that score, but I did not limit myself to that narrow a skill set.  I wanted a much more marketable talent set for that time in the future when I might walk away from corporate America. 

Why?  Why take on all those unpaid side gig assignments?  Why not just do the minimum and devote that extra effort to side gigs that you can do on your own time and can get paid for?  Glad you asked, I had two huge reasons.  One, a highly skilled technical engineer can rise to a certain level in most corporations.  That is a well paid $150,000 per year job in most cases in today’s dollars.  Most side gigger’s struggle to make even $50,000 on their gigs. The sum of those two wasn’t enough in my mind, I knew I could do even better than that in just my day job pay and not have to devote hours after work on a second job.  A broad socially skilled engineer who also had the technical chops and who could influence both coworkers and adversaries in a positive way will earn multiples of that amount if he rises far enough in the management ranks.

 My pay rose from what I started for, to 24 times that amount in my career.  Sure, some side gigs might have done that well but not very many make that much money.  I think I can make a strong case that at least 50% of my income was due to my work sponsored side gigs and that nearly 100% of the time I spent on them was company time I was already getting paid for.    And, secondly, I did not intend to stay in the corporate world forever and knowing myself, wanted to have pre-prepared marketable skills that would provide me entertaining work on my own terms. 

And that is exactly what happened. Once I was well past being financially independent and lost some of my interest in my corporate position, I retired slightly early and immediately started getting paid for the same side gig’s I had developed on my company’s time clock.  I used the same network, the same skills to solve the same problems for other companies that I had been solving for mine.  In fact, I kept solving some for my old company too, but on my own terms and schedule.  I do not need the money it makes me but I enjoy earning in spite of that and usually limit my work to a day or two a week, whatever suits me.  And remember I wasn’t finally getting paid for the side gigs, they were always partially responsible for my high pay at work.   Now that I had retired, they just kept on making me money doing things I loved to do. And as far as the financial planning I learned about from managing money for our employees, it made me money by keeping me from making emotional moves in the 2000 and 2008 financial crises.  It also gave me future content for this blog, which is not monetized but is a favorite nonpaid side gig in retirement.

How do you determine if you would best be served by an internal side gig you do not get paid for but that might greatly increase your paycheck over time?  Or if you are better off with the normal kind of side gig that earns you money for doing things on your own time that have nothing to do with your day job?  I think you have to be brutally honest with yourself.

 In my case, the first day I walked onto the job I already had a plan in place to be running the company by the time I was 40.  If I succeeded then my compensation was going to be in the mid six figure range in today’s dollars.  That made having a side income an unnecessary distraction from the rigorous corporate competition I would face to climb to the top of the heap.  And that decided the issue for me, I needed full focus on the prize and I needed to separate myself from my competition by developing skills outside of what it took to excel at the job I had now.  Skills that would make me look perfect for the jobs I wanted in the future. Skills I could take with me after my corporate days were over. 

I sized myself up as well as the competition and knew I could win the top company job and that’s exactly how things went.  But if you look at yourself and cannot see yourself in the CEO role or as the head of a division of a Fortune 500 company because of a lack of desire or talent then it is a bad plan for you.  Outside side gigs unrelated to work are a much better bet if you are not ideally positioned to run your 9 to 5 corporation some day.  And that means for 90% of you the path I took is not a good one.  But if you are in that 10% that love what you do and crave advancing to the top in your field then I think it is a superior plan to buying rental real estate, internet sales, blogging or coaching others. 

The reason I say it beats conventional side gigs is because, its fun most of the time, and rarely feels like work if you are moving up, getting big raises and bonuses and lots and lots of praise from your superiors.  It doesn’t take long hours because you get to do almost all of it on company time.  I never worked killer hours, probably less than most of my coworkers. Some of them had rental units or worked second jobs, I couldn’t have stood the hours they worked on their side gigs on top of their day jobs.  And I did not have to, I could just go home after work and relax.

If you decide to try the route I took, how do you decide what internal side gigs to build at your job?  First let me stipulate a principle that I think is universal.  You never get ahead in life by trying to turn your weak points into great personal strengths.  Every study I’ve seen says that the best choice is to run with your greatest strengths and talents and to compensate for your weaknesses as best you can.  You need to develop a depth of self awareness and self knowledge.  What are your areas of talent that you enjoy pursuing?  It may not be public speaking, it might be in researching issues or in developing procedures, not my favorites.  But you have to know what you enjoy, because if you volunteer for things you hate it will not work.  You will not do a good job at things you dislike and instead of impressing your management with your ambition and skill you’ll just destroy your reputation by looking incompetent.  Once you know the areas you are talented and inspired to pursue then you have to put the same level of intense effort to find ways to volunteer for projects at work that will allow you to showcase them.  It is not easy and takes years to accomplish but the payout can be fantastic. 

What do you think?  Is there a case for pursuing nonpaid side gigs on company time? 

Or is it possible I would have done better and retired with more wealth if I had settled for a less intense career path and focused on outside gigs to build wealth or passive income? 

As usual, if you don’t see a comment box then click on the post title and it should get you there.  Someday I’ll figure out Wordpress!