Yes you can start a business amid economic gloom – but try thinking small

Thinking of starting a business but scared off by all the economic gloom? Why not start small with a side hustle, advises finance writer Frances Cook. She talks to sucessful 'Between Two Beers' podcasters Steve Holloway and Seamus Marten about how a bona fide business grew from a friendship.

Starting a business in the midst of economic doom and gloom might seem naive – but it's not as unusual as you think. It's in these times of flux when many find themselves out of work and disenchanted with the job market that they often take a leap and either head overseas or into their own spare bedroom to start working on that idea that's been simmering.

These businesses started out of necessity can work really well. The online world is fuelling it – we saw an increase in freelance, sole trader workers starting from about 2016, and that really boomed through the Covid years, because now you don’t have to teach big organisations how to work with small business, sole traders, who are often working remotely. Everyone is more on the same page.

Of course, there's risk involved and one way to reduce that is to test the waters with an idea before jumping in and making it your sole source of income. I’ve talked to many businesses that started as a side hustle. If you can start something on evenings and weekends, and see how well it works, as it builds in popularity you can let it take over more of your week. Building a business gradually takes off the pressure and allows you more time to find which elements of your idea are profitable.

Recently on my podcst I talked to the Between Two Beers team about going from a niche little football podcast, to one of New Zealand’s big success stories - a classic example of a passion-led side-hustle eventually translating into a bona fide business.

When Steve Holloway and Seamus Marten started their Between Two Beers podcast, they just wanted an excuse to hang out together and talk with guests about football. Little did they know that a few years later it would be a full-time business, with several side businesses attached, and firmly at the top of the podcast charts for New Zealand.

But the two long-time friends say turning recorded conversations into a properly monetised business model hasn’t been an easy road. “It was really just an opportunity to ask questions that we never thought we could ask people in our network,” Marten says.

“It started as a niche football conversation; it was about Steven’s high school football coach, who’d lost his wife to cancer and raised four kids on his own. It was a chance for us to unpack that situation. Then another football coach that Steven had fallen out with, they hadn’t cleared the air for six or seven years. Then just, friends and family and colleagues that we knew had a story in football, and we just shone a light on it.

“There was no expectation. In the early stage if we got three pieces of good feedback, we thought yep, we’ve done a good job.”

The podcast soon expanded to include big sporting names such as Marc Ellis, then widened again to celebrities including Paul Henry, which sent listener numbers soaring.

But they still needed to find a way to turn it into a viable business, rather than a time-consuming hobby. The pair credit their previous varied career and life experience for helping them connect with guests to deliver thoughtful, often emotional interviews.

Between the two of them, they had tried professional poker playing, sports journalism, sports commentating, and event management.

“[As a journalist there was] a lot of blogging late at night, I’d cover all the Super Rugby games, a lot of weekend and early morning work,” Holloway says.

“But I figure you’ve just got to cut your path, you’ve got to do those hard years, and then got to a really cool place.”

Running their own business was all new, though. For the first three years, they barely broke even.

Now in year five, Holloway and Marten have both left their previous jobs, to go ‘all in’. They’ve managed to secure sponsors for the podcast, started a second podcast called Business In Between, have a speakers agency where previous guests can be hired for events, and will record bespoke private interviews called Reflections.

The pair say that it took a while to figure out how to ‘monetise storytelling’, but now that challenge is paying off. “In the initial stages we really had to work on our communication as we transitioned from something we did and loved, to, ‘hey actually this is our full-time commitment now’,” Marten says.

“Implementing regular Monday morning catch ups, which not only look across what we’re doing from a business perspective, but actually are also a check in on how we’re doing outside of work, has been a real revelation. We start every meeting by asking each other: 'how are you going?'.

“The answer has to be an emotion, it can’t be ‘I’m doing good’ It has to be really delving into an emotion, and I think it’s helped. It helps you understand where each other’s energy is at.

“We often talk about in business to leave your home life at home and bring your business self to business, but you can’t actually switch those sides of your personality off. So I think having that holistic understanding of each other is really important.”

The business partners also decided to reinvest as much as they could back into the business, which has paid off. They invested into a higher quality studio and video recording gear, as well as a social media marketing strategy.

“I always think New Zealand is a few years behind what is happening overseas,” Holloway says. So I was following the overseas trends, and I was seeing some big podcasts doing some really interesting things in the UK, in Australia, in America. And I was seeing the audiences move away from radio and TV, to podcasting.

“I had a lot of conversations over the years with people, around how the money hadn’t caught up yet, but it was coming. I knew if we could just get on top of that wave for when the money did come in, we’d be in a really good spot.”

Holloway admits to having moments in those first few years where he worried if the podcast, and marketing it through social media, was a waste of time.

But eventually, continuing to “give the steak some sizzle” paid off.

“When we started out, we built ourselves out on all the different social media channels that there are,” Holloway says.

“So LinkedIn, and Facebook, and YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. And for those first three or four years it often felt like a bit of a waste of time. The following was so small, that it was like 'ugh do we even bother?'.

“Now we’re to the point where they’re all growing really quite well together. You get one bit of content, it goes out on six different places at once, and they all get response and they all get engagement.

“So it kind of traces back in the same way that we built the podcast. The audience and community that we bring with us is just snowballing. If they’re your people, they’re your people. It can get such good engagement, and get a life of its own.”

Information in this column is general in nature and should not be taken as individual financial advice.

You can listen to Frances Cook's full interview about their business journey on the Making Cents podcast.