The first money I made outside my job

Read time: 4 minutes

Before the business, before the products, before any of what I write about now, there was one number that changed how I saw everything: £8,600.

It was the first money I ever earned outside my salary, from consulting work I did alongside my full-time job. And I want to tell you about it, because the amount was never the point. The proof was.

Where it came from

I did not invent anything to earn it. I used the same skills my employer was already paying me for, and offered them to someone else who needed them. That is the whole story of how it started. No website, no brand, no following. A skill, offered directly, to a person with a problem.

The work itself was the same kind of thinking I did at my desk every day. The only new part was that my name, not my employer's, was on the contract.

For years I had assumed that money outside a job required something special: an idea, an invention, a talent I did not have. The consulting work quietly proved the opposite. The market already valued what I could do. I had just never asked it.

I remember the strange feeling of the first payment arriving. Not joy, exactly. More like surprise, followed by a question that would not leave: if this was possible all along, what else is?

What the money actually bought

Not much, in materials. What it really bought was a change in my mindset, in three parts.

1. Proof that my income did not have to come from one place. Until you have earned even £1 outside your salary, "extra income" is a theory or motivation. After it, it is a fact about your own life. Nobody can argue against a fact.

2. Proof that my day-job skills had a market price. The salary tells you what your employer pays for your time. It does not tell you what your skills are actually worth. Those are different numbers, and finding the second one changes how you carry yourself in the first.

3. The confidence to try something bigger or different. The e-commerce business I later built, the one that passed £500k in the 12 months after launch, was started by a person who already knew he could earn outside a job. That person was easier to convince than the one before the £8,600. Confidence comes after evidence, not before it.

The honest parts

It was not passive, and it was not easy. Consulting is selling your hours, so every £1 cost me evenings and focus, on top of a full job and family. And it did not scale: more money meant more of my time, and my time was already the thing I had least of.

Some weeks the consulting hours and the job hours together left very little energy for anything else. That trade is fine for a few months. It is not a life plan, and I knew it.

That is exactly why I did not stay a consultant. But as a first step, it was close to perfect: no money at risk, fast to start, and it paid me in proof at the moment I needed proof more than profit.

Why I am telling you this

Because many of you are one offer away from your own version of this number. Not £8,600. Maybe £200 or £2,000. A design for a neighbour. A booking page for a local shop. An hour of advice in the thing you do all day at work. The size does not matter. The first money that arrives without your employer's name on it will teach you more about what is possible than months of reading, this newsletter included.

And notice where it came from: not from a brilliant idea, but from skills a job had already built. If you have been employed for years, you are not starting from zero. You are starting with skills someone has already paid for. You do not need permission, an audience, or a company name. You need one offer.

The point is not the number. The point is the order, and proof is the first thing worth building.

Before you go: the UK Budget

The Autumn Budget was delivered on Wednesday 28 October. For those living and working in the UK, I have put everything that changed for employed professionals and for second incomes in one place in an article, with the figures as they now stand and nothing else: UK Budget 2026 in plain English: What it means for your salary, your side income and your plans.

This week

Write down one skill of yours that someone, somewhere, already pays for. Then write the name of one person or one place that might pay you for it. You do not have to act on it tonight. But once those two lines exist on paper, the idea stops being a theory, and theories are much easier to postpone than plans.

Most people can write the skill line in one minute and then stare at the second line. Stay with it. The second line is the whole exercise.

Go deeper: The first £8,600 I earned outside my salary, and what it actually proved

Coming next Monday

A conference invited me to speak and my manager never said no, kind of. Nobody had to. Next week, the silent way your manager might be holding you back, and the one fix they cannot block.

See you then.

Izhar