Need To Bring In More Cash? Pay Attention To What Everyone Else Is Saying About Your Hidden Talents.

Angie Raja co-founded RIMSports, which sells colorful gear for CrossFit, weight lifting and other fitness activities. It grew into a business with $3 million in annual revenue.

The e-commerce startup ran so efficiently because of Angie’s attention to detail. As the business morphed from a two-person operation to a team of 15 people, she documented the requirements of each job in Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). That made it easy for new team members to understand what “good” looked like and helped the team run smoothly.

Since then, Angie has become a fractional chief operating officer. She discovered there was untapped demand when other founders started seeking her help with operations—particularly in areas such as outsourcing and people management.

Many people are looking for new revenue and income streams, given how fast the world of work is changing and the rising cost of living. If you think creatively, as Angie did, you're probably leaving opportunities to expand your income on the table.

How do you find those opportunities? “Chances are your purpose, your passion is probably aligned to what everyone else is recognizing in you and requesting your help for,” Angie said at a livestream panel I moderated for the New York Public Library on May 12.

I joined Helena Escalante, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the New York Public Library Thomas Yoseloff Business Center, to discuss “Income Streams That Will Keep Your Business Going No Matter What” with Angie and three other founder you may recognize from my books The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business and Tiny Business, Big Money:

· Steve Ferreira, founder of Ocean Audit, which secures refunds for merchants from ocean shipping companies

· Sonsoles Gonzalez, founder of Better Not Younger, a hair care line aimed at midlife women

· Chris Meade, co-founder of backyard games company CROSSNET and The Founders Club, a networking group for young founders.

If you’re looking for new ways to add to your revenue streams, here are some takeaways. Over the next few weeks, I'll dive into each panelist's key ideas.

1. Nail your original business model first.

“Go all in” on the business you’re already running before adding a second revenue stream or additional business, Chris advises.

“Make that a good, consistent source of income and then find something that you're also good at and try to lean into that,” he says. “If you're trying to put yourself here and there to make 50 bucks here, 100 bucks there, and 200 bucks there, you're just going to burn yourself out and drive yourself crazy.”

2. Pay attention to your lived experience.

Sonsoles, a veteran of companies such as L’Oreal, launched Better Not Younger, a hair-care brand targeting midlife women, in response to frustrations she and her friends shared.

“I started by thinking about my own experience with my hair and how thin it had become and how dry it was,” she recalls. “And I put that together with my experience having run brands like Pantene and Head & Shoulders and said, ‘I can find the solution here.’”

3. Listen intently to your community.

Existing customers may already be giving you ideas for new revenue streams, as they did in Angie’s case. If you listen closely to what they're saying, you may find the ideas are arriving everyday. “Look at what you’re getting requests for,” she said.

Also, turn to social media for input. “If you start posting to LinkedIn or Instagram, you're going to immediately see what people respond to and what they don't,” Chris says. “If it goes viral, you learn what people connect to.”

4. Don’t be afraid to step out of your lane.

Steve spent many years auditing ocean freight bills in his corporate career before opening Ocean Audit. His business model is to find errors on the invoices retailers receive from ocean shippers for a big order—say 10,000 shirts sent to JCPenney. He reveals these mistakes to the retailer and then collects the the overcharges for a 50% commission.

While auditing ocean shipments for clients, Steve realized he could apply his skills to trucking and warehouse shipments, too. He decided to roll out this option with a select group of clients. And thanks to that opportunity, he qualified for the Inc. 5000.

“I’ve been able to create multiple revenue streams in different modalities of logistics I never considered, or where I kind of bit my tongue because I didn’t want to go outside of my lane until I was super satisfied I could serve clients in those niches,” he said.

Regroup frequently. While trying out new ideas is important, sometimes you have to pull the plug on these experiments.

At one point, for instance, Chris began renting out 5,000 square feet of vacantn space in CROSSNET’s 15,000-square-foot warehouse.

"What ended up happening was just nonstop complaints,” he said. “It was just so much focus and attention away from the products that were making us money in the business."

He stopped renting out the space. “Not every business is a good business,” said Chris. “But at least I could say, ‘Hey, I tried. I did it.’ And I don't have in the back of my head, ‘What could have been?’ I did it.”

In the meantime, CROSSNET has continued to grow and his networking organization The Founders Club has taken off. The club is now receiving 250 applications a week. “It’s because people are so interested in entrepreneurship right now and see it as the future,” he says.

If you'd like to make entrepreneurship part of your future, I'm going to throw down a challenge: Ask yourself what other people are already asking you do for them—whether at work or in your personal life.

Even if you can't say “yes” to their requests because of a practical consideration, ask yourself if you could do so in the future. With timing on your side, could the idea work?

That could be the seeds of your next revenue stream.