Side Hustle to Full-Time: Less Hustle, More Muscle

I’ve been freelancing since 1996 - the first few years as a side hustle, taking on extra projects in the evenings while I worked at a digital agency. I made the jump to full-time eventually, but not before running the numbers properly. I needed to know I wasn’t kidding myself.

Tracking my hours was always part of that - not because clients required it, but because I needed the data.

The $62.50 Reality Check

You quote a website at $2,000. Twenty hours at $100/hour seems fair.

But then, one hour for the meeting, three hours research, 22 hours actual work (scope creep), four hours revisions and calls, two hours delivery.

That’s 32 hours. $62.50 per hour.

You repeat this on every project because you’re pricing based on optimism instead of reality. You forget to log the phone calls that turn into strategy sessions. The email chains. The WhatsApp messages where you’re delivering expertise. Research, troubleshooting, file prep, client training - all given away free because it doesn’t feel like “real work.”

Two hours researching typography and sketching concepts? You log 30 minutes because it felt like playing. Every hour you quietly minimise is money you’re not charging for.

Just a Minute

Every time you finish a task and move on to the next thing, log what you just did. Thirty seconds, maybe a minute. Do it every day and it becomes muscle memory - you stop thinking about it and just do it.

Give it a month. The guesswork disappears. That “bit of design on the side” becomes something you can actually quantify - and you’ll almost certainly discover you’ve been seriously undercharging.

And when the numbers show you earned $2,400 last month on 15 hours a week, the maths for going full-time stops being scary. You know you can make it work.

Less hustle, more muscle.

Steve Leggat has been freelancing in design and web development since 1996, starting as a side-hustler while working at a digital agency. He runs Front&Back, a solo design company in Auckland, and created TallyHo specifically for freelancers like him that favoured simplicity over bells and whistles.