Turning What You Love to Do Into a Business

Searching for a new way to use our knowledge, we began teaching video-game-development workshops for K-12 students, and that turned on the light bulb for me. People talk about the joy of learning, but I didn’t expect the absolute thrill that comes with sharing what you’ve learned and seeing students latch onto those concepts with as much excitement as you feel. I’d been personally discovering my passion for mushrooms during that time, and I was just so taken by the whole experience of growing them that I wanted to share that with people.

So, I created science kits for homeschooling families to dive into mushroom growing. The first kits came in a zip-close bag with a single page of instructions and a tiny label printed off my desktop printer.

At the time, we’d been living in a cabin at a former girl-scout camp for a few months while house hunting. I was very pregnant, weary of trying to find our “spot” in the world, both in terms of hearth and home, and seeking the next steps for our creative work.

I wasn’t thinking of the science kits as my next big career move – I’d just wanted to share what I was excited about with other families.

Building a Life of Sharing Knowledge

On a gray October afternoon, I posted my science kits on a few Facebook homeschool-curriculum groups from my phone while my kids played at the park. I didn’t think much about it until we got back to the cabin and I opened my laptop to find hundreds of comments and orders from families all over the country. I went into labor a few hours later. It was all very surreal, and the next day, I sat snuggled up in our sunlight-flooded cabin with a new baby and a new vision for building a life of sharing knowledge.

Our little cabin was nearly bursting at the seams with our kit-packing and shipping efforts, and our house hunting had dragged on. Right when winter and claustrophobia began to set in, our friend let us know they had the perfect place available for us: a house with lots of space for juggling kids and a business tucked back in the woods on a farm, just 2 miles from my parents’ farm in the town I grew up in.

I began getting letters from parents all over the place who wanted mushroom kits so they could grow enough to feed their families, not just as a science experiment. So, we made a collection of gourmet-mushroom-growing kits to teach people to grow them from the ground up, instead of the standard box kits where you spray the spores with water, the mushrooms grow, and then it’s over and you’re not sure how to replicate it. The kits took off like wildfire.

I’m fortunate to have a spouse who supports my work. I’m not sure how we’d have gotten here without his creative skills in tandem with his ability to encourage people, keep everything moving during holiday rushes, curate awesome events, and organize operations.

Now, our products are in 325 shops, I’ve had the honor of speaking and teaching workshops all over the country, and we’re working with multiple universities to create mushroom-growing classes within their agriculture, sustainability, and research programs. We’re working with programs in food-impoverished areas to help people feed their families and establish microbusinesses. We’re juggling raising our kids and building our lives together, and we’re getting better at coming out of our shells and being more in community with our neighbors. We’re learning from mistakes and celebrating successes. It takes so much grit, determination, learning on our toes, and a lot of sacrifice to get to this point, but we’ve made an independent life, and we’re doing it as a family to the beat of our own drum.

How to Start a Hobby Business

If you’re feeling the call of the wild and want to begin exploring what it would look like to carve out your own path, to seek independence within interdependence, and to create a life supported by your passion, here’s my advice.

Identify Your Passions and Strength

Too many people try to start businesses based on what they think everyone else wants. Start with writing out two lists. The first will consist of topics you love discussing or have a lot of knowledge in and get really excited about. The second will be your strengths: things you’re good at, whether naturally or learned.

Start Where You Are

You don’t need to quit your job and buy a farm and every goat, cow, chicken, pig, and plant in existence to start building your dream. Just having them without that knowledge or a plan is actually an incredibly expensive experiment. If you’ve already got some (or all) of that, fantastic, but you can just as well take the first steps in a tiny apartment in the heart
of a city.

Get Really Good at One Thing First

Figure out one subject that would make you happier than anything else to know, and then learn everything you possibly can about it. Study. Watch all the movies. Try a bunch of related projects. Get to know that subject so well that you could teach it in your sleep. And then keep studying.

I’m interested in a wide range of topics, but I specialize in a few, and that specialization allows me to be excellent at what I do and to provide the best support possible to my customers. I still branch out on various projects, but by keeping the fungi kingdom as my primary focus, I’m able to manage my time and resources better and be precise in my planning. Because all of my products fit under this umbrella, when we add new products, we generally don’t need to buy a bunch of new equipment or set up another production space.

If You Can Read It, You Can Do It

I’m a rabid bookworm, as is Elijah. We were primarily in competition with each other when we first met, but we both love reading so much that we couldn’t stop sharing books – and that’s what ultimately brought us together. Most of my knowledge comes from reading, and our business wouldn’t be where it is if we didn’t read the way we do.

I used to eschew e-books because I prefer print books, but not all books are available in print. There’s a whole world of audiobooks that can’t be found in print. I’d been missing out on some of the most useful books. So now, in addition to traditional books, I carry around an e-reader with a few hundred books on it at any given time. It also makes travel a bit easier.

You Don’t Have to Quit Your Day Job

Build your business to a point of strength before you cut loose your income stream from your day job. If you have substantial savings and a strong business plan, you might be willing to take the risk, but you can smother your new business if you’re leaning on it too heavily for income before it’s off the ground.

Set a realistic goal of what you’ll need to be bringing in financially to leave your job. Figure out if you’ll need more space to scale your business to a point of being profitable, and find out how much you’ll actually need to support that growth. Then, work with the space you have and keep your overhead low while you establish a strong base for your business. Wait as long as you possibly can before paying to add more space.

Connect with Your Community

It’s great to have the right set of skills and preparation for any situation, but to really thrive, you’ll need your home team.

I’m lucky to live in a town with a lot of people with shared interests in farming, homesteading, gardening, and working with the land, but until someone set up a Facebook group, we were all pretty disconnected. All of a sudden, we found each other!

It’s been incredibly cool to see the friendships and businesses that have come out of that, and even grassroots community efforts to protect and preserve agricultural land. We’ve developed a really amazing support system, and it’s made me love this town more than ever. I used to wait for the right people to just stumble into my life, but now I proactively try to build relationships with folks who are working hard to build their dreams and give back to their communities.

Write Out Your Short-, Medium-, and Long-term Goals

When you’re building your dreams, it can be hard to keep track of where you are in the grand scheme of your goals. If you don’t realize you’re reaching your goals and passing key milestones, you’ll miss the opportunity to celebrate those wins. Keep team morale up by being able to mark and celebrate progress.

When you’re defining your goals, scale them to what makes sense for you. If you’re a new business, that might mean six-month, one-year, and five-year goals; if you’ve been established longer, it might look like one-year, five-year, and 10-year goals. Keep them where you can refer back to them often to keep your efforts aligned with your goals.

Find Your Balance

While growth is exciting and rewarding, set some limits in place so your family has some balance to recharge. Frequently, when you own a business, it’s easy to let home and business blur together. Make space for time that’s only about family with no business distractions.

Balance also varies depending on the ages in your household. This can look like having set “phone off” hours, eating dinner at the table together every evening, or taking a walk together as a family a few times a week. Shut off your work brain and see how your people are doing, count your blessings together, and talk about your dreams.

Originally published as “Cultivating Independence” in the September/October 2024 issue of GRIT magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.

Erin Hamilton is the founder of The Mushroom Conservatory, nestled in the rural heart of Howell, Michigan, where she resides with her husband and creative co-pilot, Elijah, and their lively brood of children.