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More and more, I seem to be coming across friends and contacts who dabble in other jobs in their spare time. Some have thriving side businesses doing consulting in similar to their day jobs. For others, it’s broadening their hobby into a small, but fulfilling cottage business. I like to call this phenomenon dabbling. Dabbling doesn’t have to come in the form of doing formal IT consultative work. Far from it. Dabbling could simply be a stay-at-home mum deciding to use her foreign language skills to help out local businesses operating in international markets or a student starting a crafting business from their bedroom. Dabbling comes in all shapes and sizes, and in every Hush Puppy flavour you can imagine.

Economic experts tell us that the demands of the modern working world mean there’s no automatic job for life (ignoring civil servants here, as they live in an alternate universe). They say that we’ll change job every couple of years. And they’re right, but aren’t we dabbling more in side projects? Hell, almost every big-name technology giant you can muster up started in someone’s back room or garage as a dabble. This is not to say that dabbling will end up founding a Google, rather, that there is potential in every seed to build out fulfilling businesses where you call the shots.

Dabbling is great for the indigenous Irish business scene and the creativity engine that drives it, but are there ways that we can improve the environs to seed more dabbling by the populace?

Providing easier roads to capital: Some time back Elly blogged how she contributed a loan of $25 in a scheme organised by Kiva to help entrepreneurs in developing countries. Now, I’m not advocating we set up local loan shark organisations to loan out to small businesses and then shake them down, but there it wouldn’t be nice to see local people contribute and investing in businesses near them? Perhaps through a scheme operated under the umbrella of their local Credit Union. Of course, ways to prevent cronyism and neighbourly oneupmanship would need to be put in place.

Being flexible with networking time: On the tech scene I see Open Coffee Clubs happening every week up and down the country, wouldn’t it be nice if dabblers could use that idea too? It could be called the Open Dabblers Club! Instead, of having networking meets in work hours, perhaps a Thursday or Friday evening would suit. Yeah, it’s time away from the dabble, but it could make good business sense, if the right connections get made or business gets done. People could the chat about their work, look for advice and sell their product to others. I think the more flexible and unstructured these networking meets can be, the better. Dabblers have too many demands on their time already, with work and family, so keeping it flexible is mandatory. Perhaps, even the local County Enterprise Boards could host some, get some speakers to talk and provide some teas and coffees. Just tea, mind, no booze, else it might attract opportunistic freeloaders instead of opportunistic entrepreneurs.

Open attitudes are vital to helping dabblers taking that first step from hobby to business. It would be nice to see big government take an interest in fostering that spirit of enterpreneurship. Taking to the nth degree, the next generation could get firsthand knowledge into the inner workings of business DIY by witnessing dabbles piloted by their parents. Lessons learned in the home are always more strongly reinforced than limp attempts by the secondary educational system to implant business know-how in grey vocational programmes.

There’s no doubt that dabbling can be big, but are we ready? So, what do you think? Are you a dabbler?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 10:34 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.