13/04/2026
I have fond memories of my mother making her own soap for our family when I was a little child. Mum was big on self-sufficiency, she grew our vegetables, raised rabbits and chickens for meat, baked our bread from scratch, and sewed our clothes herself. She instilled in me a very permaculture attitude from the cradle.
One day - maybe 15 years ago - I was reading a copy of Grass Roots magazine, and came across a recipe for making your own soap using vegetable oils and caustic soda. I was interested. All those memories of watching my mother make soap came back to me, and I wanted to give it a try. But of course, in my natural style, I wanted to take it up a notch. I wanted to make Goat’s Milk Soap. I experimented, and discovered that the temperature of the milk is a very critical factor! Too hot, and the discolouring of the milk spoils the end result. Too cold, and you don’t get good saponification. I finally found the sweet spot, and began making soap for my family. I had a great orange tree at the time, and got the idea of drying out the orange peels and shredding them to create a gentle exfoliant in the soap, which also added a wonderful citrus fragrance.
Around about the same time, a friend of mine owned a shop in town, and sold a range of goat’s milk soap. I saw what people were willing to pay, and my entrepreneurial head kicked into gear. I really loved the process of making soap, it gave me a lot of personal fulfillment and enjoyment. What if I could get paid to do this every day? It was very different to the business I was running at the time as a bookkeeper, but perhaps this could be a side-hustle that would be my creative outlet?
I sat down and ran the numbers. It would cost this, I could sell it for that, and I would need to sell this many every month to generate enough of a profit to make it worthwhile. Is that feasible? Actually, yes it could be.
I created a label and some clever brown paper packaging with a real red wax seal that had a cute picture of a goat’s head. I expanded the range, and put a small supply into a shop on consignment. They all sold - eventually. I needed to make some tweaks, and it was a commitment to keep on top of the production schedule. Soap takes a minimum of 1 month to cure, so the impact of any changes to the recipe would not be known until a month later when it was time to pack them up. My kids were very clean around that time - lots of product quality control going on!
In the end, I did not pursue this as a business, even a side-hustle alongside my other work. I needed to give all my focus to one thing, and the calling to take on coaching was stronger. This experience will always remain in my heart as an experience I thoroughly enjoyed. It taught me very valuable lessons that went beyond the theoretical number-crunching of testing a business idea’s viability.
A few years later, my 11 year old daughter decided she wanted to run a business. She chose to make her own range of soap. She learned my recipe (just without the goat’s milk soap) and designed her own label “Suds Saver” and sold a few batches in a local gift shop. I’m sure that you can imagine how much of a proud mum I was. It was a short-lived exercise for her, and that’s ok too.
It is a wonderful opportunity to take something that you love doing, and design a way to get paid to do it. Yes it does require a considerable investment of time, money, resources, and energy, and look at what you could achieve. It could be amazing.
And so this is why I offer a workshop every month that explores the idea - How to turn your hobby into a profitable side-hustle. If there is something that you do, that brings you fulfillment and enjoyment, and there could be an opportunity to get paid to do it - wouldn’t you like to see what that could be like?
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