Most side hustles keep you broke, according to Jaspreet Singh from the Minority Mindset YouTube channel. As Singh puts it, the problem isn’t that you’re trying to build a side hustle, it’s when you work on several at once hoping one (or more) will eventually pay off.

I Make Up To $9K a Month Taking Side Jobs on TaskRabbit: 4 Tips for Making the Most as a Tasker
Learn: 3 Ways To Recession-Proof Your Retirement

According to an October 2023 study by ResumeNow, 87% of respondents had to take on at least one side job within the last six months for financial reasons, and 32% of those had taken on multiple jobs at once.

Taking on multiple side hustles to see what sticks is tempting for many, but Singh recommends focusing on one thing at a time. “If you’re trying to do everything, you can’t do anything,” he said.

That might mean you have to risk turning away money, business or good business ideas that could be worth a lot of money. That may sound counterintuitive, but Singh said that if you really want to build something and scale, you have to focus on one project and ignore the others.

This doesn’t mean you have to ignore your other business ideas forever. Your one successful side hustle could fund your lifestyle and possibly fund your future business ideas, or it could allow you to buy other businesses that are doing what you want to do.

Further, once you convert the one side hustle into a business, Singh suggested that you can expand from there. When Singh built the Minority Mindset brand, it allowed him to build several other businesses out of his brand. These businesses operate separately underneath his brand, but they offer interrelated products and services that can help support one another. Yet he noted that if he hadn’t started with just one idea, he wouldn’t have been able to expand and fund other business opportunities.

To make this happen for yourself, Singh suggested that you take a couple of steps back and focus on one side hustle. Once you know exactly what you’re working on, you must reinvest in knowledge so that you can scale your business to at least $1 million per year.

Story continues

“You don’t want to start creating different operations and different things until you can at least scale it to a million dollars a year,” Singh said. “Otherwise, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot and you’re diversifying way too fast.” Learn how to sell, market, build new products and improve infrastructure by watching YouTube videos, reading books or taking classes so that you can create better products, have more customers and eventually scale.

Graham Stephan: 4 Steps To Jump From Middle Class to Wealthy

Once you reach that point, you can ask yourself whether you want to continue investing back into your own company and scale your revenue or diversify into another operation. Put yourself in the environment where you’re thinking about business ideas, Singh suggested, and look for problems around you that you can solve and then work to solve them.

More From GOBankingRates

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Jaspreet Singh Says Most Side Hustles Keep You Broke — Do This Instead