Are you looking for ways to make money from health and safety? Are you tired of your 9 to 5 job? Are you looking for a new challenge that is more fulfilling and rewarding? Do you want to make the best out of your safety qualifications? In this post, I will be introducing to you safety entrepreneurship, the reason I could easily quit my 9 to 5 job. I will share some of the ways I am using to make money from health and safety as an entrepreneur, the one important skill that is self-taught and only developed by taking action.

The Road to Financial Freedom

The fact is that, if you truly want to gain financial freedom, you ought to run your own businesses, given that there would never be a rich employee, since employers do not make rich employees except the CEOs; the farthest an employee can get is to become comfortable and complacent, and eventually lose it all when the employment contract comes to an end or position is made redundant. Being comfortable is just not enough if you need financial freedom. You can only gain true freedom when you grow a successful business. Don’t take it from me, check the world richest men on Forbes; from Jeff Benzos, the CEO & Founder of Amazon; Elon Musk, CEO & Co-founder of Tesla; Bill Gate, Co-founder of Microsoft to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO & Co-founder of Facebook. These are people who chose to put their destiny into their own hands and founded a business, the risk not many are willing take because of fear of losing an income or failing a business.

Safety Job vs. Safety Entrepreneurship

I began my journey, obsessed with health and safety jobs. I believed safety jobs would make a difference in my life, given the scarcity of safety professionals in my part of the world. At least from my basic economics, if demand for labour outstripped supply, employers should be willing to pay higher salaries for safety professionals. Unfortunately, that is not the case; salary for a safety job is a function of how an organization values health and safety. So, the sad reality is that, health and safety is not a priority for most employers in my part of the world. Many safety professionals are still yet to decode the myth about the prospects of safety jobs. That notwithstanding, I have been lucky to experience a bit of the goodies, after pursuing higher learning, plying a good tangent to hit a few multinational jobs and gotten paid a few good salaries, at least from my 6th to 10th year of my working life. I guess I didn’t waste time pursuing the best safety qualifications (NEBOSH International General Certificate, NEBOSH Technical Certificate in Oil and Gas Operational Safety and NEBOSH International Diploma in Occupational Health and Safety) to augment my career in the oil and gas industry; these have indeed been the game changer for me. But soon my projects came to an end and I found myself in between jobs. That was when I found solace in entrepreneurship and decided to never look back.

Since changing my mindset to safety entrepreneurship, I naturally look for ways to make money from every opportunity. And I have found that the opportunities to make money are all enshrined in the lapses and the gaps in the health and safety value chain, and finding solutions to them could easily plunge one into business without even realizing it. With a myriad of opportunities staring at me in the face, I am compelled to focus on developing the relevant skills to combine with my health and safety knowledge and experience to offer solutions to fix the problems that exist. Entrepreneurship was a subtle part of me but now dominant more than ever, ever since I changed my mindset from looking for jobs to looking for problems and solutions. I now own a few start ups that are currently competing for my effort and energy, so I decided to quit my 9 to 5 job due to a toxic workplace to focus on how to scale my businesses, after I started making some decent multiple streams of income by just working from my laptop.

Ways to Make Money from Health and Safety

Based on my 10 years of experience as a safety professional, I am elated to share some of the ways I am using to make money from health and safety including what other folks are doing, so that you can do same, especially all those who complain that there are no jobs. The good news is that, you don’t have to necessarily have safety qualifications to make money from health and safety, since the idea is not to look for jobs but to run your own businesses. So yes, you don’t need safety qualifications at all and here is why; when I started my journey pursuing safety qualifications for a safety job, there was one entrepreneur who offered tuition for NEBOSH qualifications. He never took any of the courses himself nor aspired to become a safety professional. He simply found our problem and offered us solution and that was how he started as a Tuition Provider, did so well until he collapsed it himself – a topic for another day.

Here are some of the ways you can make money from heath and safety. But there is the spoiler alert; each one of them requires relevant skill, patience, discipline and real hard work, just like every successful business. Check out my posts on developing high income skills that guarantee growth and wealth in the health and safety value chain and some 40 health and safety business ideas to start as an entrepreneur to give you some more insight.

Blogging

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to start a side hustle, often as a hobby by creating valuable content around your lifestyle, safety topics, workplace experiences, safety news, expert opinions among others to build an audience. This is a competitive niche because of the easy entry, so a lot of people are in this space. To thrive, you need to ensure originality and real value in your content, be consistent and make sure your content and pages are SEO friendly and rich in relevant keywords for your niche to generate organic traffic. The good news is that everybody can have an audience. A great way to monetize blogging is through Google Adsense or Negotiated Ads, where companies or individuals bring their request to advertise on your website. You can also integrate affiliate links to earn a commission when someone clicks on a link and makes a purchase on the affiliate site. Lastly, you can create a digital product like an e-book and sell on your shop page. Blogging is always a good starting point for greater things to come your way. Now, to give you a gist of how much I make from Google Adsense; my monthly traffic as of April 2021 was just about 1,900 and I made an average of $70 per month. Now, my current traffic is skyrocketing, and I cash out about $150 every month, thus after meeting the payout threshold of $100, for literally doing nothing. This type of revenue grows as your website traffic increases with time. I just created Mina Safeti with affiliate links from SHEQXEL for my wife to go online with her safety knowledge and skill, and earn affiliate commission from every purchase of the products on SHEQXEL. Get in touch if you need one.

Freelance Tutoring

Many Tuition Providers need support from Approved Tutors to scale their business. To explore this niche, for example as a NEBOSH Tutor, you first need to have a minimum of the qualification you intend to train or a higher qualification, have a proven track record of industry experience, be a member of a professional body (not always the case) and apply to NEBOSH through an Accredited Tuition Provider to get approved. Note that, NEBOSH does not approve individuals as they wish to ensure a balanced tutorial team for Tuition Providers to ensure effectiveness of tuition and to also ensure they can hold them accountable as part of quality control to protect the interest of students. The way to scale as a freelancer is to get approved through a number of tuition providers, at least 3 good ones in order to be consistent with training gigs which usually spans from 10 days or 4 weekends for classroom sessions. In this niche, you can be lucky to carry out two training gigs in a month, so scaling can only mean, getting training opportunities every month from any of the Tuition Providers. If you have NEBOSH IGC or Diploma, take advantage of this niche to make some extra bucks for your hard earned qualifications.

Become a Tuition Provider

After becoming a Freelance Tutor, the next big step is to become a Tuition Provider for a wide range of safety and environmental qualifications including industry specific training programs for safety professionals and organizations at large. Yes, as an individual, you can become a Tuition Provider and to thrive in this niche, you will need accreditation from the examining or professional body of the qualifications you intend to provide such as NEBOSH, IOSH, IEMA, IRCA, PECB and others. This area is quite capital intensive as the accreditation fees are renewable every year hence very important for players to be aggressive with their marketing strategies in order to recoup their investments. Players would also need a team of Approved Tutors to be part of their tutorial team to train and prepare students for their exams. There is a massive barrier to entry in this niche hence quite easy for players to establish a monopoly in their countries with the right competitive advantage. There is a lot of competition from global players as well who offer e-learning platforms to a wider audience. Those who venture into this niche must be prepared to compete globally by following best practices while building a good brand to gain a sizable market share in their country. Players must be prepared to embark on a long journey with students by upholding the highest standard of integrity, given that a lot of fakes tuition providers with no accreditation easily spring up to jeopardize the dreams of students.

Create Some Working Templates

This is my favorite niche, since in our working lives, we find better ways of doing things. Working templates can range from Word documents to PowerPoint slides to Excel templates. Chances are that we would develop a template at some point to solve a unique workplace problem to make our work easier. That solution can become a product. To flourish in this niche, you have to make sure your templates are originally from you and universally applicable to all workplaces and then leverage some global platforms to reach a wider target market after identifying your customer avatar.  A customer avatar is your ideal customer with the exact problem you are trying to solve and needs your solution. Over my working life, I have come across a lot of templates, not all are great. It takes a deeper insight into health and safety to critically develop, review and continually improve a template to consistently meet acceptable standard for loyal patrons. In this niche, users are the judge of your work. If one person buys it and is happy with it, chances are that a lot would love it. All you need to do is to test the market with your templates, and you would be in business before you know it. For me, every solution I develop is an opportunity to sell on the market either on Etsy, Eloquens or my own website.

Become an HSE Consultant

This is another great area for those with great health and safety experience and qualifications. Having spent years of building and implementing safety, health, environment and quality management systems and having understood the key elements of management systems, mother and daughter policies relevant to drive QHSE goals and objectives, relevant generic and specific procedures to be kept as documented information in terms of working documents and records, among other processes for controlling work, monitoring workplaces, carrying out an audit, tracking actions, facilitating management reviews, and understanding the nature of various types of hazards and risks and workplace controls and the issue of  human behavior or safety psychology and culture, you are already ripe to consult for companies. Draft your proposal and reach out to small businesses to support them to meet their health and safety obligations and act as a support function to them. In this niche, you can team up with other professionals like environmentalists to deliver value to your client. Occasionally, I get such support gigs from old school mates who are challenging themselves to grow their businesses hence need help to meet the health and safety requirements of project Invitation to Tender (ITT).

Create Websites for Businesses in Safety

The age of information and the dawn of the 4th industrial revolution has brought an upsurge in demand for websites by businesses in order to be found online on search engines to benefit from all the goodies of owning a website. Owning website today is like buying a piece of land, you can do whatever you want on it to make it a performing asset, thus a website that generates revenue. Being a safety professional and having the skill to create websites for people within the health and safety niche brings a lot of value to prospective clients. You can better understand their health and safety needs and advise on the right theme that fits their business model. In this niche, you can create opportunity for people to start their online businesses by creating personal blog sites, corporate websites, e-learning platforms, news platforms, e-commerce websites, among others to support the growing demand for websites in this current age of information and digitization. I have created 6 websites and I run them myself. I am very happy to support anyone who wishes to own a website for their side hustle.

Create an Online Course on Udemy

Again, the 4th industrial revolution has heralded a new age of self-education. The teaching landscape is gradually evolving from the conventional classroom mode where students enroll to learn archaic information to now a self-education industry where people learn outside of classroom on self-paced e-learning platforms. According to Research and Markets,  the e-learning market will climb to $325 billion by 2025 from the $107 billion in 2015 as earlier projected by Forbes. The world is changing very fast with new information everyday and people who are able to access new information, try and test solutions are able to make strides. The e-learning industry provides an opportunity for experts in the fast changing world to share their knowledge, solutions, hobbies or anything of value on a self-paced learning platform such as Udemy. There are a good number of safety professionals who are thriving in the self-education industry by selling their expertise from how to carry out risk assessment to how to pass NEBOSH exam on Udemy. In the self-education industry, you can literally teach anything you are an expert in to impact the lives of people. I am particularly obsessed with this niche and I hope to develop the skills for creating online courses on Udemy as my first digital informational products to complement my digital downloads.

Create a Marketplace for Safety Vendors

Safety is a niche market with a lot of barriers to entry, so the few vendors who are able to break in have the advantage of thriving in the niche market to offer their goods and services to the many potential buyers who may hitherto find it difficult to find vendors with the best health and safety products and services, simply because they don’t know where to find the vendors. Congregating vendors in a marketplace is a great solution as it makes it very easy for buyers to find them. Given the physical nature of most safety businesses, a marketplace can easily thrive within the bounds of a single geographical location such as a country. So, it’s very economical to have one marketplace dedicated to your country for health and safety products rather than to focus on the global market and compete globally with the global giants such as Amazon FBA, Ali-express and the like. Also, in terms of digital products like digital downloads and informational products, the few multivendor marketplaces are Etsy, Eloquens and Udemy, and these are global giants, so if you wish to create a marketplace for digital products, be prepared to compete with the global brands. I would strongly recommend your marketplace for physical products to focus on your country, thus an achievable goal.

Create a YouTube Channel

YouTube is the biggest platform to host of all types of video content and the 2nd largest search engine after Google. The interesting thing is Google owns YouTube, so it’s quite a no brainer that it is the second largest search engine. It is an increasing trend that people prefer to watch videos to learn new information than reading.  This presents a great opportunity for safety professionals to create video content on relevant health and safety topics for attention and to grow their audience. Owning a YouTube channel is like having your own TV station. With the right content based on relevant keywords and search volume on YouTube, you can expect to gain a lot of subscribers and grow your watch-time for monetization. Apart from that you can create attention to supercharge your sales from your own websites or affiliate business. However, just take note, it takes time to grow an audience in the safety niche unlike other channels in the “make money online” or entertainment niches unless you really have very engaging content like “how to videos” or tutorial videos, lifestyle content such as a day in life of safety professional, and very informative content. To monetize your channel, you need to achieve 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch-time in a year. You can also advertise your own products or affiliate products to earn commission while delivering value to your audience. The good thing about YouTube is that you only have to put in the work just once and get to benefit from views overtime as the YouTube algorithms kick in to refer your videos to similar audiences in your niche.

Create a Membership Forum

Given the fact that health and safety is a technical profession with exclusive knowledge which can be hard to find sometimes, membership forums offer a great opportunity for sharing and learning to clear up health and safety concerns, questions and answers. Depending on the state of health and safety in your country, you can create paid or free membership forums to support upcoming safety professionals to gain access to exclusive resources and information to make their career life easier for them. Membership forums can often be complementary to Professional Associations or Certification Bodies for Safety Professionals where members in good standing can have access and ask questions in the forum. This can easily apply to any website that provides health and safety information such as a professional news or blogging site, where there is a paid membership for users to ask questions and get their questions answered by a group of safety professionals. If you go on the free membership tangent, it means you want to quickly grow your traffic and make money from Good Adsense, thus allowing google to show ads to your members, and also affiliate marketing eg. from Amazon Associate.

Create a Professional Association

Depending on the country you are in and the nature of OSH challenges you face as a country, you can quickly create a Professional Association to support members to improve upon their health and safety career and be part of a community that shares common ideals, goals and values. Due to the emergence of digitization, it is now easier to create WhatsApp Groups or Telegram Groups dedicated to health and safety to bring together safety professionals for the purpose of networking, sharing and learning. A great way to make money from a Professional Association is to get it established as a not-for-profit organization to have the identity to plan for safety conferences free for members and premium for non-members and get sponsorships for the events in exchange for advertisement slot for the event. This is area safety professionals easily ignore and leave for people who are not safety professionals, because safety folks are only focused on getting a job.

Create a Certification Body for Safety Professionals

This is an area that I find very interesting. Every country deserves to have its own Certification Body for certifying safety professionals as a way of improving local standards for the people who give health and safety advise and help to save lives on the job. Most countries have not perfected their national OSH system. As a result, they lag behind with bodies like this. Inasmuch as we have the likes of BCSP, IOSH, BCRSP, IIRSM, IEMA etc., which are worth pursuing as an independent certification body of competence, it is important that local certification bodies are developed to the acceptable standard to enable them to have reciprocal agreements with the international bodies to improve both local and international standards. Certification Bodies for the safety profession are driven by industry not the government, so I always dismiss excuses from safety folks who just attribute every lapse to the government for the lack of legal framework for occupational health and safety. A group of professionals can pursue this niche, become the founding members and deliver value in exchange for yearly subscription from an increasing member like what the aforementioned are doing.

Join our Affiliate Program

If you search all over the internet, you will hardily find an affiliate program dedicated to the health and safety value chain. Now, the great news is SHEQXEL Affiliate Program is finally here to partner all happy users who are already telling their friends about our great products and want to take it to the next level. They can now join our fully automated affiliate program to market our products by simply generating and sharing referral links of any favorite products, blog posts or content of their choice and once a sale is made on any products within 30 days, a 30% commission is earned.

In this age of digitization and Internet of things (IoTs), Affiliate Marketing has become a huge business model where popular brands such as Amazon, Click Bank, GoDaddy, and most online businesses partner with affiliates to make money online by simply sharing referral links.

If you are wondering what is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is an online marketing model that allows affiliates to simply share referral links of any online product they love and find useful to their audience and earn a commission from every sale. 💸

The good thing is everything happens online – no physical engagement like the old referral system. So all you need is to  👉 Join our Affiliate Program, create your referral links from our sites, share the links with your audience, and the links get tracked over a 30-day period within which if any potential customer makes a purchase of any products in our store, a 30% commission is earned. So, we literally share our sales with you.

The interesting thing is it doesn’t even matter what referral link you share. If a person first visits with your link, any products he or she buys over 30 days will earn you a commission. So, one click can easily earn you commissions on multiple products as long as we keep converting the potentials buyers with our great products or the customer keeps coming back within the 30 days.

Our products are digital products and have received approx. 6,215 downloads on our own site; 1,400 downloads on Eloquens and 287 downloads on Etsy! They are no doubts the winning products for affiliate marketing in health and safety.

Conclusion

Rome was not built in a day, so it’s better to start small, set your goals, set achievable targets and work on the process every day. My goal is to earn multiple streams of income. Even though, I lost an income from quitting my job, I still believe I can do more solving problems and creating value.

So here is my list of side hustles which have become my full hustles, though I am still positioned for better jobs in the future. My goal is to turn these into money making machines before I get back into full time job.

1. SHEQXEL (HSE Blog & Spreadsheet Solutions) – started in 2019 and has taken all my attention.
2. HSE Retail Shop (HSE Training Resources) –  still working on the SEO and content.
3. HSE Market Ghana (Multivendor HSE Marketplace) – started developing this platform since 2021.
4. SHEQPGHOnline (Social Service, News Blog & Membership Forum)– dedicated to my safety group.
5. SHEQXEL on Eloquens (Author on Eloquens) – quest to be found on every marketplace.
6. SHEQXEL on Etsy (Seller on Etsy) – quest to be found on every marketplace.
7. SHEQXEL on YouTube (My Channel) – needed to show people how to use my templates
8. Trustjet Reviews (Business Review Platform) – just because I got scammed!
9. SINP TOOL (Saskatchewan Immigration Solutions) – new baby.
10. Global HSE Market (Classifieds Platform for QHSE) – new baby
11. Ghana’s B2B HSE Marketplace WhatsApp Group – a community of vendors and buyers in Ghana.

Now I am so poised for safety entrepreneurship full time 🙂 Wish me good luck!

“Wrote this article in 2022 and I’m now 36! It’s shocking how time flies so fast. There is no better time to start than now. I have slowed down a bit since I got a job in the UAE, as a Drilling HSE Coach – Offshore & Onshore, and rotate between over 50 drilling rigs. Connect with Sel 💫 on LinkedIn.”

So, the point I am making is… we all deserve to make multiple streams of income. Your current job is one! but don’t be afraid to call it quits. I quit mine when it was necessary because I won’t allow my boss to talk down on me.

Do you want more? then check this 40 health and safety business ideas to start as an entrepreneur for your side hustle.