Leaving your 9-5 job to start a business or pursue a side venture while still maintaining your job?
Dilemma
Have you ever found yourself in this dilemma?
Actually, I’ve been on both sides.
In my first serious endeavor, I left a stable job with a good salary to become a partner in a service startup. It was a trend at the time. So much so that out of every 10 new businesses of this kind that emerged, 11 claimed to be the “Uberization” of something or another.
Our case was no different. It was a platform for hiring cleaning services, similar to Uber. We simply acted as the middleman.
Anyway, I entered this business that was very new to me with enthusiasm but with very little knowledge about entrepreneurship. I was like Jhonny English: “He Knows No Fear. He Knows No Danger. He Knows Nothing”.
Long story short
Long story short, during the 7 months I was involved, the most I managed to achieve was proving the biblical teaching that “from dust we came and to dust we shall return.” The business didn’t succeed.
Then I returned to the job market, the 9-5 grind, broke of course.
After some time, I rekindled my interest in entrepreneurship, but now I was more aware of many things that weren’t clear to me during the “Uber for brooms” era.
The main realization was that I didn’t need to quit my job to start a new business. That is mind blowing.
In the past I started some businesses outside of work hours, the so-called side hustles, following these steps:
I started waking up earlier to organize my day and work more focused, 2 hours per day. I made a list of topics in which I had some expertise and could leverage. I began documenting the process in a notebook and on social media, through text or podcasts.
The order may not have been exactly like this, but that’s the basic list.
The how-to
Today, I’m involved in three projects outside of work that don’t take more than 2 hours of my day. Of course, I don’t work on all of them every day.
But I can say that all of them bring me a lot of satisfaction, and I intend to continue working on them ad infinitum. Or at least until they no longer make sense.
So, the summary here is:
Start a project in which you have expertise or at least interest; research extensively about the subject and then take action as soon as possible, without giving fear or doubt a chance.
It will be worth it.
Need some staring point to clear your ideas? Try this nice project run by Patt Walls, it’s called Starter Story.
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