Wanna learn how to quit your 9-5 job and start a business – doing something you ACTUALLY want to do PLUS likely make WAY more money?
A few years ago I left my corporate job to start my own business. At the time it was exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time.
Should you quit your 9-5 job? If you don’t do the transition right it can be SUPER stressful and crazy. The good news is that it doesn’t need to be.
How do you quit your 9-5 job? In this video I’ll share how I did it, the benefits (plus downsides) of switching to a business from a 9-5 job, and my tips for doing it successfully.
Entrepreneurship has exploded in recent years, with lots of people wanting the extra freedom, the higher earning potential and a higher level of happiness and fulfilment from their work.
However it’s not without it’s drawbacks – it’s more stressful, it’s harder in my opinion and it’s fraught with uncertainty – especially early on.
But if you can get past that – it can be one of the best life decisions you ever make, I know it was for me.
I’ll share my tips on how you can also make the transition as smooth as possible and boost your net worth way faster by being in control of your own destiny.
If you have any questions or comments let me know below.
Cheers,
Ray
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Transcription:
Good day there. Ray Corcoran here. In today’s video, we’re going to be talking about why I don’t iron my shirts. I’m just kidding. We’re going to be talking about how to start a business, and how to transition from a job into a business, and how to do it as not painfully as possible. So starting a business is all the rage at the moment. It has been for the last couple of years especially. A lot of people are doing it. They like the idea of telling the boss where to shove it and starting their own thing. Now, that all sounds really, really good, and having done it myself… I was in corporate and I’m going to talk about that in a moment. The transition was very, very bumpy. I think it is for a lot of people. I think it is for most people actually, but you never hear about that. A lot of people get enamoured by the thought of them going from their job, which they may not like into a business, which seems fun, and exciting, and sexy, and all that sort of stuff.
So what are some of the benefits of moving from a job to a business? Well, there’s a few obvious ones. One is it’s probably going to be a lot more fun. Not everyone would probably agree with me on that but I have found it… It’s just way, way more fun. Running the business, and the people you meet, the experiences you have, and the places you may travel as a result of your business. It’s just a whole bunch of fun, and I just never would have done those things if I had stayed in my job. The things that I love about it the most is, one, if you’re good, you can make a lot of money. You can make way more than any traditional job. So depending on where you live in the world, thinking about the traditional salary, average salary, you can make 10x that. You can make half a million dollars a year. You can make a million dollars a year. You can make $10 million a year and more in extreme examples. There’s no limit to how much you can make.
Whereas, in a lot of jobs, you can make little incremental improvements in your salary. I was doing that when I was in corporate. But if you extrapolate that out over 30 years, 40 years, you realise that you’ll make a good living and if you’re good at managing your money, that’ll work out great. However, for me, I didn’t want to wait until I was 70 before I had a lot of money. I wanted that to happen within a sort of 5 to 10-year time frame between sort of probably 25-ish to 35-ish. The cool thing, as well, is you can make money at any age. So it’s not like a corporate structure where you have to earn your stripes. Well, you do have to earn your stripes, but you don’t have to sort of like await your turn for promotions and all this sort of stuff.
If you’re 18 and you’ve got an excellent business, an excellent product, and you’re great at selling it, people can make a million dollars a year as an 18-year- old. It’s rare, but it’s possible. Whereas, an 18-year- old within a corporate job or entry-level role, maybe an 18, 20, they’re just not going to be able to make that much money on average. Sure, there’s going to be outliers, but most of them don’t make that much money. Some of the downsides of starting a business, the stress. The biggest one, I think is the uncertainty. There’s never a moment where you’re like, “You’re definitely going to get these customers. You’re definitely going to keep these customers or you’ll keep these staff members.” There’s always different things that go wrong all the time. It’s part of the package, if you will, and there’s constant uncertainty. So if you’re someone that doesn’t like uncertainty, then maybe your job is better for you. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the business, it does come with extra uncertainty.
So in terms of my story and how I did it, I went to high school. At school, I ended up getting expelled at my school, and then I went to university. End up dropping out of university. Then from there, because I kind of stuffed up all that, I kind of just went into any entry level corporate role doing like phone tech support for a telecommunications company in Australia. I was doing that for a little while. Then eventually I moved into… I was studying marketing at university before I dropped out. Then I eventually moved after multiple roles, moving sideways and up and just gradually moving to better and better positions as I went. But basically, what happened was I just realised that I needed to start something on the side.
So I taught myself web design, which is, as you know, I’m not really too passionate about it, but I did know how to build websites like very basic rudimentary websites. But I knew how to do it for money, so that was a start. People that didn’t know how to do it would come to me, give me money, and I’d make it for them. That was a great sort of entry level way to get into business. Basically, after a while, I was kind of doing my job and then doing the business on the side. Then I thought I had enough customers to sort of get it going. I didn’t know what I was doing at that stage in terms of business. I had no idea. I made a bit of a stupid decision by just completely quitting my job. I didn’t reduce my hours or anything like that. I just quit the job and went full-time on the business.
It was awesome at the time. It felt awesome at the time, a little bit nerve wracking. But the problem was I didn’t actually know anything about running a business that well. I kind of just knew how to get a couple of projects through word of mouth, deliver them, get paid. Then that was pretty much all I knew. So after doing that… It’s like being thrown in the deep end and not knowing how to actually swim. It’s a terrible idea and most people will fail if they do that approach in my opinion. After I left, I kind of finished all the projects I had to do, but I couldn’t bring in new projects at a fast enough rate. So I was getting work in dribs and drabs. This is how I kind of got into marketing, which is what I still do today. I didn’t know how to bring more work in so I was kind of in a situation where I kind of was just doing word of mouth work as a, I guess, a freelancer.
Then after a while, I was like, “What do I do from here?” I actually had to go back to a job after that, which is the worst thing you could ever do. While probably nobody around me gave a (beep), for me, it was embarrassing. I was so pissed off that I had to do this. I felt like that was a failure and “You’re so stupid.” I was just so pissed off with myself for not making it work. Whereas, years later, I now think that I don’t feel as bad about it. I didn’t have the skills to get the customers and get that momentum. If I had my time again, I think I just would’ve got better at getting those customers and got more of a rhythm happening before jumping ship because I didn’t need to give myself that stress.
So some of my tips for people that are looking. You’re in a job now and you want to move to a business, first thing I would say is build a savings buffer. So whether it’s 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, depending on… And obviously, reduce your expenses if you can. That way you won’t need as much as a buffer but build a savings buffer. This will allow you to not be anywhere near as stressed out when you make the transition because assume it’s going to take twice as long, 3 times as long, 5 times, 10 times as long as you think it’s going to take. Even if you think you’re talented, trust me. I thought that as well. Maybe you’re more talented than me, but trust me, I really underestimated how long it would take and yes, down the track, it can really pick up quite fast. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, give yourself a lot of leeway and room to stuff up because you probably will.
My next tip is get as many customers as you can on the side. So start to really get good at and understand how do you acquire customers, what are you doing to get customers. If you just get word of mouth, you’re just going to get word of mouth. Word of mouth is great, but you can’t be dependent just on word of mouth because if it dries up, what are you going to do? You will realise you don’t have any feathers in your cap when it comes to this sort of stuff. So you’re just like, “Well, I was just hoping to get referrals.” The referrals has dried up and then what now?
So you need to get good at getting customers whether it’s like you learn how to do ads well. You learn how to do partnerships. You learn how to do social media posts well. You learn how to do video content like this. Whatever your marketing strategies are, refine them as much as possible in the safety of your job or while in the safety of your job, while you’ve got a bit of a safety net rather than you trying to figure it all out while you’ve got that extra pressure of like, “I have to bring in money this week.” Sometimes that can be a good thing having that pressure. But for a lot of people, I don’t think it’s the best approach. It just adds unnecessary stress.
The next thing I would say it would be juggle both alongside each other as hard as it is for as long as possible. You’ll know when the time is right to move across, but don’t just do what I did where I got a little bit of work, jumped ship too early, didn’t get enough new work coming in, and then had to go back to a job which was just the worst. It pisses off. Still a little bit now. Not as much as it did, but I didn’t need to do that whole bit of BS in the middle. If I just had enough customers and kind of ironed out my client acquisition process and system, it would have been a whole lot easier.
Next thing I’d recommend is asking for help and not having an ego. One of the things that I probably did was trying to figure too many things out myself. I was trying to reinvent the wheel. There are people that have already figured out client acquisition, how to sell customers, how to deliver an amazing product or service, how to do back office stuff like accounting, all that sort of stuff. People have already figured it all out. There’s no point in you trying to figure it out yourself and trying to be some wizard. It’s all been figured out by other people. So lean on other people’s knowledge. Don’t try and figure out everything yourself. I think it’s one of my biggest mistakes was I would try and do DIY everything. In the early days, if you don’t have any money, then you kind of have to do that for some things, but don’t be scared to invest, to ask for help, and get other people involved so they can help you move forward to wherever you need to get to.
The next thing that I would have done if I had my time again would be to have a set revenue, or sales target, or a profit target, just basically how much money is coming in. I would recommend having some sort of benchmark or target that you are working towards. And maybe say as a rule, if you hit 10K a month, say for example, three months in a row… I don’t know what your expenses are and what your sort of financial needs are, but let’s just say hypothetically, 10K a month. If you get three months in a row, you can quit, or six months in a row, you can quit, or if it’s 20 K a month, or whatever it is. Set something like that, and that’s a non-emotional way for you to assess whether you can produce enough income and consistently so that you can step away with a lot less risk.
So I hope you found those tips useful. If you’re thinking about doing the jump from job to a business… I don’t know your personal situation. However, for me, I found it probably was the best decision of my life. It’s given me a whole lot more freedom. I’ve made significantly more money than I ever would have in corporate, and that was going relatively well. I knew long-term, I would have made a lot of money in corporate, but how long it would have taken… It probably would have taken several years, if not maybe even decades or longer. If you have any questions about how to do it for your own situation, please ask me. I’m more than happy to help you. Leave a comment down below. Give the video a like of you liked it. If you didn’t like it, give it a like anyway, a thumbs up, please. If you’re interested in this sort of stuff, making money, investing money, and saving money, consider subscribing. We do two videos every single week. Hope you liked the video.