It’s also given me the growth and confidence to upgrade all my human relationships. Running a business has allowed me to meet incredible people, share experiences with friends, and create interesting days outside the office which allowed me to meet more women during the week. Some thrived, some changed, others withered. This is not just about my relationship: a lot of the friendships around me transformed when I went from a job to a business. However, going from a full-time job to running a business will change your lifestyle in many ways, and require the people around you to adapt too. In fact, that’s why most of us become entrepreneurs: we want to give more to the people around us. Starting a business is not a decision that will affect yourself only. You want to create a machine that generates value for others and money for yourself as a consequence: it’s much easier to do so if you focus on who you’re serving, rather than keeping the spotlight on yourself. Research forums, contact your target customers, study your competitors. Instead of focusing on a “great idea” that you came up within the shower, go straight to the market. LESSON: don’t start a startup, start a business. In a job, you are given the blueprint for generating money in a business, you have to create that blueprint (hint: it’s a lot easier if you follow what already works).
You have to serve someone else, and create value for them so that they pay you money for it: the more value, the more money. When you run a business, you have to create a value-generating machine: no one pays you a salary. In a job, you work on a specific task, someone tells you exactly what to do, and you get paid a fixed amount on a set day: most of the time, your performance will not affect how much you earn. If you’ve never freelanced or run a business, generating money works very differently from having a full-time job. I knew that meant two weeks less of a runway in the bank to figure things out. I remember when I misplaced my passport and had to buy a same-day flight from Warsaw to London: my hands were shaking as I pressed “buy”.
Suddenly, I went from a great first salary to…burning through my savings.
#CONSEQUENCE DONT QUIT YOUR DAY JOB HOW TO#
Most of us end up looking at 100 people, ending up with a hodge-podge of contradicting information to nowhere.ĪFTER: I had to figure out how to create value. Yes, you can do this online via podcasts, blogs, and books, but it only counts if you actually select one person and follow exactly what they say. LESSON: if you want to start a business, surround yourself with people that already have one. To figure it out, it took me a long time: I read a ton of books, went to events, made mistakes, and asked other people. When I started a business, I had no idea what the rules of the game were.Īpart from my dad (who was no longer around at the time), I had never been closely exposed to anyone with an actual business: most people around me, while I was growing up, had a job. It’s not easy, but it’s not complicated either. Communicate everything clearly, and you get praises and…eventually a promotion. In my corporate job, I knew exactly what to do: wake up, go to the office at 9, finish my list of tasks and duties, and follow my manager’s instructions. That way, all you have to do is multiply your efforts (not find out what the formula is). You don’t have to replace your salary straight away, but you must create a repeatable way to generate value for others. LESSON: don’t quit and start a business, start a business and then quit. It took much about twice as long as I initially expected. That included how long it would take to actually finish the product and get the first sale in (of course, I also overcomplicated things). When I quit my job to launch my first business, I very quickly ran out of time.Īs the first time I ever created a product or sold a business, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. On the other hand though, it allows you to think long term and take strategic actions, rather than survival actions. On one hand, that time makes you procrastinate and never pull the trigger. When you have a salary coming in on the same day every month (or week), you have time. So in a few months, I quit my job and launched my first business. The idea of quitting and starting my own business became stronger and more tempting every day. It looked like a mirage: on one hand, stay in an uninspiring office and live in a boring hotel on the other, start my own adventure and craft my lifestyle. Through self-development books and local meetups I started meeting more and more entrepreneurs (and a plethora of wantrepreneurs pretending to have a business when all they had was an idea and a stack of business cards…) In the meantime, I was exposed to the idea of startups and running your own business.
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