Quitting Your Job To Be Self-Employed – The First 90 Days

First of all, The Rugged Male is back … like John Cena, Puma sneakers and those horrible high waisted shorts that women are wearing.  Apologies for the lapse in content, our writers went on a soul vacation.  To add to the drought, this writer attempted to have a solo back country excursion through the Sierras that was met with zero degree weather and a transmission failure. Things quickly escalated into an abandoned vehicle in pursuit of the first Cessna ride back home to the beach.

But all is good, The Rugged Male is tenacious, like a southern Senator in a restroom foot tapping his way against gay rights.  This article is long overdue as I hit this fork in the road last year, about a decade too late.  I chose the path less traveled and quit my executive career to focus solely on OUR Rugged Male and my Los Angeles digital marketing agency – eMaximize.

How To Quit Your Job To Be Self-Employed

• Have Plenty Of Coffee – More than likely you will be working from home, which is great.  You wake up at 7am, walk 20 feet and you are at work.  What you wont realize for a few days is that you no longer are commuting, which means no more stopping at the Starbucks watering hole to wait behind frothing rhinos as they order their double fat, caramel diabetes frappe to start their day.  You need to purchase a Keurig and have plenty of coffee and breakfast food, cuz this is your new routine.

• Do Not Expect Help From Your Colleagues – All the people that you worked with, and helped shape their careers and send on Presidents Club vacations to Cancun will suddenly forget who you are.  This is tragic, but true especially if these people are in sales.  They do not engage in any activities that do not benefit themselves, no matter how many favors you have done in the past.  You no longer have any value to them and they are not programmed otherwise.  It’s very important to understand this before you quit your day job to start your own business.  You will have much better luck asking complete strangers for a client referral than the people that used to rely on you to promote their own careers.  This is just another indication you made the right choice to move away from this “society”.  Pat yourself on the back grasshopper and make cold calls, not warm calls, they are futile.

• Get Your Shit Together – Before you quit your job, get your pitch down.  This means your digital marketing, business cards, positioning, vision, uniform, shovel – whatever is needed to be productive once you cut off the corporate heroin drip.  Getting your digital marketing strategy in place can take a few months and it’s best to do this at lunchtime while you are still collecting a salary. Your first few months you want most of your time to be spent on sales and client generation, not administration.

• Don’t Expect Help From Your Friends – I just quit my job where I was CIO of a billion dollar organization (I was inching down the freeway in my metal coffin). My friends think I am now building websites like the guy in the corner at Starbucks – so not awesome.  Even my friends that are in marketing do not understand what I’m doing, even after they read the Services page on our website.  This is not because they are stupid or rude,  it’s because they just don’t care, life gets in the way.  It’s like all those friends you have that work in “finance” or “investments” or some other shit you haven’t taken the time to understand.  Don’t be offended and certainly don’t expect a pat on your ass.  Keep your head down, eyes on the prize and stay the course.  If your friends are kind enough to lend a hand or even understand what you are doing, consider it a blessing, but don’t expect it.  You are better off spending your precious time with those who benefit from your services or products.  You are no longer collecting the same robot paycheck for the next 52 weeks so you don’t need friends at the water cooler or someone to rip a butt with in the parking lot.  You need revenue, so focus on that.

• Invest In A Proper Work Space – When you start your own business you will be working 10-12 hours a day – fact.  Get a proper and efficient workspace.  If you are going to be spending time on the computer, don’t do it on your couch with a tiny laptop.  Get a monitor and mouse, you will work much faster.  If your business requires more than 6 hours a day online, then get dual monitors.  You put your email on one screen and browser on the other.  Opening an account with Dropbox is also essential, now is not a good time for data loss due to hardware failure.  Getting a landline and a phone with a decent speaker is also recommended.  Communication is essential.

• Create A Soft Landing – What you don’t want to do is get frustrated and pull a Jerry Maguire without a plan.  Hang in there with your kiss-ass boss and annoying coworker that thinks HR helps companies move forward.  You need to have at least 50% of your income secured before you make this jump. Things like health benefits, phone, car allowance, lunch are all going bye bye.  Do the accounting on what you need to survive and have at least 50% of that income secured.  The rest you can make up as you go.

• Expect The Unexpected – You won’t have a complete picture of your new business until you start doing it every day.  Expect the unexpected in a good way.  There will be revenue opportunities that come up that you hadn’t thought about, so plan on them showing their pretty little heads as you go about your day-to-day.  They are wonderful and are another indication that you have chosen the right path in attempting to be self-employed.

How To Succeed In Becoming Self Employed

You’ve sold your life to work for an uncaring machine that doesn’t want to understand you. If you can possibly fail at something you don’t like, why not try to succeed at something you do like.

According to The Center For American Progress, only about 10% of the entire workforce is self-employed. Congratulations, you have joined an elite special ops team.

The first ninety days in the wild are going to test every ounce of grit, caffeine, and stubborn pride you possess. You will stare down an empty pipeline, answer to no one while simultaneously working for the toughest boss you’ve ever had.  You’ll wonder if trading a predictable salary for absolute chaos was a stroke of genius or an emotional meltdown. But when you finally look up and realize you built something out of thin air that feeds your esteem and answers to nobody, the corporate coffin will look like a distant, faded nightmare. Welcome to the other side of the island!

Thanks For Reading the Best Outdoor and Travel Website!

You Might Also Like