Starting a business or entrepreneurship, as they call it, it is in one word… scary.
It’s scary because you have to work extremely hard to make it work. You have to wear multiple hats in your organization to make it work, and at the end of the day, there’s a lot of failures and when you fail, you have no one else to blame but yourself.
That said if you succeed (and that’s not impossible, I did it and I’m confident everybody can do it if I can do it). Still, if you succeed, then you’re able to work on whatever you want, whenever you want, and the harder you work, the more money you earn, which is how it should be.
That’s all well and good, but at the end of the day, that begs the question, should you just say, “You know what Full-time job….sayonara. I’m leaving, and I’m going to start my own business.”
Should you do that?
What I’m going to do in this post is I’m going to talk about my experience and how I’ve been able to grow my business and what I would recommend to someone that’s starting today and whether or not they should just jump ship and leave their full-time job and get started or ease into it.
WATCH THIS BLOG POST IN VIDEO FORMAT
So first, let me go over my background.
Again, my name is Ron. I am the founder of this website. I have a portfolio of websites that I’ve created over the last five years that make somewhere between $20,000.00 to $25,000.00 every single month in revenue (see my income reports), but it wasn’t like that just kind of happened and was straightforward.
I was working at a full-time job for about eight years in marketing. I was a digital marketing manager. I was doing pretty good, but I kind of realized that there was a ceiling, so I set out on my own and started a side hustle, which was a simple website that ended up growing.
Job vs. Own Business
In order to really understand the idea of having a job vs a business, you need to understand the differences between the two.
Salary
JOB: The first thing with a job that’s great is that you have a salary, plenty of places to get job advice like CompanyReviews, and you have what I would call “predictive income”. Meaning that every month you’re going to get x amount of dollars and then you just budget around that and you’re able to live your life. It’s pretty stress-free.
You can always lose your job which would suck…and that does happen. You can go from 100% of your income down to zero in one day which sucks but it’s just kind of the risk of being employed with someone else.
OWN BUSINESS: With a business, however, you don’t have a salary. You don’t have guarantees. There is no paycheck unless you’re making money. If not, you’ll need some type of funding to get started.
Health Insurance
JOB: For the traditional employer, regular job, you have health insurance. For most jobs, not all of them, but in most of them, you have health insurance. The cost of the health insurance, deductibles, that sort of thing, it’s all reasonable because they have group plans. If you have a bigger family, it’s great because if anything happens, they’re all covered.
OWN BUSINESS: However, if you have your own business, big negative, you don’t have health insurance. You have to get health insurance, and usually, from my experience, health insurance is pretty costly when you’re self-employed.
However, there is a bonus here, and that is the fact that when you have health insurance as an entrepreneur, you get to write that health insurance off.
Let’s say you spend $1,000.00 a month on health insurance; you’re able to write that off as a business expense at the end of the year, which is a pretty big deal.
Co-workers
JOB: Speaking from the side of a positive is that co-workers, it’s nice because you have that camaraderie, you’re all working together, you have projects, you’re communicating quite a bit. There are negatives with co-workers too, but we’ll stick to the positives here.
OWN BUSINESS: When you are working for yourself, you do not have co-workers. It is just you. You can hire people, but at the end of the day, someone that you recruit, you don’t want to be their best friend, you want to be friendly with them, but you also want to be the boss.
Safety
JOB: It’s safe, it’s comfortable, it’s not risky. You know that check is coming every month, and you know you have health insurance. It’s not all on you. It’s on a whole organization to fail for bad things to happen.
OWN BUSINESS: With entrepreneurship, with your own business, it’s not safe, it’s not stable until you’ve established yourself. It’s not like it’s never safe, and it’s never permanent. It does get reliable and stable eventually. It just usually takes about a year to two years to get to that point to where you’re like, “Okay, everything is okay. We’re profitable every month. We’re kind of comfortable. We understand our limitations, and the harder we work from here, the more we can grow.”
Longevity
JOB: The reality with a job and this is a big downer, you basically will work 30 to 50 years and then you’ll retire. Most people will go into an employer, they’ll work 30 to 50 years, they’ll retire, and then they sit there doing nothing and grow old. Their life has passed them by, and they didn’t get to spend enough time with their family, and that’s kind of just how it goes.
OWN BUSINESS: Compare that to owning your own business where you can really shorten things. Instead of 30 to 50 years, it might be 5-10 years. You can really shorten that if you sell a business for a decent profit after growing it to a certain point or you grow a business to where your monthly revenue is more than what you would have made at an employer, you’re in good shape.
I was making $100,000.00 a year, and now I make over $200,000.00 working for myself. There’s a big difference there. You can shorten that trail to retirement if you work for yourself. Then again, you can also go more slowly on that path if you fail, and you lose your business. It’s kind of a risk that you have to take if you want to be self-employed.
Freedom
JOB: There is little freedom with a job. This is one of the things that sucks about a job. You get a vacation every year, maybe two weeks, there is your freedom in addition to your weekends. That’s it.
OWN BUSINESS: When you have a business, it really depends on the business model obviously, but the harder/smarter that you work on this in the beginning and the staff that you surround yourself with, it allows you to gain total freedom of your time and all of your decisions too.
Pay
JOB: With a job, you never get paid for your full productivity. This is what really kills me. If you go to a job, and I did this for years. I was in a job and I was working and I was working just hard enough to do a decent job with my responsibilities but I never overdid it.
I wasn’t the greatest employee ever because why would I be the greatest employee ever? At the end of the day, why would I work super hard? I didn’t have a bonus incentive, so I worked just hard enough to keep my job. I’d go in, 9 to 5, in and out.
I would get criticized for leaving too early (which was on time) so I continued to do it. People didn’t like that, but whatever. There was just no incentive aside from maybe getting a 5% raise every year which barely keeps up with inflation.
OWN BUSINESS: If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re working on your business, then the harder you work, the smarter you work, the better things that you do, the better your business performs and then you can make significant increases in your income as the business grows.
This was big for me. My first couple years when I actually started to make money, I was growing over 100% year over year in income, which was crazy.
Yearly Raises
JOB: Every year, 3 to 5% with a job. Every job, 3 to 5%, maybe once in a while you’ll get a kicker to 7%. But unless you get a promotion, you’re not going to see much more than a 7% raise.
Sometimes if you get a promotion you can get a raise by 10, 20% or if you change jobs you can get a raise, but at the end of the day, you’re never going to make nearly as much as you’d like to because you’re always going to be stuck working for your employer at a fixed rate.
OWN BUSINESS: With a business, that’s not the case. There is no yearly raise. There is also no guarantees of your yearly salary, so you can go up quite a bit, but you can also go down.
Work Hours
JOB: With a job, you have a 40-hour workweek. That’s it. Sometimes maybe 50 hours, sometimes they’ll make you stay overtime, you don’t get paid extra for it. That’s what I dealt with. I stayed a little extra, no one cared.
At the end of the year it wasn’t like, “Oh great. You stayed.” They don’t care. They will just pay you the same.
OWN BUSINESS: As an entrepreneur, it’s different. In the beginning especially, you’re going to work way more than 40 hours.
You can confidently expect 60 to 70 hours a week in the beginning.
It is crazy, but it’s not crazy.
The thing that’s interesting is that when you’re an entrepreneur, and I can speak about this, when you’re working hard. especially in the beginning, it’s work to everybody on the outside but to you… it’s not.
Because it’s something that you’re interested in and so motivated to do and you really want it to succeed, that at the end of the day you may not consider it work. I didn’t consider it work in the beginning even though I was working constantly. Literally not sleeping just always working. But I think when you’re in it and you’re working really hard on it, you don’t see it that way.
The cool thing is, and this is where I’m at now, is that once you’re established with your business, you have a team in place and things are running pretty smoothly, you no longer have to work as much because you’ve hired a team and you’re pretty established and now you can take a step back and let other people manage it and you can do things that you want.
What do I recommend?
So, based on my experience, what is it that I recommend?
You’ve seen the comparison between a job and your own business. Now you know the risks.
Should you just leave your job and jump into creating a business?
No, I actually don’t think you should. That’s not how I did it. I think that’s crazy. Because at the end of the day you have no guarantees. There are no guarantees and nobody cares.
If you fail, nobody cares. Your friends and family will try to pick you up and say, “Hey, it will be okay.” At the end of the day, they’re not going to pay all your bills. That’s just not how it works.
What I think is a much smarter way of doing this is keeping your full-time job and starting a business on the side while you’re still full-time somewhere else.
This is great because then you still have a salary, you still have a paycheck, and your back’s kind of against the wall but at the same time if you don’t work on your business for a day it’s okay, you can get by.
I think that’s really important because when you just leave a full-time job and go into the business, you’re now working off of desperation and in my opinion, desperation causes people to do stupid things that are about chasing money, but not good for the business.
Instead, if you’re thinking about this, you should focus on creating something that you can easily do from home in your spare time.
Because the weekends, nights. Those are really when you’re going to be able to work.
You may need to establish a sole proprietorship for this and get a registered agent depending on what state you live in, but it’s pretty easy to manage overall.
I personally really like the model of websites because they don’t have a big startup cost, they are passive, meaning even when you’re asleep they’re still working for you because when does a website close? It doesn’t close.
The other thing that’s really nice is that it’s really not location dependent, meaning you can do it from anywhere.
My wife and I, we go on trips. I will work from wherever we are for an hour a day, checking email and everything. My business just kind of keeps on moving.
Convenience is key with this sort of thing. I think that when you start a business, and you’re trying to grow it, you need to have something that’s really convenient for you because it’s not easy.
It’s not easy to go from a full-time job where you’re working 40 hours a week and then going somewhere else or doing something else and having to work a whole second job. That gets pretty tiresome over time.
Now you can … I’ve talked about this numerous times but if you’re interested in the website thing you can click right here to take my free IGNITION course.
Start while working
Whether or not you do a website doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you start your business while working. After all, you’ll have random expenses like Antivirus among other things. Speaking of Antivirus, check out this Avast cleanup review to learn more about what’s out there.
I highly recommend that because you’re able to use the funds from your job to not just sustain yourself, but to also help grow that business.
Every day that you have a bad day at your day job, leave that day job, go to your side business that you’ve created and work your butt off. Do it as hard as you can because at the end of the day… that’s your way out.
Worst case, especially with a website, the worst-case scenario here, it’s going to be a resume builder.
That’s if you even want to disclose it.
If you want to tell people about it, great. It will be a resume builder, it will be something on your resume and they’ll say, “Wow, you created a website,” and this is pretty good.
I personally think that this is a much safer method than just leaving a job.
If you just jump full-time from a job, even if you have savings, if you jump full-time from a job over to something with absolutely no progress, with absolutely no idea what you’re going to do, you’re going to make bad decisions.
So I definitely don’t recommend that you quit your job and start something full-time as a business. I think that’s a terrible idea. You can, however transition slowly, while you’re working that full-time job, and start that side business as you’re still working your full-time job. Just don’t tell anybody until it’s successful. It’s that simple.
Those are my thoughts on if you should quit your full-time job and jump right in to starting your own business.
In summation, no.
But you definitely should start your business, just don’t quit your full-time job yet.