This Content Is Only For Subscribers
I often get asked is whether or not you should quit your job cold turnkey to pursue building a business full time. My response is almost always, heck no. Ideally, you should keep day job until you have had a chance to fully validate your business idea before taking the plunge into full time entrepreneurship. After all, running a business is challenging enough as it is, you definitely do not want financial stress to cloud your judgment or make difficult decisions nay harder than they need to be. Even though you might hate your job and cannot stand your boss, thing of these circumstances as a way to stay in the game.
If you keep your job, you can use your salary to buy yourself extra time until you can grow your business into something healthy and sustainable. You do not have to trade one set of stressors for another which sadly is exactly what most entrepreneurs do. They take all their unhappiness and lack of fulfillment in their day job and immediately transfer it to their new gig. You do not have to do that. Instead, you can experiment with a number of different centuries on the side, chaptalizing the whole thing with your own money and see what works. You can, in a way become your own venture capitalist without having to deal with the song and dance of keeping investors happy.
When it comes to starting your own business, the safest strategy is to keep your day job at least for now. Stick with something steady until your side project gets off its feet then you can go all in if it make sense. Your family will thank you for this, I promised. It might man a little extra work for you but it mean a lot more security and a lot less financial stress in the on run. Overall, there are no guarantees with any business but one thing for sure. The more time you have to validate a business idea, the more likely you are to eventually succeed. The best and safest entrepreneurial strategies involve crating a safety net and having the freedom to take small but calculated risks.
To put it succinctly, what successful entrepreneur do, more often than not, is take small, calculated risks. They do not bet the farm which gives them room for little mistakes. Then they iterate. I stared our business, we both worked full time jobs while building an ecommerce store on the step and learning along the way. Our success is not a result of any brilliance on our part, just a willingness to keep experimenting and not going all in too soon.
