When Should You Quit Your Day Job?

I was reading one of Des Walsh’s latest posts at Thinking Home Business and he was referring to a blog post he had read by Darlene McDaniel (blogging seems to do that – lead you from one to another!) and the question had been raised as to when people should quit their day job when establishing their own business?

That’s an interesting question and the answer can be very different for a number of people. The reality is that if you are depending on the income from your day job, that the time to quit may well be quite some time after you started your business. But, at the same time, you want to make sure you aren’t using your business income for anything else and becoming dependent on the two incomes – that wouldn’t work at all!

For those in the Virtual Assistant industry I encourage them to start out part-time and then as their client base and workload increases, to move from a full time role to a part-time one to give themselves more time to dedicate to building their business whilst still receiving income. This, in part, is what I did. I actually had a govt job and took leave without pay for 12 months – which gave me some protection. I lined up some part-time roles with 10 hours here and 15 hours there, and small bits of work in between. After 12 months I’d matched the same income as the previous year in my corporate role so I knew I could tender my resignation with confidence. About six months later I was getting far too many hangups on my phone at home (this was before I had a mobile phone – only tradies carried those big bricks around) so I made arrangements for bringing the work back home to my office. One of the clients received that suggestion quite well, another didn’t but it all worked out in the end and the hours I lost with a couple of clients was soon replaced by new ones in my home office.

I didn’t have the Internet then otherwise the clients I ‘lost’ might have been quite open to the idea too. The point is I made sure that I was replacing ‘old’ income with ‘new’ income so that the transition took place with little interruption to managing our household expenses and that, for many, is the main thing that needs to be catered for. So planning is paramount. KMT

day job, quit, part-time work, virtual assistants, work at home, home based business