Should I quit my job? 3 questions to make your mind up

This is probably one of the most challenging questions you have to answer for yourself when you’re starting out with your own venture. There’s never one right answer but the following thoughts might help you make a good decision based on your own situation and preferences. Don’t forget, we can give you various ideas but at the end of the day you need to decide what’s right for you. That’ll come down to how much risk you can bare, or how much money you have saved, where you currently live and how many people rely on your income. So take a moment to think about our three simple questions for helping you make your decision.

1. Are you thinking about your side project all the time?

Think about the side project or hobby that gets all your passionate thinking. Have you got to a point where it’s already a fledgling business, or is it just a great idea at the moment? If all your passion is focused on this and you are sleepwalking through your current job then it’s definitely time to reassess what you’re doing. However, if you’re just daydreaming about what you would like to do and haven’t done anything to make it a reality yet, leaping into the unknown without testing it first could be a really big mistake. Chances are you would go from from your current job income to no income + business expenses and that puts you in a very tight spot.

Instead, try to get your business idea to at least the point where you can test if you have a market that’s interested in what you offer. A great way to find out what kind of market you have for your service or product would be to try out some targeted Facebook ads. Use your evenings and weekends plus some of your existing salary to fund an initial test and then see what response you get over the course of a month or two. If you work at it this way, you’ll see if you’re on to something good or if no one is interested. Then you can start to plan leaving your current job if you have some initial success.

2. What do you really need to survive?

We quite often bang on about knowing your sums but it is really important that you do at least the very basic maths to understand your personal position. This isn’t designed to put you off but to give you the best chance possible of success! If you take just 1 hour, you could scan through your last year’s expenditure. What is regular repeating and essential, what could you do without and what is a flat out luxury?

At the end of the day if you truly want to get your business off the ground then you’ll need to make some sacrifices. But it might not be as bad as it sounds. What if you realised that you could just cut out a couple of luxuries and reduce a few monthly expenditures and that this would mean you could live on half your current salary for the time being? Perhaps knowing this means you could then consider reducing your employed work to a part time position, giving you much more time to ramp up your fledgling business.

3. Do you like Having a boss or do you want to live life on your own terms?

This is really worth thinking about. If you actually just enjoy your side project being simply that, and you enjoy letting someone else take the responsibility for running the business and giving you work to do, then maybe you would be better off having the best of both worlds. Enjoy being an employee by day and enjoy your side project by night. This might even take the pressure off having to make money from your side project and enable you to really enjoy pursuing it as a passion.

4. Bonus question: Does someone have your back?

OK this isn’t essential to making your decision. You may even find it difficult to share with your nearest and dearest that you are thinking of doing life as a freelancer or businessperson. A lot of times the people nearest to you struggle to understand why you would do something that seems so risky to them BUT if you know you can’t help but give it a go then do what you can to find someone or even a group of people who will support and encourage you. We all need it at some point or other.

Conclusion

We hope you realise from the questions we’ve been asking you that you don’t need to go “all in” right away, particularly when we know that just paying the bills is a task in itself. But we also hope this encourages you to think in upward steps, taking one step at a time but moving closer and closer to your goal all the time.

If you’ve got a passion for your project and it looks like there’s a market, plus you’ve figured out how much money you need to make to live and you have a key friend or someone who will give you much needed moral support, now all you need to do is go put your plan into action.

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