Today, I have an awesome guest post from Allan over at Day to Day Finance. Be sure to read more about him after the post and check out his blog!
Every year, millions of people choose the entrepreneurial route because they all want to experience what it’s like to start up a business.
Sadly, the problem with most of the startup statistics you see out there is that largely 50% of those rush to start companies get to see their businesses die within 4 years.
And the sad fact about this whole failure rate is that majority of the people entering had to quit their day job to start the business.
While it cool to want to go the entrepreneurial way, it’s not entirely good to throw all your eggs in one basket. Any newly started business has a high chance of failing or succeeding.
Instead of losing both, the best way is to start the startup and still keep your day job. It might be hectic and too tiring to attempt. But it’s possible. Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, was working at Starbucks while he was running some smaller internet startups before he co-founded PayPal.
This shows it’s possible to juggle both work and not break down. If he could do it, that means you certainly can.
Here are 4 ways to start a startup without quitting your day job. The first is:
1. Learn The Art of Automation
Truth be told, you can’t do it alone. Juggling between a day job and running a business is practically one of the most challenging things to attempt. While it won’t kill you, it would constraint your time, sleep and social hours.
The best advice here is to automate most of your startup core processes. Running the business will require some form of inputs daily. But there is no business book that advices on spending time answering every inputs of the business.
Automate the aspects you find difficulty doing. Truth be told — in business — we’re not all en-graced the same way. Some fellow have strength when it comes to marketing and sales, while others flop around that aspect.
Find out ones that take most of your time and delegate them to virtual or fixed workers. Mostly, what you to outsource should be around tasks that eat more time. Tasks like customer care, accounting, social media marketing etc.
Locate the time wasters and automate them. This will instantly bring out more free time. With this free time, you can use it to think and strategize on the future of the business or utilize it on other aspects worth the time you spend on the time wasters.
2. Develop a Strict Routine for Both Businesses
Businesses strive largely on habits. Just as humans need habits to have an identity, your businesses and jobs also need strict habits to stay afloat and make progress.
That said, you can’t successfully run two business-like structures plus your own personal social life without setting routines for each of them. Since your day job is strict and can’t really be manipulated in anyway, you’d need to learn planning strategically around the hours remaining after your day job hours have been removed.
At best, give specific time to every other thing you’d be doing. Give a specific time to your social hours. It’s good to mingle and meet up with friends, but you’d have to restrict yours to known hours.
Give specific hours to your startup. It’s obviously the reason your day time is short. So basically, you have to give more hours to it. This would sometimes mean to sleep less in other to create more time for your startup business.
Basically plan each hour you have left. Then each day, consciously follow the planned hours the way you specified it. When done in a repetitive manner for at least 66days – that’s how long it takes for a routine to become a habit — it will naturally turn into a life long business habit.
When it does, juggling between the two core works will become automatic and easy.
3. Plan Your Week Effectively
Your day work is already static. You’re an employee there so you take orders and comply with them without asking questions. That aspect of your life is already literally constant already.
The only way you can maximize your time better and make your routine bring high returns is to plan ahead. Make a specific day of the week your day of planning. Plan out every aspect of work to be done that week and simply follow through on them.
Weekly planning removes guess work from your week, since you literally know what to do each point in time. Not just that, you understand what work must be done and why it’s needed to be done at that time.
An understanding of a weekly plan will help make juggling between the two tasks of the day an easy stuff. All it takes to run a day job and a startup business is an effective use of each week.
Utilize your week well and your business and day job will grow effectively.
4. Frequently Revisit your “WHY”
It kind of hard to juggle two main jobs and still not feel discouraged and want to throw in the towel. Starting and running a startup in the midst of a 9-5 job is hectic and challenging. This is why business professionals advice that it’s always better to know and understand your WHY.
You will need something to help you stay motivated, because surely, depression and wanting to give up will come.To stay motivated at all times, you need to know your WHY.
Your WHY is simply the reason you started that startup while running a 9-5 job. Every business needs to have a strong reason why it was started from the beginning. Your reason for inconveniencing yourself to that degree lies on your WHY.
Your why is that thing you’d lose out on if you give up.
Someone “Why”can be that sick child in the hospital. Whenever they feel fatigued about the whole 9-5 and startup business stuff, and they just feel like giving up –immediately their sick kid–which is their “why” will come to mind and they’ll instantly have a glimmer of hope to forge ahead.
Likewise, find your Why. Look for something you’d lose if you give up. Startup entrepreneurs give up easily because most of them don’t really have anything tangible to lose.
Entrepreneurs who have spouse dying of a treatable disease don’t have time to give up. All they think about is how they can continue their 9-5 and startup business and make money enough to save their spouse.
Tie your business to something tangible. Let that thing be your motivation every time you step out to go to your 9-5 or come home to your startup business.
About the Author:
Allan is an experienced blogger and he notes down his thoughts on a regular basis through his blog Day to Day Finance. At its core, writing is a part of communication. Allan loves to communicate with people via his write ups. He shares his thoughts, advices, tips, and tricks related to finance, marketing, lifestyle, and on many other topics which are closely related to daily life. He believes blogging helps a person to think deeper, which is the reason he loves to write so much.