Blog readers, school friends as well as ex-colleague discuss with me about starting a business. More often I can sense they are sitting on the job just because they are mentally not prepared for quitting the job.
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Majority of my school friends and ex-colleagues are from Kolkata and they have a very unique excuses for not being an entrepreneur.
Are you willing to be an entrepreneur or just want to be one. If you just want to be, you may not be one but if you have a willingness to be one, you will be. If you really have an excuse for not quitting the job, what are you doing about that excuse?
So let me share with you how I managed to quit my job.
Year long survival plan
When I said no to job, I was drawing more than 40k per month into my bank account as salary. It is not very easy to say no to that kind of income unless you are not only mentally prepared but also able to convince your family of what you want to be doing.
I started to analyze my expenses and started to find a number that will be enough for my family to survive for a year. Remember I am talking about survival that includes only the basics. I came down to a magical number of Rs 300,000 or 3L because my monthly expense was roughly Rs 25k per month.
So now once I had a number I want to keep my family alive for 1 year, I reduced that number to 2L as the final amount because I knew, there is some contribution from my side being invested towards provident fund which I can withdraw when I quit a job or switch a job. I had done that earlier as well.
200k in savings looks pretty small when compared to my last salary of 40k per month but in reality it took me almost 3 years to make that amount as saving because my last salary was pretty high but it was not that high in earlier years when I had created plan.
How I opted to Save
Once I have my plan, I know exactly what I needed and so I avoided loans and liabilities because if you have a loan too early in your job, things can go wrong very easily for your switch to an entrepreneur.
On top of that I kept my household expense to always under 20k so I don’t go over the 25k mark by any means. I had a separate bank account which I kept solely for the sake of savings. A hike in salary should not be a trigger point for a change in lifestyle but you should focus on keeping your lifestyle same and use the extra amount for savings.
I had seen my ex-colleagues took hike in the job as a means to upgrade their mobile phones or go for a car (many a times in advance of hike as well) but then I always had a very old phone even when I was quite successful as an entrepreneur. Till date I don’t have a car but have plans in later half of 2015.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, take your job hikes as a way to save money for entrepreneurship ventures.
Avoid Investment
As your savings grow, you can be tempted towards investing it to boost your savings but then I had different plans. Once you focus on investment, you tend to find ways to maximize your investments and can loose focus of your savings goal for your survival. Allowing your mind to focus on your job when you are in office and then allowing it to focus on your entrepreneur research is more important than investing you’re saving as of now.
I did loose track of my savings and moved towards investment. I did not opt for mediocre investments into bank deposit but jumped into equity investment but soon realized that it was not something that I can focus when I have a full time job. So I opted out of those investments and believe me, it was really very difficult to be doing that.
The Quit
I was given a good hike in March 2008 that allowed me to hit 40k mark in salary but I also had accumulated 120k+ as saving in my bank account. Once I got the hike, I decided to continue my job for few more months and when had dilemmas. This is when I had to mentally prepare myself for actually quitting the job.
Once my bank balance hit Rs 150k, I had to mentally prepare myself to quit the job. I knew my last salary and amount for paid leaves would make my bank balance hit that target I had planned. It took me almost a fortnight to compose my resignation letter and actually submit it. I had lot of mental barriers to overcome before I could send that magical email.
I remember I did not took my bike to office on the day I finally decided to send that email because there will be lot of things that will be going in my mind when I will be returning home after that email is delivered. Yet another mental barrier I had to overcome.
Plan B
The next morning as expected my immediate manager had meeting scheduled with me to know the reason for quitting. I did not give a real reason for quitting and told that I want to pursue higher education and want to prepare for exam.
I always had very good relationship with my managers including the manager where I left the job in less than a year and wanted to make sure I keep the same in my last job as well so if want to be returning to the job, I can.
The option to get back to job was not the only backup plan I had. I also started doing freelancing projects from Elance.com for 25K per month and once I was hitting that mark in a month, I used to say no to more clients. The aim was to generate 25k per month so that I don’t need to touch my buffer money of 300k and I can focus on my online ventures.
In Salary Mode
Once you have the salary of 12 months as advance lying in your bank account, you can loose focus and so I used my same salary account that I had from my employer to credit the amount each month from my alternate bank account and then use only the amount from my salary account for expense only.
All my earnings from my sites and freelancing were being deposited into my savings account and I only took 25k into my salary account for expense. I started to accumulate lot more money into my saving account and instead of depleting the balance it hit a magical figure of Rs 10L or 1 Million and that is when I mentally told myself job days are over.
In job it took me almost 3 years to get to a saving of 3L but in under a year of being an entrepreneur I managed to reach 10L mark. In next year or so, I was having a turnover of roughly 3L in all my businesses combined.
Final Thoughts
Write down all the excuses you have in your mind to quit the job. Now have a plan to overcome each one of it. Once you have planned for those excuses, you will be mentally ready to quit the job.
If you are able to mentally prepare yourself for being an entrepreneur, get a finite amount of money you need to be able to try an entrepreneurship for one year and go for it. You can always get back to job if things don’t work out and you have nothing to loose.