A common question you find on Reddit and Twitter from those who are aspiring to business ownership is:
Do I quit my job and just go for it, or do I side hustle my way to success?
Once you get into business ownership and your accountants start asking you questions about your books, when you don’t understand something and ask for guidance, they often answer “It depends.” They aren’t trying to be annoying; often that’s how you have to look at classifying assets or expenses.
That’s my answer to the classic “Should I quit my job, etc.” question: it depends.
I say this as someone who quite definitely chose door #2: I side hustled MaidThis for two years. On July 13, 2013, when I got my first-ever client for MaidThis, I snuck outside of my full-time job and did a happy dance. Alas, there is no video evidence of this dance, but I can replicate it for you anytime you want.
Dancing aside, I’m naturally a bit more cautious, so keeping a full-time income while reinvesting all the “profits” from my side hustle into growing it made more sense for me. I didn’t want to go “all-in” as I felt like there was so much I wanted to/needed to learn and I would rather have someone else pick up the tab for my life while I learned on my private time.
My friend and business partner David Lahav is on the other side of the argument. He’s very much an all-or-nothing guy who has been trying to escape corporate life so he says he could never side hustle for two years (or probably even two months). It’s not as if he doesn’t feel that he has to learn stuff, but he wants to give that his entire focus and a holding down a job at the same time would be like torture to him.
In an episode of the Remote Local Podcast in which we discussed this issue one of the objections to quitting your job was the “security” a job offers. But even though I didn’t go the quit-the-job route I think this sense of security is totally false.
If you think about it from a business perspective, a full-time job is like a business with an exclusive contract with one client. If you lose that client, your business implodes. How secure is that?
The other part of security is the golden cage or golden handcuffs a job gives you: how can I leave when I’m making all this money? Again, on the surface this seems reasonable, but at the end of the day, is that all your time is worth to you? Money? Life is short, man, and at some point you have to start asking yourself bigger questions than how much money you’re willing to trade your time for.
That was the conclusion to David and I’s conversation, ultimately. There isn’t a “right” answer to the quit your job/side hustle dichotomy. There’s only what matters for you. And money is only one aspect of it. Examine:
- Your personality
- What you want
- How quickly you want it
- Your financial situation
Once you have all that written down, the path will be clear for you.
Photo by Olya Kobruseva from Pexels
This article was written by Neel from MaidThis Franchise, a remote-local franchise opportunity for people looking to escape the rate race and reach financial freedom. Learn more here.
