Guest post by Simon North, Founder of Position Ignition, the UK’s leading career development and career learning company and the Career Ignition Club.
If you jack in your job to set up your own business, it should be because self-employment is genuinely right for you, not because you’re running away from something. Explore your motives and get honest with yourself about whether this really is the right move for you. Here are five things to ask yourself before you go into business with yourself.
1. Why are you even thinking about it?
There’s got to be a good reason why someone moves from being employed to wanting to do their own thing. What’s your reason? It can’t just be that you’re tired of being employed. You’ve got to have positive reasons for becoming your own boss, as opposed to just choosing it as a default or fall-back option.
2. How good is your idea?
So you have an idea for a new business but how good is that idea? How much research have you actually done into it? Have you tested the idea on a segment of your target market or even on yourself? Are there already lots of companies that have had the same idea and are saturating the market? If there’s no one doing what you’re proposing to do, is there a reason for that? Perhaps it’s not a viable idea or maybe there’s not as much demand for it as you think there is.
3. Can you actually afford to?
Quite often quitting your salaried job and becoming your own boss means taking a huge financial risk. If you have family responsibilities and an expectation of economic earning, it might be that you can’t afford to leave your current role and pump money into an independent venture. Even though you might want to you may have to accept you just can’t at this stage.
4. How are you going to do it and who you are going to do it with?
If by this stage you still think becoming your own boss is the right move for you, how exactly are you going to make it happen? How you going to set up your business and where are you going to get the capital you’ll need? Will you be a sole trader or will you go into partnership with someone or a group of people?
5. Do you have the energy for it?
One thing that happens when you are your own boss is that you find that you’re thinking about work all the time. To put yourself under that kind of pressure, you’ve got to really be fit, mentally, physically and emotionally. If you’re not fit and you can’t put the work in, then what’s the point?
About the author:
Simon North is the Founder of Position Ignition and the Career Ignition Club. Position Ignition is one of the UK’s leading career development and career planning companies. The Career Ignition Club offers a range of career support tools, advice and e-learning materials for its members. Follow Simon North and his team on twitter @PosIgnition and get more advice from him on their Career Advice Blog.
