I’ve been along to a few different networking groups since I started my business. You meet an incredible range of different people with all kinds of businesses. These days I find myself speaking to a lot of people who have a job and a side hustle. Some of them want to turn the side job into the main business and others just want a bit of extra money every month. It all means that I’m hearing more and more conversations about the right time to leave a job.
It’s a tough one. Even when you’re unhappy in your work a regular, predictable income is hard to leave behind. How do you decide where the tipping point is? I made the leap so want to tell you about the things that helped me make the decision. If you’re teetering on the brink of a new business adventure I hope they help you too.
The good (but not great) job
I used to be a solicitor. After university it took me a while to get a training post, via a couple of legal secretarial jobs which introduced me to the right people. I qualified as a personal injury solicitor and got a job with a national firm. My team represented the companies that had been sued.
I really enjoyed it to begin with. When you deal with personal injury claims you hear an interesting story every time a new file comes in. I got to know lots of different people and learn about what made them tick. It’s hard for me to pinpoint when the dissatisfaction started to set in. All I know is that by the time I went on maternity leave with my first child, I’d started to wonder whether I really wanted to do this work for the rest of my life. I had ambitions to be a novelist but saw that as a long term prospect at best.
Crisis point
When I returned from my second maternity leave a lot had changed. There had been reforms in the industry which had started to affect the day to day work. I had a meeting with two of the partners who told me that I needed to think about applying for promotion as I was too senior to carry on case handling as I had been. It would have meant managing financial targets and other members of the team. I’d half expected it but somehow it was still a shock.
I went home and sobbed. There was no way I wanted to be a manager. I’d mentored people before and hated it. It was time for me to find something else.
Time to leave
On reflection, the decision to leave was pretty easy. It was a choice between leaving or going through a rigorous application process for a promotion I didn’t want. My husband and I sat down and worked out that we could survive on his salary while I built a business. Even if I’d decided to build the business on the side I would still have looked at the budget. We worked out how much we needed to cover the essentials first, then the things that weren’t essentials but which we weren’t prepared to live without. It helped me to work out what my priorities were.
I suppose that’s the one golden nugget I want you to take from this story. If you’re making the leap, be realistic. How much do you actually need to live on and are you making it yet? Are you at a point where you can’t build your business any more without cutting your hours or leaving your job altogether?
Whatever decision you make, good luck! Let me know how it goes.
Have you ever asked yourself that question? I hear it a lot and it’s often from people who are hesitant about blogging. I suspect that there are even more people who don’t ask how long their blog needs to be. They assume that they need to write ‘War and Peace’ for every blog post.
I’m going to say something that might make you go a bit twitchy. When you’re marketing your business you need to decide who you want to target then focus on them. It sounds fairly logical, doesn’t it? Yet small business owners everywhere get very nervous when they hear it. They say things like ‘but I might make someone feel excluded’, ‘what if I lose a customer because they don’t think it’s for them?’ or ‘but I can sell to anyone’. I understand the worry. As small business owners we need to work hard to attract new customers and build trust. The idea of putting people off just seems counterintuitive. However there’s another important factor to consider. We have limited time so we need to spend it wisely. When you get to know your customer you can do just that.
There are three questions I always hear when I talk about blogging. One of them sometimes isn’t a question at all, just a statement. “I would write a blog but I don’t know what to write about.” (The other two questions are ‘how long does my blog need to be?’ and ‘how often should I be blogging?’ – we’ll get to those another time.) When it comes to finding topics for your blog, there are hundreds of different ways to go about it. I’ve written about a few in 
Blogging is wonderful as a business marketing tool and a creative outlet. If you’re writing a blog to promote your business it’s important to know what’s going to appeal to your audience so you can tailor the content to them. You can also air your personal views via blogging. There’s loads of scope to talk about whatever you choose.
There have been a few times recently where I’ve started to feel that no-one else gets it. Logically I know it isn’t true but there’s no accounting for the wobbles a human brain is capable of having. As I write this my mood has improved considerably and I feel much less isolated, but I still think it’s worth talking about the time where I felt really lonely. That’s the only word I can use to describe it.
It’s easy to think of storytelling as being something you do with your children. You can cuddle up at the end of the day and send them off to sleep with a lovely bedtime story. Mine are still young enough to watch CBeebies so we sometimes get the added bonus of a tale read by Tom Hardy. (I even know people without kids who tune in to watch him anyway!) If that’s how you think of storytelling you might be forgiven for having dismissed it as an effective marketing tool. Actually, it’s one of the most effective approaches you can take.
I suppose the question should really be – are you bored of going to workshops that all blend into one? Or are you the person who’s responsible for organising them? It can be tough to find new ways to make learning more interesting. That applies whether you’re a sole trader looking for some good quality training or part of an organisation where there’s a set pattern to your sessions. When it comes to blogging training, it is possible to find workshops that work for you. I can design a session to include whatever works for you. In the meantime, here are some ideas for things to look out for at your next workshop.
What springs to mind when someone suggests you should write a blog? Do you think of all of those influencers that you see on Instagram getting wined and dined in return for a good review? Or maybe you think it’s something for professional writers or marketing agencies? It’s true that you can pay a professional to write your blog for you (me for instance). You could even do some blogger outreach to get product reviews or more social media exposure. But there’s absolutely nothing to stop you from writing your own blog if you want to. There are lots of misconceptions about blogging. I’m going to tell you about a few of them – are any of these getting in your way?
As some of you will already know, I run workshops and training to help business owners start writing their own blog. Things don’t always go to plan but that’s OK. Getting together with other business owners is generally a good thing in my book. I wanted to share a story (because that’s what I do) about how a workshop went a little bit wrong and still worked out brilliantly.