Quit your corporate job and start your business - the smart way!

Hey new listener, thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on. Don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you, Squirrel in this episode, I'm going to tell you the smart way you can quit your corporate job and start your business when you have ADHD. Squirrel High score, Katie I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the weeniecast. One of the most exciting questions that I get as a business coach is how do I quit my corporate job to go full time in my business? And let me tell you, I have helped a lot of my clients do this. There are a lot of things to consider, but it is one of the most freeing, satisfying and empowered things you're ever going to do. But it does have a lot of things that you have to figure out. There are a few ways you can do this when you're starting a business. You can either quit your job to start your business and have all your time available for your business, or you can do what I tend to recommend, which is starting your business on the side of your 9 to 5. This does a couple things. It gives you that buffer so you can build up a monthly revenue while you're still pulling a salary. All that money that you make from your business in that time you can put into savings, which will give you a Runway. If you are good with money and you've saved and you've planned for this, there's nothing wrong with you quitting your job and going full time in your business. It really depends on how strong your stomach is for risk. If you can handle the not knowing when things are really going to pick up, then do whatever you want to do. But if you tend to be risk adverse, if you tend to not thrive when the pressure is on, then I highly recommend building it as a side hustle. Whichever way you decide to go. The first thing you want to consider when you're thinking about going full time in your business and quitting your corporate job is doing the money math. This is figuring out how much Runway you have to go with. And Runway typically means like how much money do you have to live off of while you're ramping up your business? Are you going to be going off of savings? Are you going to borrow money? Do you have enough monthly recurring revenue coming from your business already that can cover some Stuff. One of the things that most people are most stressed out about, especially in the United States, is what am I going to do about health insurance? Right? Because typically when you're employed, that's one of the main reasons people like to be employed, is because you get health insurance through your employer. They subsidize a good chunk of it so you don't have to pay for the full policy yourself. And it's just automatically taken out of your paycheck every week. Now, thanks to former President Barack Obama, getting health care insurance on the open market is so much easier for Americans now. It's also a lot more affordable. A lot of employers, when you quit, will give you the option to stay on their insurance plan through a program called cobra. Do your own research on this. But I have found that COBRA programs are so stupidly expensive. I paid for COBRA for a little bit when I first went out on my own, and let me tell you, it was $500 more expensive, expensive than the insurance that I qualified for through covered California. So do your research. Figure out what you can get on the open market. If you're married and your spouse has the option to put the whole family on their insurance, that's also an option. That's an option I did not have because when I started my business, I was single, single, single. The other thing you want to think about after you give notice, because this isn't really something you can ask before you give notice, is you want to go to HR and you want to ask them if you can carry over the disability insurance that they have on you when you go full time on your own. When I started my business, this is something that I thought of after the fact. And I went to a financial advisor to try to figure out if this is something that I could sign up for. And they told me, you know, the hindsight story is that it would have been better if I'd thought of this six months before, like. Like after I given notice and was about to quit, because it's a lot more affordable if you get it through an employer. And some policies will allow for you to carry on a single policy as you break out on your own. Other things you want to think about are, like, what are your retirement accounts? How much money do you want to be able to put towards those? What are your daily, weekly, monthly expenses? What is your absolute baseline for survival and what will set you up for success? Foreign. You also want to plan for the unexpected. I highly recommend having an emergency fund for things that come up. A flat tire, an unexpected Medical bill, your child being accepted to some premier athletic club where you're going to have to. You spend a stupid amount on fees and travel. That's something that I did not have when I started my business. I did not have an emergency fund. I ate through my savings and you know my whole story. I got myself into some serious debt in those first few months of me being full time on my own. And I don't want that for you. Do as I say, not as I do. Once you figure out all that math, you're gonna have all the information you need to be able to create a plan as to when and how you're gonna go full time in your business. When you're thinking about leaving your job, you also want to consider what is your notice period going to be? How much notice are you going to give this employer? Now, I want you to remember that the more notice you give, the better the relationship is going to be long term. So if you're able to give them a couple or a few months notice so you can really wrap up projects, you're going to be on fairly good terms with them going forward. Now, one of the things that your employer probably doesn't want to lose is your institutional knowledge. So one of the things that you can offer when you give notice, if you've been involved in certain projects that are ongoing, if you've already been mentoring other people within the company and helping them climb the ranks, is you can offer to continue coaching those individuals or working in an advisory capacity on those projects. I've had numerous clients like quit their jobs and through the quitting process, land clients that help them ramp up their initial monthly revenue. And it's one of the best feelings ever to be able to quit your job but still kind of be involved and still make money from the company that you escaped from while you're starting work on your dream. A few models you can do here is you can do classic coaching for any individuals who are going to be taking on responsibilities you had or who maybe will be taking over projects that you are doing. You can do the consulting model where you are involved in a few meetings a week and just continuing to put your two cents in on what should happen. So coaching is one way that you can continue working for your employer after you quit. Another way is to be an advisor, a paid advisor. So basically you would be available for the occasional phone call and maybe one meeting a week to be able to point people in the right direction, answer questions, tell them who to turn to for certain problems. You could Also continue doing some consulting work where you're doing some of the work that your previous role required you to do. This is especially possible if there's no one else in your company who's qualified to do that or who has the capabilities of doing it within their available time. Now, you can only do this if you leave on good terms. They're not hiring you. If you kick over a bunch of chairs, emptied the garbage on the floor, and try to burn the building down on the way out, okay, if this has been a miserable job, if you've hated everyone, if it was toxic, if you need to just walk out one day, you do, you boo, I support you in whatever you feel you need to do. But I'm also a big fan of you making money. So if at all possible to maintain that relationship and continue making money from this company while you're working for yourself, I think that is a win win situation. Now let's talk about the managing the fear and the anxiety that comes up when you go out on your own. Right? Your nervous system has gotten acclimatized to getting a weekly, bi weekly paycheck. It's on a schedule for here's when we get the resources that allow us to get other resources that cover our survival needs. When you break away from that and you start your own company, that cycle goes away and your nervous system really does have to recalibrate to whatever schedule it is that you're bringing in money. This is particularly hard for people with ADHD who tend to be impulsive spenders. And especially when we are stressed out, we tend to spend to get a little dopamine drip. I'm sure you've had that experience of having a really rough day and thinking, you know what, I'm just going to swing by Target on my way home and buy a little knickknack and treat myself and I'm going to feel a whole lot better. Now that's fine when you have consistent income coming in every other week from your job, but if you're in the early stages of your business and you're not making a lot of money and it's not consistent, you want to find other ways to manage your anxiety and to give yourself that dopamine drug. Because here's what ultimately happens is what used to give you that feel good energy when you're a full time employed, it would give you that little drip of dopamine that would help you turn that day around and actually enjoy your evening with whoever you're spending time with. When you're full time employed and stressed out about money. It'll help. For about five minutes, you'll walk out of the store with your bag, you'll feel good about this silly thing you bought, but five minutes will pass and you'll start punishing yourself thinking, God, I'm such an idiot. Why did I spend money on this stupid thing that I don't need when I'm not sure when money's coming in again? Which, as you know, when we start punishing ourselves for something, we tend to get into kind of a downward spiral and we start looking at all the things that we're doing wrong. And once we start looking at all the things that we're doing wrong, we start spiraling even more about how this is never going to work. And we all know that for you to have a successful business, one of the first steps is you have to actually believe that it's possible. If you spend too much time in this downward spiral of oh my God, this is never going to work. You're right, it's never going to work. And so these little decisions that you set yourself up for of going and doing some emotional spending, you want to be very conscious about when you do this because I'm not saying you can't do it at all, but you want to be very aware of what the consequences are going to be. Some things that really helped me when I went full time and I really had to figure out how to manage my anxiety was meditating, going for walks, talking to friends. I started going back to therapy when I started my business. I've been in and out of therapy as an adult. I think most of us have. Sometimes I'll get on the phone with someone who has experienced a lot of trauma either through work or relationships, and they are burned out on being part of a system. So like they want to break away from their corporate job and they think that starting a business is going to be that ticket to freedom. Unfortunately, if you have any underlying shadow work that needs to be addressed, starting a business will bring it all to the surface all at once. And you will have to address it as you're trying to build this. Do the mental and emotional work first. I cannot recommend therapy enough for new entrepreneurs. You are walking into the unknown. You're doing something that you've never done before. There is no guarantee that it's going to work. And literally unless you are independently wealthy and you are doing this for fun, what hangs in the balance is your ability to survive. That's what money represents for us in this world. If we don't have money, we can't afford food, we can't afford shelter, we can't afford water. All very important things I will say also a big part that got me through that fear and that anxiety was working with a coach, working with someone who, even when I doubted myself and my ability to succeed, they believed in me. Someone who could talk me off the ledge and point me in a direction, just say, hey, go do that. That was a massive help for me to manage my fear and my anxiety as I started full time. Things you want to be very careful of. I know during the pandemic a lot of people turned to wine to manage their anxiety. I remember there was that classic Tiktoker reel of that man who went for a run through his suburban neighborhood. And as he's running, he's filming all the recycling bins and all the bottles of booze and all the empty containers and just saying, yeah, like, we're all freaking out about this. When you're starting a business, it's really easy to reach for things that will numb the feelings of anxiety and fear. But as we know from research and from experience in the world, people with ADHD do have a predisposition to addiction. So you want to be very careful with that. Something that will create a little more anxiety and fear for you. And I'm sorry to laugh, but this happens for absolutely every one of my clients. ADHD and neurotypical is that you are going to have what I call kind of freedom overload in those first few months of working for yourself. Especially if you've worked in a structured 9 to 5 corporate job. You know, where you showed up, you had to sit your desk, you had to go to the meetings, and you were constantly paying attention to your corporate calendar. You know, when you go full time on your own, you're not going to be as busy as you were in your nine to five. You're going to have a lot to do, but you're not going to be beholden to a very specific schedule because you make the schedule. And I guarantee you in your first two or three months, you will miss calls. That happens to every single one of my clients. They miss a call, either a sales call or a client call, because they get out of the habit very quickly of checking their calendar. And I say this not to like, be like, don't do this, this is terrible. But to normalize it and to tell you you're not alone, if this happens to you, it happens to the best of us. And it's not going to be the end of the world. One of the tricky bits about having ADHD is we oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. One of the biggest challenges I hear from new business owners is how hard it is to figure out what to post on social media and to stick to consistent schedule with it. Because it's hard. And so in the month of May, I'm actually launching a challenge to help you build that muscle of posting every single day. Each participant will get their own customizable content plan for the month of May. An extensive list of content prompts so you have an endless bank of ideas of things you can post that work with your content plan. Every Monday through Friday we will have a 45 minute Zoom call at 9am Eastern where you will create your content and one lucky person per day will be able to volunteer for for the coaching hot seat where I will help you fine tune your messaging so that your content can help you attract high paying clients. If you can prove that you posted every single day for the 31 days, you will win a 30 minute one on one coaching call with me. Normally I charge $497 for this, but for the whole challenge for your content plan, for the content prompts for this 23 daily calls that you're going to get throughout the month. It's only $197. This is my birthday gift to you this year and I'm so excited to hold your feet to the fire and make you post every day about your business and get more clients. If you're down for a challenge and you want to join us, then go to weeniecast.com challenge I can't wait to see you. One of the tricky bits about having ADHD is we thrive in structure, but we also have a very difficult time creating structure for ourselves. So some things that will really help you ease yourself into some kind of structure for yourself as you go full time is signing up for stuff that will create structure for you. So for instance, you know, signing up for a daily yoga class that you have to go to, committing to, doing a boot camp maybe there are regular networking meetings that you can go to in your area that help you create a structure around it. Things that make you do something that's outside of your home that you have to prepare for and you have to plan, travel around and then you have to come back to your desk. Your inclination when you start this business is as soon as you have free time to make all that free time available to all of your clients and all your potential clients and anyone who wants to talk to you at any point. This is going to be one of the biggest mistakes you make in starting your business. I don't know a single store that's owned by one person and has only one employee that's open for 24 hours a day. Because if you're just one person, you're going to have to sleep, you're going to have to eat, you're going to have to go to the bathroom. At some point you're going to have to be a human. You're going to have to go out and have fun with your friends and be with your family. You're going to have to have a holiday sometimes. When I first started my business, one of the pits of chaos that I fell into was making my calendar open nine to nine every day, Monday through Friday, and having some availability on the weekends also. I figured this would make me so hyper accessible that people would just sign up for anything. This actually just made my life a living hell because whenever I'm waiting for something to happen, I'm not actually getting done in waiting mode. And so if I had a client call at 10:00am and then my next one at 3:00pm, guess what happened between 11 and 3:00pm? Not a whole lot. I might answer a couple emails, I might respond to people on social media, but I wasn't getting into flow. I wasn't able to really get into the bigger projects that would have helped me move the needle on my business. So one of the things that I really recommend to new business owners is limit the times that your clients can book with you. This will help you time batch your different activities in your business. You will get so much more done than if you make yourself super widely available to everyone. This also creates that structure for you. If you only allow client calls to happen on Tuesdays and Fridays, guess what's happening on Tuesdays and Fridays. You're going to be on calls. That allows for you to create different systems that you're going to do on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays you create content and that's all you do on Mondays. That's going to allow for you to really get into the flow of that. Maybe on Wednesdays, that's when you do your sales calls. Maybe that's the only thing that Wednesday is available for. And you'll be able to go through sales call and sales call and sales call and follow up with everyone with any more information that they need to make A decision with you. And then you make the rules here. So maybe you take Thursdays off, like, live on the wild side. This is your life, this is your business. You set the hours, you can do whatever you want. There's this incredible amount of guilt that happens when you start your business that no one expects. You know that guilt you have when a coworker or your boss walks by behind you and you've been checking Facebook. That like, sinking feeling of, oh, God, they're gonna think I'm not working. Oh my God, they're gonna think I'm slacking off. It's incredible how you will actually feel that immense amount of guilt for being on Facebook during the working days of the first six months of you running your business. Even if part of your marketing strategy is to post on Facebook, you're going to have this, like, overhang of all the, like, oh, I shouldn't be doing this. Oh, I shouldn't be doing this. Oh, I shouldn't be doing this for shit that you need to be doing for your work because it was something that could have gotten you in trouble in your previous J O. B. If this happens for you, just want you to know you're not nuts. It's normal. It's just something that your nervous system is gonna have to get over. Because remember, your brain is designed to identify danger. When you worked for a corporate company and being on Facebook was bad, and if you got caught on it, it could get you in trouble. That's a dangerous thing because it could cost you your job. So when you start your business, like, your brain doesn't switch over immediately. The danger sensors in your brain do not automatically correct for your new environment. So you're going to feel anxiety doing stuff on social media when you're working in your business. And that's so normal. And I promise you, you'll get over it. The final thing I want to talk about that happens when you go, you break away from your full time corporate job and go full time in your business is you have to train the people in your life to honor your new work hours. I can't tell you how many times this happened for me and how often this happens for my clients that once they go out full time on their own and they, quote, unquote, have all this free time, their friends and family are like, oh, are you free on Tuesday because we're going wine tasting. Would you like to come with? Oh, would you mind babysitting our child on Thursday afternoon? Because we have some appointments we have to go to. Oh, I see that you are standing around the house, you know, not really doing anything that's perceivable to me. Would you mind doing this and this and this many tasks around the house since you're just here not doing anything to your friends and family, you will look unemployed, you will appear unemployed until you start honoring your working hours. During the pandemic, when I was locked down with my family, this was something that I had to train my parents on because I do a lot of work on my cell phone. And I totally get how being on your cell phone writing something or being on social media looks like you're just around. It looks like you're just kind of like texting people and messing around and having fun. That was my work. And I can't tell you how many times I'd be like mid writing a whole marketing post for my business and my dad would start telling me about something really interesting that he saw in the news and he started telling me the story and I felt so, so bad in those moments because I'd have to stop him and be like, dad, I'm right in the middle of writing something and I have a train of thought and I don't want to lose it. Can you hold this for a little while? Can you tell me about this later? Because I can't focus on this right now because I'm going to forget what I'm trying to say here. And this is this. I'm actually sitting here doing work right now. There's also, you know, to combine the previous point with this point. You know, you'll be sitting at home and on social media and you could be on social media taking a break from the work. You could be playing a game on your computer, taking a break from the work, and your spouse or your child or your roommate will walk past and you're going to feel judged by them and they may make a snide comment of, oh, must be nice to do that. Must be nice to not have to do work all day. If you let those comments get to you, you're going to be less productive. Those comments are dopamine killers. One of the best things that you can do for yourself as you're building this business is to keep your mood positive. And some things that keep your mood positive are playing games on your phone, watching cute cat videos on YouTube, death scrolling on Instagram, or TikTok for funny Reels. Those things actually do make you happier in the moment, which makes you more able to learn, which gives you more access to your creativity. Both are Incredibly important things for you to have when you're starting this business. This is going to be something that you have to learn so much in so little time with a lot of pressure on you. Being able to learn faster is just going to help. If watching 20 minutes of Cat videos is going to help you be happier and learn better, go and watch the cat videos. Don't let anyone shame you for that. At its core, you just have to get really good at setting boundaries with your loved ones. I will also add that starting a business and going full time into it and betting on yourself in this way is one of the bravest, hardest things you're ever going to do. And I know you're smart and I know you're capable and I know you have figured out tough things before. This is not a test to prove how smart you are though. This is not a test to prove how capable you are of figuring out. This is starting a business. So if you get up and running and if you're struggling to land clients, and if you're struggling to figure out what to do for your marketing or how to create an offer or any part of the business, I want you to recognize that you were never taught this in school. They don't teach entrepreneurship in elementary school, middle school, high school, or college. Unless you take a very specific entrepreneur class, which I have had clients who've taken entrepreneurial classes and they said that it was completely useless in actually starting a business. You also did not come out of the uterus naturally knowing these things. Some things that you did come out of the uterus with, knowing how to breathe, knowing to blink, knowing to cry when you're hungry. Okay, Nowhere in that list is knowing how to find a niche, create an offer, market the offer, sell the offer, all those things. It's not something that you have to expect yourself to know inherently. And also I want to remind you, the only reason I train on this is because I had a 10 year career in sales and marketing. I just so happened to work in industries that had business models that were very similar could be transferred over into service based entrepreneurship. I hit the jackpot with all the things that I did that led me up to knowing how to do this stuff. If you didn't have that list of experiences, it's okay that you don't know what you're doing. It's acceptable. It's not proof that you're not smart. It's not proof that you're not capable. It's not proof that you can't figure out you absolutely could but how long do you want to take? Figuring it out is the big question. If you're independently wealthy and you're doing this for fun and you just really love complicated puzzles and putting random shit together and just throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what works, then absolutely take as long as you want. But if you need this business to actually make money so you can pay the bills, then you have to figure out what does that figure it out timeline. And when is that moment that you're going to have to say, you know what, I either need help or I need to give up. And if you hit that point or if you realize you just don't want to waste the time trying to figure it out, then I want you to go to the link in the show notes and I want you to book a generate income strategy call with me. And the link for that is weeniecast.com strategycall. On this call we will break down exactly what your big dream is for this business. Talk through all the things that you're getting stuck on and building it by yourself. And if it's a fit for both of us, we'll talk about different ways to work together. And if it's not a fit for both of us, I will point you in the direction of some resources that will massively help you. One of our neighbors has a massive like 120 pound Irish wolfhound and Luna doesn't like dogs that are bigger than her. She like is really like vocally mean to them. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Join the Weenie cast Hyper Focus community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls, turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this. At the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast. Do. Com Hyperfocus. All one word. That's weeniecast. Com Hyperfocus.