Katie McManus walks through whether to tell your boss about a side coaching business. First, check your employee handbook for explicit rules. Then look at your company culture: what happened when colleagues started their own projects.
Welcome to my seven part series on how to start a coaching or consulting business on the side of your full time 9 to 5 corporate job. A lot of the advice that I'm going to be giving you in this series is stuff that your manager will not want you to hear. Full warning. Okay. But my job is not to be your executive coach. Hi, I'm Katie, your practical business coach and I help new business owners leave their corporate 9 to 5 and replace their 6 figure salaries by doing work that they love that actually helps people. And you know what, when you're first starting that business and you're working full time, sometimes you're going to have to be a little sneaky. One of the number one questions that I get from my clients and new business owners is should I keep my new business a secret from my boss and from my current company? And you know what? Yeah. Sometimes. Sometimes you absolutely need to keep it a secret. Okay. There are a few things that I look at when I'm helping my clients figure out how secretive they need to be about their new business. So in this part one, I'll be telling you exactly how you can decide if, if you need to keep this a secret or not from your employer. Number one, we need to look at your employee handbook. Are there any rules that explicitly ban you from starting a business while you're working for this company? If yes, then absolutely. We need to keep this a super duper secret. If not, then we need to move on to stage two. We need to look at what the culture is. Just gossiping. Go and ask people, has anyone started a business while working here and find out what the response was from hr, from their managers, from their teams. If anything bad happened, if they got fired, they got put on a pip, why was it that they were managing their time badly? Was it that they just had an asshole boss? What's your boss like? Okay. Once we understand the culture of your company, we then need to look at a few other factors and I'm going to be going into that over the next six parts of the seven part series on how to start a business on the side of your corporate 9 to 5. So like and follow to see those and just don't tell your boss that you follow me because they'll start getting suspicious.
