MBA955 Q&A Wednesday: How did you know it was time to quit your job?

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA Show. The 10 minute business workout your business to get buff with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. If you're getting started with your business, the first thing you gotta do is make sure what you're offering your customers is something they actually want. You need to nail that business idea and we're here to help with our seven part video course on Idea Validation. This is a seven part video course with a workbook to make sure that now whatever you're trying to decide your product, your service, your price, you get it right. And this course is absolutely free. You can just enroll over@100mba.net with just your name and email address and you'll get the course instantly again. That's 100mba.net Today's episode is a Q and a Wednesday episode. On our Q and A episodes I answer a question from one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar mba.net Today's question comes from Vernon and Vernon asks how did you know it was time for you to quit your job? Good question Vernon. That moment where you decide hey, it's time to leave my nine to five and be a full time entrepreneur or start working towards that is a very defining moment in your life. It certainly was for me. So I want to share with you my story as well as what were the deciding factors? What kind of flipped the switch for me and then once I made that decision, what are the actions or the steps I took to make it a reality that I am going to become an entrepreneur? I want to walk you through all those steps so if you haven't gone through it yet, you know what to Expect. All right, let's get into it. Let's get down to business. There's no doubt that quitting your job, regardless if you're good at your job, you're petty, or job, you love it, you hate it, it's a hard decision. It's hard to say I'm going to stop doing what I've been doing for years. Everything I know, everything that's familiar is my job, my career. I'm just going to stop it cold turkey. It's scary. And that decision is so critical. So I want to share with you my story. I also want to share with you it's not just the decision that matters or knowing when it's time to quit. It also matters what you do. Once you do decide. Once you know it's time you do decide, what are the action steps? How do you make sure that transition is not, you know, super, super difficult? You want to make it as easy as possible for yourself and everybody around you. All right, so let me just begin by starting out with answering the question directly. How did I know it was time to quit my job? Well, for those who don't know, I was in education for over 13 years. I was a teacher at the high school and university level. And the last six years of my career I was in management. I was head of department at the university I was working at. So I was managing 30 plus teachers, training them, evaluating them. I had a lot of responsibility and I kind of liked it. I was very ambitious. So I'm still ambitious, but in that setting, I really wanted to move up and I did. And I'm super hardworking. I was really hardworking in this job. And this is the prime time of my life in terms of my energy as a young adult. In this period of time, I was doing a management role, a chair, department role, without having the title. I was actually doing the work of somebody who's left the department and they didn't replace this person in this position. So I was the next in line. So I had to take on those responsibilities. But I wasn't getting the salary, wasn't getting the title, I wasn't getting any of the recognition. But I did it anyway because, hey, the team needed me. There was no one in place and I thought, hey, if I could prove I could do the job, then they have to give it to me. Why wouldn't they? So I'm doing this higher management job, this chair position, for two years and not getting paid for it, not being compensated for it, not getting the title. And I'm Starting to get impatient because it's like, hey, they haven't pulled me aside and, you know, officially gave me the position. They haven't interviewed me for the position. They haven't even talked to me about it. They're just happy that I'm just doing the job for them, right? I spoke to my supervisor one day, I said, hey, listen, am I going to get this job? What's going on here? I've been doing it for two years. When am I going to be formally promoted? And then my manager said, hey, the director of the university actually wants to make an outside hire for this position. And at that moment, my heart sank. I thought, man, they just played me, right? They just dragged me along for the ride. I was doing a fantastic job. Two years doing the job, everything was moving smoothly and I made some huge improvements to the university. And I remember when I went home that day, I really felt powerless. I felt like, wow, I can work as hard as I can, I can make huge changes, I can be a go getter and I can be a team player and do all the work, not even be compensated for it. And at the end of the day, I still don't have control over what happens next about my achievement, about my upward mobility in my career. Somebody else is going to make a decision and I have no power over that now. At that time, I was building some online businesses on the side as a side hustle. And I was doing that for about eight years. It was about eight years of me doing some small businesses on the side and I was doing pretty well with these side businesses. And I thought to myself, hey, why do I put all my energy into the side businesses of my life, right? How well would I do? And I thought to myself, I'd probably really kill it because, you know, I'd have so much time on my hands and. And I basically did some small math, you know, some quick math, and said, hey, you know, I'm spending X amount of time and getting X amount of results. What if I multiply that time by the amount of time I'm going to have? I would get these results. So the disappointment that I experienced knowing that I wouldn't get that promotion really made me reevaluate things. Now, if I'm going to be completely honest with you, even before that meeting with my manager, I was kind of ready for a change. But I didn't have the motivation to make the change. I didn't have a reason to make the change because again, sunk cost fallacy. I spent all my time and money and effort to get to this point in my career, all the degrees, all the hard work, all the office politics, all that kind of stuff to get to this point. I didn't want to throw that away. But in a way, that conversation with my manager made me feel like they're going to throw it away for me. So it kind of opened up that opportunity for me. Even though it was kind of a depressing day and a disappointing day, it allowed me to explore other options. Now at that moment, I knew, I want to move on from this career and be a full time entrepreneur. I was scared, I was intimidated by the challenges ahead. I knew my whole life would be upside down. Hey, I was doing well in my career, I was getting paid well. I knew that there was going to be a lot of risk. But I got to a point where I was just like, it's worth it, it's worth the risk. Life is short. Before you know it, you're going to be old and gray. Right? I look back at 2017, where did that year go? It just flew by. Time just goes by. You're going to have to make some decisions at some point. So once I made a decision and I knew, okay, I need to make a change, I want to make a change, it's worth the risk. I knew that I have to have a plan of action to make this transition as smooth as possible. It's going to be challenging no matter what, but if I want it to be as smooth as possible, I need a plan of action. So before you put in your resignation papers, you got to have a plan. So with me and teaching, you know, you had to give six months notice before you resign or before you leave your job posting because, hey, it's an academic year. They can't replace you in the middle of the year. They need, you know, the semester break to do that. And when I decided, it was about maybe nine months from the moment I actually left my job. So I had three months to plan and then I put in my notice once I had a plan in place, and then I had six months of that job left. And I knew that was a deadline I was going to leave then. So I think nine months to a year is actually pretty good. It's a lot of time for you to plan before you exit your job. Now, the things I considered when I planned was how am I going to replace my income? I have X amount of bills. This is how much money is coming out of my bank account every month. How am I going to make sure those things are getting paid? Right now, one of the easiest ways to make sure that happens is to lower your expenses. So I had a plan on how am I going to lower my expenses. I'm going to sell my car. I'm going to move to a city that doesn't require a car. I'm going to stop buying things I don't need anymore, like clothes. I can live without new clothes for a couple of years. Decisions like that, these are tough decisions. You know, a lot of people are not willing to move city, even if it's a neighboring city, to save some money or sell their car. Maybe they think that's drastic. But hey, I wanted the best chance possible to be successful as an entrepreneur. So I was willing to lower my expenses as much as possible. So I planned these things out. I had revenue goals for the business that I'm going to be doing when I am, you know, out of my job. So I started building that business before I left the job, started building the content, building the audience. And if I were you and you're able to, I would actually give as much notice as possible to your employer. So if you could tell your employer, hey, I'm going to be moving careers, I may be changing my life. I like to, you know, move on in nine months. And that way they can plan accordingly. And you have a hard deadline. You can't back out, you're leaving, you know your situation. If that's possible, I highly recommend you do it. Because once I put my resignation in, I knew it was real and I had to plan accordingly. Thy ticket, lady Jennifer of Coolidge.

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One of the best ways I can describe How I knew it was time to quit my job is when my pain outgrew my fear. Let me say that again. When my pain outgrew my fear, I knew I needed a change when the pain of being unsatisfied with my job or the way I was living my life was. And a big part of your life is what you do every day for work. So once I got to that point of so much pain and frustration, it outgrew my fear of making that leap. And for you, it could just be like, I really want to be an entrepreneur. I really want to build something for myself. I want to be my own boss. Those wants could really outgrow your fear. So once you get to that point, you know it's time to quit. It's time to move on. It's just having a plan of action to do it right. All right, Vernon, I hope that helped answer your question. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me at omar100mba.net I'd love to answer it here on Q and A Wednesdays. Thank you so much for listening. If you have two minutes right now, leave us an itunes rating and review. We'd love to hear from you. We read every single review. It lets us know what we're doing right. It also lets other people know what you think of the show. Plus, everybody who leaves us an itunes rating and review enters our weekly random draw to win a free ride to one of our programs. We announce the winner every Friday. You too can win a free ride. Just leave us an itunes rating and review. Alright, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. The most critical decisions in life are the hardest decisions to make. So this is supposed to be hard if you feel like, oh, this is really hard. When do I quit? How do I quit? All that stuff Normal. But it shouldn't stop you from doing it. My own last piece of advice is make sure you know why you're quitting. Sometimes we just need a new job or a new career. Because sometimes entrepreneurship is not the answer to all your prayers, right? So ask yourself questions like if I had a different job, if I worked for a different company, or I worked for a different company doing something else, would I be happier? Or is only being an entrepreneur going to fill that hole in my heart or going to fill that need in my life? Only you know the answer to those questions. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode where we talk about how to turn monthly subscribers into annual subscribers if you have a reoccurring business, Whether it's a SaaS business software, for example, or membership site, how do you lock in people for an annual term that are currently on monthly? We'll talk about that in tomorrow's episode. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. I'll check you then. Take care.

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