The strategy that helped me quit my job

Quitting my job was one of the scariest things I have done in my life. I was living paycheck to paycheck, had a family and a baby daughter. In addition to this, I had a lot of bills to pay and credit card debt. My financial obligations were about as much as I was making in my day job and sometimes even more. My credit card was my stimulus plan from time to time. I pretty much could not afford to quit my job or else I would be putting my family in jeopardy. I came up with a strategy that would make this possible and reduce the risk of failure from 50% to 0%. Considering I had no room for failure, I planned for 100% success.


My Strategy
1. To commit to a money plan before quitting my job.
2. To identify my unfair advantage.
3. To ask myself if I was passionate enough about this venture.
4. To validate my plan with people who were familiar with my work.
5. To make connections to start getting clients. 


100% success?
That is correct. I did two things which are essential to success. One, I gave myself no chance to invite failure into my plan - and two - I energized myself with a positive mindset to attract the success I needed to bring this plan into fruition. Math and statistics could tell me otherwise, but for me it was a mental hack that I had to reach for 100% success. 

How it all began..
I came up with a down-to-earth money plan to save up all revenue generated by the business until I had enough to support my family for at least a year after quitting my job. I did not know how long this was going to take me, but made a decision that I would not quit my job until this milestone was achieved. I needed this strategy to allow me to try out my business venture and give me enough room to completely focus on my work without worrying about money. 

I started my business in January 2007 and quit my job 8 months later. This was faster than I ever imagined. I wanted to start a business to capitalize on my unfair advantage. And this was for me, identifying problems and finding a way of solving them through software. 

I have always been passionate about programming because it is one of those things that I could do for days at a time and never get enough of it. It is like drinking coca-cola. 

I decided to start a technology based company to create applications and websites. There has always been a market for software solutions and as the world migrates more from the real world to the online world, the demand is only going to get bigger. 

I had also experienced some previous success freelancing in the past and got customers to love my products. I needed to validate my plan and reached out to some of my old freelancing customers and asked them to give me their opinion on my venture and their response was very positive and encouraging.

Finally, I reached out to one of my best connections and one of my closest friends Libardo Lambrano who had a web development business at the time. I told him about my plans and asked him if he could pass me some leads in exchange for a commission. He kindly agreed and this is how it all began.

Your Take
Planning, planning and more planning. Do what it takes to make sure if you ever plan to quit your job that you have all sorts of plans  in place, but most importantly a money plan. Do not put yourself or your family in jeopardy to run your own business. I came up with a well planned strategy that ended up working for me. I am by no means claiming that my strategy is a cookie-cutter strategy that will work in all cases. I am simply sharing my experience and my outcome. I hope this article has given you some insight into the strategies I used to quit my job and hopefully bring you some benefit. 

Thanks for reading and come back next week for my next article on how inspiration and gratitude helped me start my business. Please take a minute and leave me your feedback on the article and/or the blog.