Build the Side Business While Someone Else Pays the Rent
I’ve started businesses both ways. Once by leaping: notice handed in, savings on the line, a plan and a prayer. Once by building on the side for over a year while a salary covered the bills, until the side thing was obviously the main thing and leaving was a formality. The first way makes a better story. The second way made money.
The job is your investor
Think of it that way. Your employer is funding your startup, in the form of rent, food, and health coverage, and asking nothing in return except that you do the job you’re paid for. That’s a better deal than any investor will offer you. Don’t throw it away before you’ve used it.
Sell before you build
The fatal mistake of side businesses is spending the evenings building a thing and never finding out if anyone wants it. Reverse it. Find one person who’ll pay for the simplest version, deliver it by hand, and build only what that person needs. Then find the second. The product emerges from paying customers instead of from a plan, and plans are where side businesses go to die quietly.
My second business had three paying clients before it had a name. The first one had a logo, a website, and an office before it had a client. You can guess which one I’d recommend.
Protect the hours
Two hours, most evenings, or one morning and one weekend block. Fixed, defended, not negotiable with yourself. It’s less than you want and more than most people manage. The side business that gets a reliable ten hours a week grows. The one that gets whatever’s left after everything else gets nothing, because nothing is what’s usually left.
Don’t steal from the job
Do the job properly, on their time, with their resources kept separate. Not just because it’s right, though it is. Because your reputation from the job follows you into the business, and your first customers are often people who knew you there. Check your contract for conflict clauses and respect them. A side business that costs you a reference or a lawsuit wasn’t worth having.
Know the number
Decide, in advance, what the side income has to be, for how many months in a row, before you leave. Mine was two-thirds of my salary for six consecutive months, plus the emergency fund intact. The number removes the drama. There’s no agonising about when to jump; the spreadsheet tells you.
Leave well
When the number’s hit, give proper notice, train your replacement, and go out the door with every bridge standing. Several of my early clients came through the employer I left. That only happens if you left like a professional.
What it cost and what it bought
A year of evenings. Some tiredness. In exchange: a business that was already working the day it became my only income, and a transition so undramatic that nobody around me had to worry. The speech would’ve been fun. I’ll take the undramatic version.
This week
Find one person who’ll pay for the simplest version of what you want to do. Block the two hours. Write the number. Then build only what the customer asks for.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
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The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.