Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. Got a question from Mike A. who asks, Hi, can you please do a video on what to do before starting a consulting business and how much money is needed to start the business? Okay. So I'm going to assume you have a job. So assuming you have a job and you do a thing that you believe that you're good at and you have an idea that you could go out and freelance doing that thing. So for me, my only cube job ever was doing file maker development in-house at Staples, the office supply superstore. And eventually I became dissatisfied with the arrangement there. So I went solo. I didn't go solo. I went out to look for a consulting spot. So I ended up getting a consulting gig through a small firm. I was a full-time employee at a firm and I sort of learned how to do freelancing and consulting through that firm. So that was great. So that might be one step for you as a kind of a easier self into the pool kind of thing is go from like a full-time employment, if that's what you have, a sort of corporate job, go to a small firm, pretty small, maybe five, 10 people maximum. So you've got good access to the owners, the founders, the leadership so that you can kind of learn from them how to do this thing. So going from like an in-house position to a consulting or a freelance position through an agency is a nice transition phase. It was for me anyway. There was a lot more I needed to learn that I even knew about. So that was a very good move for me. But if you do want to go straight to freelancing, let's say you're a Rails developer and you've been in-house, how much money you would need to save, I can't give you a number, but I would want three to six months of living expenses in the bank. If you're going to do it really comfortably and not be scared to death, then minimum of three to six to if you just want to be super safe about it, that would be a very risk-free way to do it. A lot of people can't do that. Maybe they're in a really bad full-time job. Maybe their boss is horrible. They're really stressed out. They haven't got a lot of money saved up and they just can't stand it anymore and they want to go solo. Another thing you can do is to work with your employer to sort of consult back in for them, but you've got more autonomy and freedom. So maybe you're not in the office every day, you're not in the office at all anymore, but you work for them on a freelance basis to kind of be your first client. So I guess if you hated your boss, that would be a bad idea, but it can be the case that you're disgruntled for whatever reason. You don't like to commute. You want to start working from home. So you leave, you say, hey, I'm going solo, but if you guys want to hire me back on a contractor basis, I'd be interested in talking about that. So you can kind of fund your leap by doing some part-time consulting for your former employer. If you do go through a firm, you could perhaps do a revenue share with clients that you service at the firm if you're going solo from a firm. I don't know exactly what your employment arrangement is. Another thing that I recommend a lot, and I wish I had done this, I did it a teeny bit, but I wish I had done more of it, was while you're employed and assuming that you're not like in a bad situation and you have to get out of there immediately, I would start building an audience of the people that I think I want to work with once I do go solo. So this has got a lot of benefits to it because it gives you the sort of security of knowing that there's a market there, that you know how to reach them, and that you speak the same language. You're already helping them for free with like a mailing list or a podcast or a YouTube channel before you even leave your day job. So you're doing your day job and on the side, you're building an audience around some angle on what you do. So if this sounds tricky, it's because it kind of is, but it's much safer to do it while you're still getting a paycheck instead of you go solo, you run out of money, you don't have any clients, and now guess what you have to do? You have to find clients. It's the same exact thing as building an audience. So better to do it now when you're not trying to make a sale, you're just trying to connect with these particular kinds of people and help them with a problem that they have that you can apply your expertise to and create, I would really say a mailing list. I don't know if a mailing list is an uncomfortable thing for you or if it'd be easier to do like Instagram stories or a podcast or a YouTube channel, but the mailing list idea is great for lots of reasons.

about the magic of mailing lists before but you own it, it's portable, there's very little that someone can do to change an algorithm and disconnect you from your audience. So to me that's probably the safest one and the most powerful one is a mailing list. So I've given you a range of options, I don't know that much about your current situation but hopefully that's helped. Yeah, so if you, dear listener or dear viewer, have a question, just hit me up on YouTube, Twitter or LinkedIn with the hashtag AskJonathan and we will find it and answer it as soon as I can. See ya. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at ThePricingSeminar.com. That URL again is ThePricingSeminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time? Or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space? Or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal? Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to JonathanStark.com slash call. C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.