Will This Be the Year You Create Your Own Business?

“Unless you build a habit of making money on your own, standalone, you will find yourself, at some point, depending on the whims of someone else who will run your life. When it’s too late.” — Nassim Taleb

?Are you frustrated by your job?

Thanks to what I do as a career advisor, I’m always talking with people who are frustrated with their jobs and lives. We like to think that we can completely separate work from our identity and life, but we’re kidding ourselves.

If you have a bad day at work, it tends to follow you home. If you’re having trouble at home, it shows up in how you work and interact with your colleagues.

I often discover that this frustration in life happens when people feel stuck. If work is going well and your career is advancing nicely, you don’t question things. The questions only arise, and the frustration sets in when you hit a ceiling, feel stalled in your career or don’t see a clear path forward.

After a few years of repeating this pattern, jumping from company to company only to inevitably face the same frustrations again, some people wonder if they should break free of the 9–5 grind and start their own business (I know that I finally snapped).

Take everything you know and love doing, and flow that into a new business. Leave everything behind that you hate about your job. Carefully craft your new entrepreneurial career to eliminate all of the things you found frustrating in your old gig.

Easier said than done?

Sounds great! The only problem? You have no idea what kind of business you want to create.

First, it seems overwhelming. There are more than 30M small businesses in America alone (~400M globally) and the North American Industry Classification System has over 500 pages of business classifications.

There are so many business structures and types of businesses that you could start that you don’t even know where to begin. How do you focus? How do you choose one idea in which to invest your precious time, energy, and money?

Next, some people think they have nothing that they could offer as a business. They are accustomed to being an employee, deeply specialized, and being pigeonholed into a specific role. With those blinders on, they can’t imagine being independent or having customers or clients willing to pay them for something.

It just isn’t clear what they have to offer. They are interested in starting a business, but they fear that their only path is to go back to being an employee for a similar company.

Here’s the good news

If you’ve been successfully working in the corporate world for a decade or two, you do have something of value that people will want. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it helps to focus on where you’ve developed your most in-depth expertise.

I’m going to simplify things. If you want to scratch your entrepreneurial itch, I’ve observed that it boils down to 3 types of businesses.

1. Selling what you can do.
2. Selling what you know.
3. Selling whom you’ve become.

What can you make or do?

I’ve found that this is one of the easiest businesses for a 9–5 employee to start. Why? Because it is based on what you already have several years of experience doing in your day-to-day job. You have either been providing a variety of services, creating some product, or maybe even a little of both.

Examples from my social circle:

• An accountant who started providing business accounting and tax preparation services.
• A designer who founded her design service consultancy.
• A software engineer who became an engineering contractor for hire, and then he started developing and selling his software.
• A PR leader who left a corporate job to start her own business providing PR services on demand.
• A field service technician who began offering in-home HVAC repair services on his own.
• An in-house recruiter who spun out to become an independent headhunter.

I know how quickly you can create this type of business. I have witnessed first-hand many of my friends in Silicon Valley Tech do precisely this over the past 20+ years. Some have been independent for decades. Plus, this is what I did when I first left my comfortable 9–5 job lifestyle and became an entrepreneur in 1998.

I quit my job as a senior designer at a startup and formed a solopreneur “design agency” in less than a week. I had my first client before I quit my job, and I added additional clients over the next few weeks. I sold what I could already “do.” I provided my software design “services” for years as a full-time employee at IBM, Apple Computer, and a couple of startups.

Whether you’ve realized this yet or not, you are a "product" and successfully managing your career is like running a “Business of You.” The value you create for your employer isn’t very different from the services a consultant would sell to your employer to replicate what you do.

A useful exercise is to transform your current detailed job description into a business plan. How would a business describe its services if it offered what you do day-to-day? What would that company charge? If your employer hires contractors or consultants to provide similar services, what are they paid?

For me, the transition from employee to independent business owner was almost seamless. I was comfortable with the service I provided, and I had my Silicon Valley network to tap into for discovering new clients.

I also formed deep friendships with several other independent consultants who were doing precisely the same thing in design, engineering, QA, and program management. We would often bring each other on for big projects.

Finding customers was reasonably easy during the Dot-com Boom in Silicon Valley. As I would discover later, I was spoiled and didn’t learn about the importance of marketing, advertising, and lead generation until much later in my career.

The only new and challenging part of running a business was the accounting and paperwork. I still don’t enjoy that, but it has become much easier to outsource many aspects of your business that aren’t directly related to your core offering.

One of the drawbacks of a business that sells goods you create or the services you provide is that it is an active revenue stream. It requires that you are involved, is limited by your time, and you are primarily selling your time for money.

You can hire employees to scale the business, or if the “goods” you create are digital goods (e.g., software). But, an exciting transition from this first type of business is to move on to selling what you know, vs. what you can make or do.

What do you know?

If you’ve been in the working world for many years, you have acquired a great deal of knowledge, skills, and experience. This “Toolbox of You” can be packaged up and sold as books, courses, training services, workshops, and more.

Unlike the first type of business, which is typically considered “active,” this business can generate active and passive income streams. “Passive income” is a bit of a misnomer. It requires a great deal of diligent work to capture the information and put the system in place to generate passive revenue later.

Selling what you know takes you into the world of consulting, vs. feeling like a contractor when you sell what you can make or do. It also feels amazing to help someone with your hard-earned experience and knowledge.

There are several options for providing your knowledge live in training sessions, workshops, and speaking engagements. You can also capture your expertise and offer it in a course format that can be sold virtually forever, without your active participation. Creating courses has become easier than ever before with services such as Podia, Udemy, Thinkific, Skillshare, and Teachable.

Successfully selling your knowledge does require that you’ve consistently demonstrated your expertise, can honestly back up your claims of experience, and have some solid social proof. Competition has heated up in this space.

Thousands of people will claim that they have the same knowledge and experience that you do. You will need to stand out and set yourself apart with proof of your expertise (e.g., through writing and speaking), validated experience (Linkedin helps here), and testimonials and recommendations (which are invaluable when they are from other reputable people).

Who are you?

For this third type of business, you must have achieved a degree of visible and recognized success. I will admit that this is the most challenging business to build of the three, and not everyone will do it.

It goes beyond what you can make or do, or even what you know. It is based on who you are, your career and life path, your notable success, and the resulting lifestyle you now enjoy.

Think Oprah, Tim Ferriss, and Michelle Phan. Their fans don’t just want to learn from them; they want to become them. They want to follow in their footsteps.

This type of business isn’t about hiring such people to create a good or provide a service. They are beyond that. This business isn’t even really about paying to learn what they know. The implied sales pitch is more like this:

“Do you see my success? Do you want my lifestyle? Read my story. This is my rise from rags to riches. Attend my event, buy my book, and discover how you can follow in my footsteps to achieve my success and become the next me.”

A real-world example

Ok, we’re not going to be the next Oprah. But don’t get discouraged. This third business is achievable for folks like you and me. You will need to focus on your niche and find your 1,000 true fans, but it doesn’t have to happen overnight (which is a good thing because it won’t happen overnight).

It’s a natural progression for people to take their business through phases from type one to two and then three. They start out offering their services, then they start capturing their knowledge to sell as a course, and eventually, they have enough success and fans that people will pay to learn how to follow in their footsteps.

I’ll use the example of a great photographer. I know someone who developed decades of experience in the industry, and she now has her own successful photography studio business.

Over the past few years, I watched her take her business from what she could offer as photography services to teaching courses leveraging her extensive photography knowledge. It eventually evolved into the third type of business of how to become her: a successful business owner with a thriving studio.

Her first business/income stream

Products: She sells a client booking toolkit.

Services: You can hire her photography services for weddings and family portraits.

As her second business began to take off, she dialed back this first business, mostly selling time for money. We all know that it doesn’t scale well and has inherent limitations.

Her second business/income stream

Courses: She has classes on how to find new clients, secrets to excellent wedding photography, how to capture someone’s real personality in portrait photography, etc.

Now, as her third and more lucrative business began growing, she let the courses become a passive income stream that only requires occasional updates and tweaking.

Her third business/income stream

Selling her path: She has a premium offering to learn everything about following her path of breaking into the photography business, scaling it successfully, and now running a profitable studio.

This business may seem like a nuanced difference from the second category of “what you know.” The difference is that the focus isn’t just on acquiring some crucial bit of knowledge from her in a course here or there.

Her followers desire to become the next “her.” I’ve referred to this as a “career hero” before, and how much you should focus on what your hero does day in and day out (vs. focusing on what they have).

Transforming frustration into success

I’ve spent about 13 years in corporations and startups and another ~14 years running my own companies and businesses. I’m thankful for the people I met, the lessons I learned, and the experience I gained.

However, working for someone else can be frustrating. Most of us don’t have great bosses, which is one of the most significant determinants of our happiness and satisfaction.

The longer you work in a specific type of role and for a particular kind of company, the harder it is to imagine doing anything else. You may have even forgotten what it is that you wanted to do with your life in the first place. You may be tempted to break free and start your own thing but feel stuck, overwhelmed, and at a loss for what “your thing” is.

I hope this helps you see that you do have options. Of course, you should always strive to improve your job and make it work for you. Of course, you can always look for a better job at a different company.

But now, I hope you understand that you could also wrap up your unique talent, skills, knowledge, and experience and create a lucrative business from that package (more quickly than you may have thought).

I wish you the best of luck!

Feel free to reach out if you need any support, advice, or guidance.

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Larry Cornett is a Leadership Coach and Business Advisor. He lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children and a Great Dane. He shares professional advice that helps you reclaim your power and regain your freedom! You can also find him on Twitter @cornett.