My first lesson after quitting my job to start a business
I hope this helps you in your journey.
How the business started?
First of all, I am not a great risk taker, I didn’t quit to start a business from scratch. As the pandemics made me work from home, driving to work was not necessary anymore and I had a lot of free time.
My first idea was to take some courses in order to improve my skills. That was the plan until my former boss called me to help him out to start a business, a digital marketing agency.
When we worked together I managed the social media advertisement of our company. I liked the job and, as a mathematician, I found the optimization process interesting. I even developed a model that helped us decide from the message to the color of our ads.
We managed the first account; him as the salesman and key account manager, me as the campaign strategist. The result was quite good, our client was happy and we decided to search for more clients.
After a couple of months we got five more.
The struggle
Working from home offered me time to do some new things at the beginning, but as time went by, my home office started to become my office, and all that free time began to be occupied by meetings and work.
As my full time job took up all my time, I started to abandon my 5 accounts. That was the moment when I asked myself whether I wanted my full time job or my side hustle.
It was not an easy choice; if I decided to stay on my full time job, then, my next move was to become a manager and start to think about an MBA (cause all the bosses have one, right?) but if I decided to take my side hustle a step further I might have my own business.
So I took the leap.
The first problem
Since I never managed a team and was used to work mostly by myself, I decided to do all by my own, I had a lot of time, right?
I designed, posted on social media, plan campaigns, set budgets and ads. Pretty soon I realized I was working the same amount of time as before but more stressed since everything was on me.
My first lesson after quitting my job to start a business was: focus on the things that have the most impact and delegate the less relevant things.
After realizing that I was working the same amount of time as before, I decided to make a list with all my tasks, then wrote which ones had more impact on the results for our clients and finally, which ones could be done by another person.
It was easy to recognize that all the designs could be done by a professional. So, I hired some freelancers to help me design. I had to accept the fact that I would be receiving less income from the business, but the quality of our work would increase and make our clients happy. Actually, they even recommended us and that was worth my investment in professional designers.
I still have to plan the campaigns and set them, but as soon as we get more accounts, I am going to continue to delegate work and focus on key activities that bring value to the business and which I enjoyed doing in my previous job.
