When To Quit Your Job

When should you quit your job?

This is a common question that I get and the answer is more geared for someone that is already making money online.

If you aren't yet making money in a business, then you should stick with your job until you have another income stream set up as a business that you can depend on.

In this video, I cover the most important things to consider BEFORE you quit your job and when is the best time to tell your boss to take a hike and give your 2 weeks notice.

Watch the video below:

(Click here to watch on YouTube)

[smart_track_player url=”http://www.buzzsprout.com/9299/361876-plm-245-when-to-quit-your-job.mp3″ social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_gplus=”true” ]

Video transcript

All right, when to quit your job. What's up, everyone? This is Stefan from ProjectLifeMastery.com. In this video, I'm going to answer a common question that I get from people that are making money online. They want to know, “When should I quit my job, give my notice to my boss, and then pursue my online business full time?” It's a great question. Great position to be in. One of the best decisions you'll ever make in your life.

I remember the day I quit my job

I haven't even looked back since. My life is so much better as a result of that. I'm really happy if you're in this position right now, it's a really amazing place to be. A really big transition in your life. A big game changer. You want to make sure when you make this decision, you're not making it in haste and you're protecting your downside and you're being intelligent about it.

This is what I recommend for people that want to quit their job. First, just because you're making money online, that doesn't mean that that's going to be sustainable and secure over the long term. Really that's one of the most important things you're going to look at. You have to understand that the Internet is volatile. It's always changing, things can happen.

Especially if your online business is set up in ways that are somewhat outside of your control and you have to depend on a force outside of yourself. For example, if your business is built dependent on Amazon, then the challenge and risk of that are if Amazon decides to change something in their business.

Then, you're directly affected by that or if your online business is dependent on YouTube or Google or something that's outside of your control like that. There's always going to be some risk associated with that, that you really need to understand and be aware of. With that being said, I always recommend to try and diversify your income.

Diversify the traffic in your online business

I'll give you a good example of this. For me early on in my Internet business career, I was building different websites and ranking them in Google doing a lot of search engine optimization. One of the challenges with that was that I was making money online. One of the challenges was that I was so dependent on Google that when Google changed their search algorithms, it immediately affected my online businesses. My online businesses went from making a certain amount of money, I think around 5,000 dollars a month to down to making 2,000 dollars a month. That really hurt me. That was a lot of money to me at the time. I was living off that money. I was really dependent on that. This was actually happening to me in 2012 by the way. I remember one of the changes happened the day that I was going to South America. I actually had a video blog, you can go back to my YouTube channel and see it.

On How to Overcome Adversity. That was the day that I was going to South America. Faced some big adversity in my online businesses. Really hurt me, didn't know what I was going to do. A lot of uncertainty. I really had to focus on just moving forward and overcoming that. That was not a very fun or comfortable position to be in.

Hopefully, I can help you avoid having to deal with that, just by making a little bit better of a decision before you decide to quit your job. Understand, you've got to look at how your business is set up. If you're dependent on Amazon, or Google, or Facebook, or one of these big platforms like that. There's nothing wrong with that.

Understand I try to diversify my business

For example, if you're a Kindle publisher, one of the things that I teach is to set up another Kindle publishing account. A KBP account, in order to do that you need to set up another corporation or have that under another entity. You can even do that with Amazon Seller Central, Facebook, Google, other platforms as well.

What that will allow you to do is that will help protect you. If something happens to one of your accounts for whatever reason – you get suspended, you get terminated, you get banned. Hopefully, you're following all the rules with Amazon, with Google, Facebook and you're compliant. There's always still some risk.

I've heard horror stories of people, for example, that they use PayPal in their business and all of a sudden PayPal terminates their account and takes all their money in their account. I've heard that happen with email autoresponder software as well, where they terminate your account and all of a sudden they basically ban you from using their services. That's happened with Kindle Publishing and even Amazon Seller Central.

Again, that's primarily if you're violating copyright or doing something that's against their terms of service. Understand these are things that can happen. I'm not saying that they will. You always need to anticipate and protect yourself as much as possible. I would look at all the downside, all of the things that can happen. Have some systems in place to help protect you from that. Setting up multiple accounts is one strategy.

If you're building a Kindle Publishing or Amazon business and primarily you get most of the sales and income from Amazon, then I'd also recommend setting up Facebook pages, build an email list. Build some assets outside of Amazon, because if Amazon decides to change how they rank things or delete some reviews which they do from time to time, who knows what could happen.

You want to make sure that that doesn't really effect you that much. Diversifying your income, diversifying your traffic. If you're making some money right now from Kindle diversify with Createspace, with Audible, that will provide some different income streams for you also. Have an email list with affiliate marketing.

Then, that way, if something happens to one or two books you may have or one or two parts of your business, then you're still making money. You're still going to be okay. That's one piece that I recommend. Really looking at your business and really try and protect your income a little bit more.

Be a master at managing your money

At a certain point in your online business, once you're making significant money you're going to want to invest in lawyers and even accountants to help go over your business to make sure that you're not violating anything and you're protected from anything that can occur in your business also. The next thing is just because you're making money, again that doesn't mean it's sustainable.

What I'd recommend is make sure that, number one, you know what your expenses are. You should be a master at managing your money. That means making sure you're tracking what your rent is, your mortgage, your car payments, your gasoline, your food costs, your internet bill, your cell phone bill. Make sure that you're tracking, you know exactly what your expenses are every month.

Then how much you need to make in order to pay for that lifestyle and the current expenses that you have as well. If you can try to avoid enhancing your lifestyle, meaning buying a nicer place or buying a nicer car, or upgrading your lifestyle.

That's always more ideal, because the more expenses that you have, the more money you're going to have to make in your online business to be able to replace that, to be able to replace your job. Often times people that I work with, they might have a 6 figure job and make a lot of money and it's actually more challenging for them to quit that job. They're used to making so much money from that job that they're still a little bit too secure at that job.

I was really lucky because I quit my job when I was 21 years old. I never looked back since, but I always kept my expenses low. If the internet thing didn't work out, I knew I could always easily get another job to help make enough money to pay for my expenses. That's one benefit of making sure you keep your expenses relatively low.

You've got to make sure that it's somewhat stable and secure

Now, once you know how much you need to make, I recommend that you're consistently making that amount of money for at least a few months. At least 6 months, I'd recommend, because in business it's not like your income is stable and flat-lined like this. You might have some months where your income goes up and then it's going to go down the next month, it goes up the next.

It's always maybe like this, up and down. You've got to make sure that it's somewhat stable and secure. That you can expect and depend on making a certain amount of money for a period of time. I also recommend that you have some savings, at least three to six months of whatever your expenses are, have that put aside. Have that saved.

That's just in case something happens. Just in case everything disappears. Just in case, you have a bad or slow month in your online business. You can have that reserve that you can depend upon that can help pay some of your bills and expenses. You want to typically avoid getting in debt, credit card debt especially. Especially if it has very high-interest rates.

I'd try to pay off debt as well. Those are the main things that I'd really look at. Make sure that you're patient with it. Don't try to rush certain decisions like this. Take your time. You have time on your side.

There is an advantage to having a job and having an income. In some cases, there could be a little bit of an advantage having a job and having an income while you're trying to build an online business because at least then you'd have some money and cash flow you could invest in your business.

You can outsource and hire people to do a lot of different things for you. Sometimes I know people, they quit their job and they work at their online business, full-time. They don't know what to do. You have all this free time and all of a sudden they don't know what to do with it because in some cases your business might not require that much time either.

It's always about working smarter, not necessarily harder

It's always important to ensure that you factor in that you're making enough money that you have money aside you can invest in your business. Put aside to maybe save as well as invest in other investments also for the long term. Hopefully, this video is helpful for you in helping you make that decision.

One of the best feelings you'll ever have is that moment that you go to your bosses office and you quit. You just feel totally free. It's really exciting. It's one of the best feelings. I remember for myself different moments because I used to hate waking up at a certain time and having a job, having to be somewhere. Having to listen to someone else.

It's really one of the most amazing things that you ever can experience in life. Really that you'll never forget. Hopefully, once you make that decision, you'll never have to go back. I know for me, the pain of going back to having a job has been something that's seriously motivated me and driven me forward even more. Just going back to a certain lifestyle, going back to a boss.

It's hard once you've already had freedom to go back to something like that. Anyway, if you've quit your job, maybe you're in this position. I'd love to hear about it. Leave a comment below. Love to hear about your experience. I'd love to hear where you're at? If you're not quite there yet, then no worries. There are many opportunities that I recommend.

Spend whatever time you have for the week and your evenings and your weekends working hard and commit yourself. In a matter of months, you're going to be in a position where you're ready to quit your job and move on to a new lifestyle. Thanks for watching this video guys. Leave a comment below. Like this video. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.