Today on the blog, I’m sharing something I struggled with last year: how to know when it’s time to quit your full-time job for your side hustle, which in my case was my wedding photography business that I had been growing on the nights and weekends. It can be hard to know when exactly is the right time to say goodbye to your safety net and those predictable twice a month paychecks. On one hand, if you make the jump too soon, you could be setting yourself up for failure and lots of unnecessary stress to try and scale your business fast, but on the other hand, if you wait too long you could burn yourself out and hurt your business growth in the long run. I also struggled with the notion that I was throwing away my career and everything I worked so hard for at the University of Michigan (read more about that here) but I ultimately realized that that wasn’t the case! I did a ton of research and asked lots of different people for advice before I made the leap and would have loved to read an article like this when I was making that decision. Hopefully this helps some of you boss babes out there struggling to make the same one! Here are the top three things I considered when deciding to quit my job:
Have you done all you can do to maximize your time?
I was waking up around 6:30/7 AM most days and spending an hour or two in the morning before I left for work answering emails, wedding inquiries, and prepping the days blog post and social media posts. I would take my full, hour long lunch break every day and while I was eating, I would be posting to Instagram and answering whatever emails had come in since the morning. I also sat in my car in the parking lot many days listening to business podcasts or reading blog posts about business and photography related things trying to keep learning and growing as much as I could! When I got home from work, I would eat a quick dinner and then most days sit back down at the computer to edit, since that needed a larger chunk of my time. Most Saturdays were spent at weddings and I tried to fit in as much time for friends and family with whatever free time I had and it was getting tougher and tougher to balance a life and work, which leads me to my next point…
Bookings
At the start of 2016, my goal was just to book as many weddings as I could. I wasn’t worried about how many days off I would need to take from my job or where I would find the time to edit them all. I figured I would just work until I couldn’t juggle both anymore. It wasn’t until I looked at the calendar in the middle of September and realized I had 7 weddings in October, and the first two weekends in October as well as the first weekend in November had weddings that were all out of town. That 30 something day period would have me in Traverse City, Chicago, and New York City, plus shooting 5 other weddings around Detroit. That was the point where I knew I had to do something. I looked at my bookings for 2017 and realized I had enough on the books to cover all of my normal living expenses and I had about 13 more weddings booked going into 2017 than I had booked at the start of 2016, so I was confident I would book what I needed. And that lead to my final deciding factor…
Salary matches or exceeds full-time income
When I ran the numbers before I quit, I realized that my photography business was bringing in more money than my annual salary at my demanding full-time job that was keeping me away from my business 40+ hours a week plus an hour a day of drive time! Seeing that was like a punch in the gut. I remember thinking, why in the world did I wait this long to quit?!! Even though I probably could have quit my job a bit sooner, I’m glad I waited until I got to this point. It allowed me to have a huge safety net when I took the full-time leap because I was already able to fully replace my income from my full-time job. It also afforded me the luxury to save up quite a bit of money as an emergency fund and I knew I could fall back on that should something happen in my business where bookings slowed. This was especially important to me because I had purchased my first home in 2016 and now had a mortgage each month. This was the last piece of the puzzle where once I sat down and took a hard look at the numbers (which trust me, can seem scary) I realized I was going to stunt my business growth and do it a disservice if I didn’t take the chance on working for myself and seeing where I could grow this giving it my full attention and working on my dream 40 hours a week instead of someone else’s!
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