Have you ever wished that you could become your own boss, and just be able to pay yourself for the work that you do?
I started to have this vision for myself after a decade or two of working for other people.
I had a day job, and it was slowly starting to grind on me.
What I noticed was that the day job really seemed to sap my mental and emotional energy. In my mind, I was trying to clearly separate my life into 2 separate compartments:
1) When I was at work.
2) The rest of my life.
This did not work very well, though, and it was the “emotional overlap” that was killing me.
For example, I would spend a lot of time outside of work worrying about work related stuff. It was hard to enjoy my free time because I was so stressed out about work.
And even when I took a vacation, I was sort of dreading the return to work the entire time, so I could never really enjoy myself.
So one day while I was playing video games, I made a decision.
“This is stupid” I thought to myself. Here I am, playing an expensive video game system that I paid for with money from work, and I really don’t like work, and the video games are even getting sort of boring.
I wanted more out of life.
I wanted my freedom.
So, I decided that I would build a business. Furthermore, I decided that it should be an online business, since I had a background in computers, graphics, programming, and writing. Nothing professional, mind you, but I was always competent in those areas.
So I set out to learn how to make money online. For at least a year or two, I made nothing, and even lost money.
But then I stumbled onto a path that worked for me, and I am confident that it can work for others too. In fact, I have taught my methods to at least two others who have profited from it: my parents and also a friend of mine. Both of them have been able to build a similar business and earn relatively passive income from it.
As my online business grew, I knew that was getting closer to the day when I could finally quit my day job. It was interesting to see how my attitude changed slightly when I realized that I had the power to leave my job behind and strike out on my own successfully. I was relieved, more confident, just generally more excited to be alive–knowing that I was about to take the leap into entrepreneurship.
At the time, my day job was actually paying me fairly decent money, and full benefits. My boss did not want me to quit, and he attempted to talk me into staying. It was during that conversation that I realized on a much deeper level that this had nothing to do with money. They could not double my pay and hope to get me to stay. I wanted my freedom, and I had carefully built up a successful business in order to buy that freedom.
They could not buy me back. I was no longer for sale. I had decided long ago when I vowed to work hard on my online business every day that I was not for sale. I wanted my freedom, and I wanted to become my own boss.
After I got serious about it, the journey took me about 2 and a half years. Here is what I learned:
* Why you will never get freedom working for an hourly wage.
* Separating your income from your time.
* Starting with a lean business model.
* Embracing frugality as part of your long term mindset.
* Dealing with naysayers and doom and gloom people (who convince you to stay stuck in a job you hate).
* Cutting the cord and taking the plunge into freedom.
Why you will never get freedom working for an hourly wage
The problem with working a day job (for me anyway) was the combination of two things:
1) Hard limit on how much I could earn.
2) Lifestyle inflation.
Those two things combined to really keep me stuck in a cycle of earning and spending.
Any extra money that I earned at work (in the form of a raise generally) went straight to buy me more and better stuff.
Now I was smart enough to realize the trap of lifestyle inflation, but it seemed that I was powerless to prevent it. When I got promoted at work and took on more pay and more responsibility, I could not help but spend more money in order to relieve the additional stress I had taken on.
As much as I wanted for that NOT to happen, it seemed to just happen automatically.
I needed a better way rather then the earn-spend-earn-spend pattern.
I saw where that road headed (buy a house with a mortgage, take on additional debt, keep buying stuff, more consumerism, etc.) and I did not want to go there.
I wanted freedom.
And I realized that I was not going to achieve it by working for 13 bucks an hour. This was doubly true due to my need to spend money as a salve for hard work.
Separating your income from your time
The internet seemed like a very powerful solution for me because it allowed me to create a system very easily. If I could create something of value that could be delivered by a server over and over again, then I could effectively make money over and over again without any further intervention on my part.
This idea was tantalizing to me.
So I started experimenting with creating something of value online. This created some initial failures followed by a small amount of success eventually, which I was able to build upon.
I created resource articles that were insightful, original, and helpful for people who were searching for information about my topic. Eventually I added free eBooks to my website that people could download and read at their own leisure. I added a discussion forum at some point as well. In the end, there were over 1,500 articles and over a million words of original content that anyone could view for free.
This is how to decouple your time from your income. All of that content had the power to generate attention, each and every day. The search engines saw fit to send me over 80 thousand unique visitors per month, and this traffic stream could then be turned into income via advertising quite easily.
The internet made all of this possible, and the search engines brought me this enormous audience, all for less than $100 dollars per year in overhead.
The only thing I had to do was to create an amazing website, one that had real value for people who were searching for answers to their problems.
Therefore, the secret to becoming your own boss is to:
1) Create an amazing website.
2) Promote that site so that it gets free traffic.
3) Turn that traffic into money.
4) Kick your feet up and collect checks.
When I reached what I considered a successful point with my online business, I was still working at my day job and I was able to live on about one third of my total income. This was an amazing level of freedom and economic security that I had never before experienced in my life.
Starting with a lean business model
Internet marketing is not something that I would recommend for the newcomer to jump in and just start investing and outsourcing with all kinds of money right off the bat.
You could certainly do that, but I think it would be a big mistake to do so. Instead, you should build your first website yourself until you learn how to become profitable by yourself. It is only then that you will understand what it required in order to effectively outsource the growth of your business.
If you follow my suggestions for building an online business then it will be a very lean business indeed. Your dot com and shared hosting should cost you under $100 per year, and your additional expenses for this business can be just the time that you invest yourself into writing articles. Nothing more is required in order to build an income stream and eventually buy your freedom from your day job.
If you want to become your own boss then you need to treat this as a real business and start acting like a real boss. That means keeping things as lean as possible and not spending extra money that will not contribute to your bottom line. If you are just starting out and have limited knowledge, I would follow my guide for making money online for beginners and expect to only spend $50 to $100 bucks or so in the first year in order to start your business.
If anyone tells you that you need to spend all sorts of money in order to create your online income stream, they are probably trying to con money out of you. The only overhead you really have is hosting + domain (under $100/year) and you may eventually start outsourcing your link building if and when you become profitable (I would not do it before then).
Embracing frugality as part of your long term mindset
If you want to become your own boss then you are going to have to quit your day job and start relying on your own income streams that you create for yourself.
Think for a moment about your monthly expenses and how you have to cover each bill, ever month, over and over again. This is the kind of thinking that you need to prepare with before you actually quit your day job.
If you can lower your monthly expenses, this will have a huge impact on your ability to survive without regular day job income coming in.
How much does it cost you to live each month? A thousand dollars? Two thousand? Four thousand?
If someone put a gun to your head, could you cut that number in half? I could. I would have to sell my car and get a roommate, but I could drop my expense from $1300/month down to $650/month without too much problem.
Now, realize that this frugality angle is actually–in some ways–more powerful than the idea of generating passive income. This is because:
* Money that you save (rather than additional money earned) is tax free. So a dollar saved is actually MORE than an additional dollar earned.
* Every dollar that you spend each month on living expenses must be covered in full by the profits of your business.
* Staying lean and frugal in your household budget and expenses allows you more flexibility when it comes to new business opportunities. Having extra operating capital laying around could allow you to, for example, purchase an already profitable website as an investment.
Frugality is one half of your ticket to freedom. If you are serious about being your own boss, then you need to get serious about cutting expenses. This will move you closer to freedom than you think if practiced consistently.
Ruthlessly cut your monthly expenses down to the bare minimum and your income from your online business will go much further.
Dealing with naysayers and doom and gloom people (who convince you to stay stuck in a job you hate)
When my online business was experiencing real growth, I started to get excited about the prospect of eventually quitting my day job and becoming my own boss. As I shared this excitement with my friends and family, I was shocked to learn that most of their reactions were surprisingly negative toward the whole thing.
Most of them tried to caution me against quitting my job, believing it to be “unrealistic,” “risky,” and “downright foolish.”
Why the negativity? I think it is because:
* Most people have never been entrepreneurs, only paid employees. They are stuck in a mindset that says “steady paycheck = safe and secure.” Of course, a business can go bad at any time, but so can a day job. Businesses fold and people get let go all the time, seemingly without rhyme or reason. A day job is not necessarily more secure than full time entrepreneurship.
* Many people secretly do not want others that are close to them rising above them and gaining this sort of freedom and wealth. This can happen on a subconscious level, so don’t even bother suggesting this to others. They will deny it so fast your head will spin, because they genuinely believe that they want the best for you. Deep down though, they secretly loathe their own day job, and so they have this sort of quiet desperation about them that keeps them int that “herd mentality.” They feel threatened if one of their peers or equals suddenly rises above them.
Cutting the cord and taking the plunge into freedom
So here are my parting thoughts for you if you are really going to go through with this grab for freedom and start being your own supervisor:
1) Keep your business ultra lean with minimal expenses. Focus on income growth through investing your time and reinvesting profits.
2) Keep your monthly living expenses as low as possible, to the point that you are making sacrifices that you have to think hard about. If you can cut your monthly expenses significantly then it is that much more likely that your business will survive. You can purchase at least half of your freedom by simply being ultra frugal. Your business income is the other half of your freedom.
3) When you finally quit your day job, do NOT take a vacation or go on a spending spree. This is your big chance to be truly free once and for all. Buckle down instead and get really serious about producing big gains in your business. Treat it very seriously and dedicate large amounts of time to the business, more than if you were working your day job even. Later on when you have smoothed things out and become profitable on a regular basis with no surprises–it is then that you can relax. Right now you need to go like crazy and push like you never have before.
You quit your day job to buy your freedom but it is much better to err at first on the side of working too hard rather than taking things too easy. Remember all the doom-and-gloom people who said you would fail if you went through with it? Prove them wrong with resounding success by working your tail off for the first year or two.
The reason this is titled “in 24 to 36 months” is because that is about how long it will probably take you to build an authority website and get it producing decent income. You can probably build and rank a tiny niche site and get it producing income much quicker, but the long term payoff and stability is not there. If you really want to become your own boss, you are going to have to build something a bit more substantial, and that takes time.
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