What You Need to Know About Starting Your Own Business After a Career Setback
What You Need to Know About Starting Your Own Business After a Career Setback
It’s not easy to find the silver lining in a career setback. Whether you’ve been fired, laid off, or passed over for a promotion, the sting is severe and it may seem like you’ve hit a dead end. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Going backwards on one path gives you reason to change course. Starting your own business may be the way to begin moving forward again. Here’s what you need to know.
Why starting your own small business is the right move
There are a multitude of reasons why starting your own business might be the best decision you can make following a career setback. For one, it’s the ultimate way to put yourself in the driver’s seat. If you’ve had a career setback, you know how it feels to feel powerless to affect your own future. Starting a business removes other people from the equation. You and you alone are ultimately responsible for your own job security, and the sky’s the limit in terms of how high you can climb. It’s a way to put your hard work and determination to the test.
Starting your own business will force you to face your fear of failure head-on, and will remove the possibility of having those “what-if” regrets later down the line. There’s no better time to take a risk than when you’ve gone as far as you can in your prior career.
You should start with what you love
The first step to creating your own business is to figure out what that business is going to be. There’s no better place to start than by thinking about how you can turn something you love – a hobby or passion – into a real money-making venture. Don’t limit your ideas. If you love dogs, think about how you could turn something like dog walking into a real business. Do you love sports memorabilia? What about a buy/sell/trade memorabilia business? Do you know everything there is to know about hiking or fishing? Offer you services to tourists or open up a shop. There’s a good chance that after careful consideration, you’ll decide that you can’t turn a hobby into a real business – and that’s ok. But some people do this successfully, so it’s the first place you should look.
Start thinking about financing as soon as possible
All small businesses need some sort of capital to begin – some more than others. Even if your idea is still a seed that’s yet to germinate, you do yourself a disservice by putting off the financing question. Start considering how you’re going to fund your venture – out of pocket, loans, crowdsourcing campaign, help from family & friends, or a combination.
There’s a good chance you don’t need a brick & mortar
Unless your small business idea involves selling a lot of goods, and it’s important for people to see those goods in person, there’s a decent chance that you don’t need a brick & mortar – at least not right away. Tons of successful businesses can be run online from home or from a modest office. Low overhead is crucial for many starting a new business – and there are plenty of options for this.
One of the main reasons many entrepreneurs-at-heart fail to take the plunge into small business ownership is that they find comfort in the security of their job and they don’t want to rock the boat. But if the boat is rocked for you, it presents the perfect time to follow your dreams. That’s the silver lining.
