Barbara Turley’s 4 Steps To Leaving Corporate Life Successfully
Corporate life is a fast and often exciting life but sadly can drain the real life out of you!
After years of living the corporate lifestyle there may come a time where you ask yourself where your career is going, where you personally are going and whether those two things are still aligned.
Your mind starts to wander into thoughts of leaving the corporate world, quitting your job to start a business and having more autonomy and a sense of purpose in your life.
That’s actually the pivotal moment where your entrepreneurial journey starts ….. As long as you have the strength to face leaving the corporate world behind with all its cushy benefits!
Find out how our very own Barbara Turley, Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub took the leap of quitting corporate life to start her own entrepreneurial journey.
Here are Barbara Turley’s 4 Steps To Leaving Corporate Life Successfully
PLAN the Leap. Then TAKE the Leap!
The first time you think about quitting your job to start your own business there will be huge amounts of fear. The whole fear of failure can really hold you in its grip. In our corporate careers, most of us have been quite successful so the fear of failure and how that will make us look can stop even the most enthusiastic entrepreneur in their tracks. The last thing you want to do is leave the big corporate job, the big daddy looking after you, and then go out and fall flat on your face!
A lot of the mental struggle is around the question – ‘when is the right time?’. There are sort of two schools of thought on this issue. One is to do the hustle and continue to do your corporate job, slowly migrating over time to your own business as it gains traction. The other school of thought is to just take the leap and just do it! If you have no choice and there is no turning back then you will have to (hopefully!) fly.
One might seem riskier than the other but in actual fact that is not necessarily true. You have to decide either way and commit to your plan.
The next key steps will help you to decipher which one of the above routes will suit you the best.
Take a lifestyle cut and get over it.
While taking the leap may work in your favor, others fail at it because most people get it wrong. The first thing that everybody needs to do is to be extremely ruthless with your expenses. Because when we’re in the corporate world, we get used to the big lifestyle. We’ve got big mortgages and big lifestyles. You really have to work hard to pay that back for a long time before you leave your corporate job, so that you get used to not having the luxuries for a little while, while you get a business going. Then you’ll be more successful.
It’s going to take four times the time and twice the money to get there. It’s hard, but it’s that level of commitment that you want to do, and you have to take some pain. That’s the truth!
Catch the Build Live Give Podcast with Paul Higgins, where Barbara Turley shares the challenges of leaving a very successful, stressful corporate career and starting her own business.
Surround yourself with people who have DONE what you want to do.
How do you overcome all these fears, the challenges, the emotional and mental rollercoaster that is the entrepreneurial journey?
You may have to change your circle of friends a little bit. Your family and friends who are not treading the same path as you will not get it – not even if they try or you try to explain how it feels. They will mean well but they will potentially (and often unwittingly) sow seeds of doubt in your head that can derail your self belief.
It may not be the best thing to do for everyone but if you feel the need to surround yourself with others who have tread the path you are now on – then do so.Your success might actually hinge on that decision in the end.
It’s not good to bottle it all up. You may say to your friends and family that everything is great because you don’t want them to worry, but deep down inside it may not be true. So it is great to have people that are going through a similar journey who can share that with you.
Find a problem your ideal client will fall over themselves to pay money to solve… today!
If you want to make a lot of money, and get a business that really works for you, you have to find something that people will literally fall over themselves to pay you to do. So you’ve got to find a problem that people will pay money to solve … TODAY! That last bit is the absolute key part of that sentence! Everyone tells you to find a problem and then solve it and bingo you have a successful business but, the truth is, that some people will tell you problems they have but unless they are really motivated to solve that pain today AND pay money to solve the problem you can find yourself barking up a lot of money wasting product trees.
That’s where your idea will come from. You can start your business on that premise and what you’re going to find is, there will be many other problems that will emerge after that – other problems your ideal client will pay you to solve. You have to keep pivoting and evolving your business. You’ll find that quite challenging in the beginning. Because, just when you think you’re onto something, and everyone is delighted with your service because you’ve solved the first problem, then the second problem raises its ugly head and you have to rebuild the whole business around that problem. You have got to say to yourself, okay, how do we remove this challenge from our process? How do we fix our process, such that this challenge goes away?
Barbara Turley is an investor, entrepreneur and Founder & CEO of The Virtual Hub – a business she started by accident that exploded in the space of 12 months to become one of the leading companies that recruits, trains and manages virtual assistants in the digital marketing and social media space for businesses who need to free up time and energy so they can go to the next level.
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