Highertrustmarketing.com asks this question. Let’s see if I am ready yet.
1. Have a major goal defined. I know setting goals is great, and it does help a great deal, but it is a weak point of mine. I plan on making my niche travel, so I would probably make my goal, “to produce the greatest online travel guide and travel community”. Perhaps it is a bit lofty, but I believe anything is possible on the internet.
2. Understand your strong points. I think I reasonably good at coming up with various ideas for websites, an average writer, reasonably good at promoting my sites and good at monetizing them. Weak points: poor at design, writing could be improved and generally need to have more solid plans and to have things more organized.
3. Have at least 6-months of expenses covered. I should have this by end of the year. Rather than living expenses, I am more worried about covering my realestate if there were to be any major problems.
4. Understand the rules of the game if you are selling information products. For me this is only a side venture and just one additional source of revenue. I think you either need to spend money promoting your book, or you need to have an ebook that is related to a website with reasonable traffic. For some reason I have had a flurry of sales over the last couple of days?
5. Remove the subjectivity from your decision. Analyse the benefits and risks associated with your intended change.. This is a good one.
Having a job:
Advantages:
- Stable income
- Meet interesting and different people
- Can gain knowledge of different industries
- Structured week (not sure if this is an advantage or disadvantage)
Disadvantages:
- Lost time
- Commuting (fortunately I only have a 15 minute bike ride to work so it is not much of a problem)
- Become too tired to work on other projects
- Potential loss of creativity
Working for yourself:
Advantages:
- Time to do anything you want, anytime
- Can throw away your suits
- Can travel during off-peak times at discount rates
- Work when you want
- Maintain ownership of everything you earn
- Potential to increase your income exponentially
- Greater number of tax deductions
Disadvantages:
- Unstable income
- Potential to loose focus
I think if you have built up a reasonable income part-time, have some money behind you (at least 6 months), have a strong desire to work on your own business, I say give it a try! Having kids and a mortgage would obviously make the decision a great deal harder.
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Great to see you have applied the criteria – everyone’s answers would be a little different, some perhaps coming down harder on the disadvantages of a job versus advantages of a business making the decision an even easier one.
Sounds like you are right where you want to be right now – building your business as a side income, perhaps with greater things to come in the future. Looks also by your responses that you had given some of this thought before hand – that’s great too as many people don’t.
Once you’ve made the decision – #2 becomes the most important question. Playing to your strengths can make the massive difference in your abiilty to dominate and earn more from a market.
Thanks for posting your responses.
Jeff
Thanks for the comment. It was an interesting article at an appropriate time for me.