Choosing when to leave corporate world to strike out on your
own, is a very dicey decision to say the least. It reminds me of
the decisions friends were making twenty or so years ago, about
having children or not. Waiting until you think you can afford
children, will pretty much exclude you from ever having any.
Likewise, waiting ntil you can afford to leave the corporate
world, where things are relatively safe and secure, might also
exclude you from ever doing that as well. It only complicates
things if you are starting up a venture that is unrelated to
your present line of work. How will you know? How will you even
have a clue, about the potential success of a dream venture?
The Internet can make things simpler, and I will tell you about
my path of leaving a job I had held, and hated for the most
part, of nineteen years. A job that provided me and my family,
health care, generous vacation, and an honest to goodness old
fashioned pension. And left me with an ever growing feeling that
I had sold out my entire life for these securities and my
natural fear of risk. Indeed, it always came down to health
care, and not for me but my children. When my two oldest were
toddlers, the papers were constantly reporting on children
needing transplants and surgeries, that were not going to be
performed because the parents lacked health care. It seemed
health care was the only way to secure medical care when the
need arose. My wife also was a stay at home mom, and was not
open to even considering me leaving my job. Divorcing her three
years ago in a way, was the first necessary step to my jump to
entrepreneurship, even though just days ago she called making
sure her alimony would be forthcoming as per usual. Having it
deducted from my paycheck was her way of still exerting control
onto my life. Or was that just my bitter perception?
OK, my path. I had begun using a hobby to sell things on eBay.
Nothing relly unusual about that. Except my wife did not support
me in actually making money doing something I enjoyed. Within
six month we were separated, something I must say has worked out
great for me and my kids, and those of you staying together for
the sake of the children ought to have your heads examined,
because your children deserve to see their parents as happy
people. Anyway I digress. In two years I took my hobby from eBay
to the world wide web, and was making something like $700 month.
The problem was, I couldn’t make any more at it without quitting
my job, and I couldn’t quit because when you actually brought it
down to the nuts and bolts, I would never make enough being my
own supplier. I, then advertised for other hobbyists to sell me
their wares, and that worked not at all. People were gung ho,
for about two months and then bagged it. Well, one June, a full
two years after I began I had a house guest for the summer. I
was complaining that my days off were filled with filling
orders, and the whole summer was going to be done, and I
wouldn’t even had had time to enjoy it. And he said ’so quit’, I
thought about it for about two seconds and went fishing. I
closed the website, and took all the auctions off eBay, closed
the eBay store, and viola, I was done.
The last six months or so of this two year period, I had toyed
with the idea of importing my product, and selling them on eBay
and a new website. I enjoyed marketing the website, I enjoyed
writing articles on the hobby, I enjoyed everything else about
the business except producing the product. The only problem was,
the risk. Sending money to third world countries and waiting a
month for the product to arrive, went against every grain in my
being. And this is where being single paid off, because if it
didn’t work I would never have to hear about it again. So I
contacted some manufacturing companies, and sent them money via
Western Union and fretted. But the items came. I sold them on
eBay for way less than I did when I produced them myself. I had
to change my marketing spiel, come up with a new target
audience, and began developing a new website.
This went on for fourteen months, and I was back to working all
my free time again. Yet now I was making over $2,000 a month
with no limits in sight. In other words the more time I put in
the more I would make, and I even had my sons help me, and I
paid them. There was no cutting corners this time, Google ads,
eBay power seller, the sky was the limit. But also limited was
my time. I had specific goals in mind to reach before quitting
my job, but burn out became more and more pronounced. I asked my
supervisor if I could be down sized so I could collect
unemployment, which would make up the difference I needed
between my business and my salary. I was stockpiling cash like
never before in my life. But, what I wanted was there to be no
risk.
And then one day I snapped, I snapped at our sales director, and
he went to my supervisor, and viola I was laid off. And I,
immediately felt the shackles of slavedom released. Now I am
free. Read the chronicles of my new entrepreneurial venture,
learn Internet marketing, learn from my trial and error, and
read my thoughts, on the loneliness, the singular existence, the
life of no going back. Learn from my mistakes, learn from my
victories at http://ebusinessman.blogspot.com/.
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
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Posted by admin in Commerce Ideas 
