If you’re currently in a work situation where you feel stuck in a job and you want to leave to create something that you own and control…

…you are the reason I wrote this.

I worked in the corporate world for 8 years. 

During that time I developed many valuable skills that still serve me today. I am thankful for my time in the corporate environment. 

However, I also know how easy it is to get trapped in that world. It almost happened to me! 

Thankfully, because I always knew that I wanted to build something different for myself and my family, I was able to figure out a way to exit without putting my family in any sort of financial risk. 

My goal is to share with you the steps that I took to build a more fulfilling life, doing work I enjoy and work that rewards me financially even after I’ve put in the time. 

Ready to dive in?

Ok – first I want to give you some context on the situation I was exiting from. 

Here are the highlights:

• I worked in the corporate world for 8 years
• The last four of those eight, I was essentially an internal digital marketing consultant at a very large corporation
• I made enough money to allow my wife to stay home with our two young kids; one infant and the other under age 5
• The work wasn’t that hard for me. It was more meetings than work.
• My co-workers were (are) nice people

Not a bad list huh?

I didn’t have an overbearing boss or demanding workload. Yet…

Every morning, on the drive into the office, I dreaded the day ahead. I couldn’t escape the feeling of being TRAPPED.

I actually felt guilty sometimes of being so unhappy because I knew I had someone’s dream job. 

But I couldn’t ignore that voice inside of me that was begging me to jump ship before the Golden Handcuffs came out. 

So before I even knew what I would be jumping into I started Step 1 in the process:

Step 1: Build Your Revenue Runway

With two little kids at home, the thought of not being able to provide for my family financially terrified me.

At the same time, I also knew deep down that I would never let that happen. I knew I could go find another job if this entrepreneur thing didn’t work out.

But to push that potential reality further and further into the future I knew I needed CASH.

So I set a goal to save up 6 months of income before taking the leap.

Notice I said income and not expenses.

Six months of expenses would have given me a lower number to hit. But I wanted the extra cushion.

This is all kind of based on your own level of risk tolerance.

If it was just me, my risk tolerance would have been incredibly high. 

With a family though? It sank like a stone.

So I saved up six months of income instead.

And as I said above, I started saving before I had any idea what I would do next. 

That’s my advice to you.

If you know you’re going to leave your job to build a business, but you don’t know what kind of business you’re going to build…go ahead and start putting money away.

Because there will come a day when you gain clarity (see Step 2) and when that moment hits you’ll be glad that you started preparing early.

Speaking of Step 2… 

Step 2: Why Are You Unhappy?

The reason this step was so important to me is because I wanted to know specifically what I didn’t like about my current situation so that I could avoid recreating it in the future. 

If you don’t know what you’re trying to avoid there’s a good chance you’ll just recreate it in whatever you do next.

We all have blindspots and I wanted to know mine.

One of the most effective ways for me to process an open ended question like “Why am I unhappy?” was with a simple pros and cons list. 

My guess is that during the last four years of my corporate career, I probably did a pros and cons list quarterly; at least three times a year.

So this isn’t a one and done type of step…at least it wasn’t for me.

For every list I made, I took all of the cons and I started asking “Why is this a con for me?”

And I would journal. 

When I journal I find I can process my thoughts faster than if I’m running over everything in my head.

I was obsessed with understanding what was driving my dissatisfaction. 

For years, the closest I could get in this process was saying that “I want freedom.”

I didn’t want to trade time for money and I didn’t want other people to have so much control over my life.

Wanting freedom was a good start but it wasn’t specific enough.

And when something is unclear, definitions are your friend. 

Define the thing you want.

So I would write out what freedom looked like for me in detail. 

When you’re stuck it feels like prison. Getting unstuck is freedom.

I would describe to myself what being unstuck looked like for me. 

>> When would I wake up?

>> What would I do first thing?

>> How would it feel to start the work day? 

>> What was I working on?

These types of vision casting exercises were helpful because they allowed me to dream about a life I could have some day. They gave me a clearer picture of what the “AFTER” photo of my life would look like.

I knew what the “BEFORE” photo looked like because I was living it! 🙂

Probably one of the best “vision casting” exercises I ever did was following the Core Influence process that Frank Kern describes in the video below. This is old school Frank and it’s worth your time.

I went through this process in 2012 and I can tell you that more than 10 years later, when I look back at what I wrote it’s kind of surreal how many of my dreams from 2012 are reality today.

My advice is to bookmark this page and come back to the video when you have time to go through the process. You’ll need about 90 minutes.

Vision Casting is a good practice and I encourage you to go through the video above if you’re interested in following a process instead of figuring it out on your own. 

In my experience, the more I worked to describe the life I wanted, the clearer the differences between my current state and my future state became. 

And when you compare those differences to each other you can start to see what’s really driving your dissatisfaction. 

In my “future state” I started to notice that I decided on the type of work I would pursue. And I was motivated to do the work because I was building a Revenue Engine that would continue to pay me after the initial work was done.

It was so obvious to me that there was a huge gap between working for a salary and working to build a money engine that you own. 

I wanted the engine over the guaranteed salary.

That’s when I first wrote down the phrase Unlimited Upside.

As soon as I wrote that phrase down I felt clarity. It perfectly described the essence of what I wanted. 

I wanted to be in situations where I could get paid for my work over and over and over again regardless of the amount of time spent. 

It might sound silly but just having that phrase gave me such focus.

I needed to pursue opportunities that provide me with Unlimited Upside.

The other component I noticed in my future state was the freedom to work from anywhere.

Even if I never used that freedom, I wanted it. 

So I wrote down another phrase: Location Independence.

Those two phrases, Unlimited Upside and Location Independence, became the filters that I ran every decision through when executing my exit plan.

“What decisions?” you may be wondering.

Well, this is more of a nod to Step 3 but I knew that I would need to start a side hustle that would bring in cash.

I’ll go into more detail about this in the next step but it’s worth mentioning here because as I was assessing side hustle opportunities, I now had a filter. 

“Would doing xyz thing lead me closer to or further from Unlimited Upside and Location Independence?”

But more than that, these two phrases led me to a HUGE realization which may seem counterintuitive to you at first.

But stick with me ok? 🙂

I realized that I didn’t have to start a business.

I always thought that I had to be an entrepreneur if I wanted to be happy. I’d bought into the idea that entrepreneurship was the ONLY path to having full control over my life. 

Today, I don’t think that’s true. 

You don’t have to start a business to make a lot of money while also having tremendous freedom and control over your life.

I knew that there were a lot of ways I could gain location independence without starting a business. 

And I knew that there were plenty of ways for me to build revenue streams with unlimited upside without having to start a business. 

I didn’t know what they were…but now that I knew what kinds of opportunities I was looking for, I knew I’d be able to spot them. 

It’s something I call the car shopping effect. 

Have you ever had the experience where you’re thinking about buying a specific type of car so you look it up to get some prices online?

Then for the next month you start seeing that car EVERYWHERE on the road!

What happened?

You gave your mind a new thing to focus on and it started spotting it.

The cars were always there but we ignored them because they weren’t relevant to us at that time.

It’s the same way when you get clarity on what you want. You’ll start seeing opportunities where you hadn’t before. 

You judge everything by whether or not it moves you toward or away from the thing you want. Or in my case…the two things I wanted. 

So, so powerful.

So I knew what I wanted. 

And my “ah-ha” was that I realized I didn’t have to launch a new business to get it.

Now, I obviously DID start a business but the point I’m trying to share with you is that I realized I didn’t HAVE to. 

I had options to achieve the two things I was looking for.

The more you can eliminate black and white thinking, the freer you’ll be.

So now that I understood what was at the core of my unhappiness and I knew what I was aiming for, I was ready for Step 3 in the Exit Plan.

Step 3: Create Cash Flow

The final step in my exit plan was to create cash flow outside of my 9-5 job. 

For me, I chose to offer the new direct response copywriting skills I had started developing to other businesses through consulting.

More on this below…

I had always resisted doing consulting. 

It felt too similar to trading time for money. But my new filters of Unlimited Upside and Location Independence helped me become more open to consulting on the side. 

You can read more about this part of my journey and how I got my initial clients here. 

But for some quick context…

Copywriting was the part of direct response marketing that really clicked for me. It was something I enjoyed and wanted to get better at. 

So that’s what I started doing for people on the side. But copywriting wasn’t my front end offer. I actually started by helping people with more technical tasks like building landing pages and managing podcasts. 

And what needs to go on those landing pages? Copy.

What do podcasts need to attract the right listener? Copy.

Again, I go into more detail about how I got my first and second clients here.

For the purposes of this Guide, I’m keeping it high level. 🙂 

All of that to say…

I do believe that productizing your skills as a service is the fastest path to cash.

If you’re resistant to the idea of consulting the way I was, here’s my advice.

You need consistent cash flow if you want to exit your current job situation. 

You can build a product which takes a lot of time.

Or you can sell your skills as a service which is something you can start doing right now. 

I was able to get to the place mentally where I knew that even though consulting wasn’t what I wanted to do long term, it would allow me to move closer to the life that I wanted. 

When the pain of staying in your current situation becomes greater than the pain and embarrassment you imagine you’ll feel when you step out on your own and fail, you’ll do just about anything to get out.

If that’s where you are right now;

If you’re miserable driving into work every day…

If you dream of doing something different with your life…

If you look at your calendar and you resent the fact that someone else is deciding which meetings you’ll attend…

You have to do something to get out or the resentment and stress will kill you. 

I’m serious. 

Life is a limited time offer. 

When I started having regular side income coming in, it built momentum and gave me confidence.

I consulted on the side for 18 months before I decided to leave. 

During those 18 months, even when I got pulled into one of those boring corporate meetings, I knew that I had the upper hand. 

I was ALLOWING my boss to pull me into a project or meeting. I felt like I had regained my power!

Eventually, my consulting income got to be within 80% of my salary. 

And on a July afternoon that I’ll never forget (more on that here), I knew it was time to execute the plan to leave. 

I was gone by October. 

Summary

I hope it was helpful for you to read some of my story and experience. 

I encourage you to take the parts of what I’ve written that work for you and ignore what doesn’t. 

Your journey doesn’t have to be like mine. But if there are parts of my journey that help move you forward, hold onto those and run with them.

To summarize how I planned my exit from corporate:

1. Build Your Revenue Runway – I did 6 months of income
2. Take Time to Understand Why You’re Unhappy – Define what your future state looks like and compare it to your current state. The difference between the two will be obvious and you’ll see what you need to focus on. This is not an overnight process. Do this regularly.
3. Create Cash Flow on the Side – I started consulting on the side to bring in cash and eventually replaced 80% of my income. It’s a huge momentum boost to see money coming in every month that’s NOT from your job. If you don’t want to do consulting that’s fine. But you will need to create cash flow somehow if you don’t have other sources of income…and especially if you have a family.

To wrap up, here’s what I would tell you if you were sitting across from me right now.

I would look you in the eye and remind you that your situation, your unhappiness…it’s temporary. 

Unfortunately, too many people are content to trade in their happiness for the feeling of security. That is a trade that leads to more unhappiness, anger, resentment and stress.

And it destroys families. 

I don’t want that for you. 

But you have to “not want it” more.