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How I Started Working For Myself

Posted by Paul B | April 24, 2008 .

Giving up a full time job to go and work for yourself is a scary thing to do. You’ve certainly got to have self confidence but luck and some guts also don’t go amiss. In my case I left a nice little cushy government job, if I’d have stayed my salary this year would have been about £30k a year, 30 days a year holiday plus up to 18 flexi time days. Up to 6 months full sick pay, a non contributable final salary pension scheme etc etc…the benefits just go on and on. If you’re looking for a stable “nice” job then it would be ideal. Unfortunately it was never me.

I only fell into that government job because things went rapidly south in the IT sector where I live, companies going under, absolutely no jobs that would pay a real salary. Cheap labour, you can’t stop market forces. Unfortunately within 3 months of starting in 2003 I knew the public sector wasn’t for me. Too many people stuck in their ways content with a life that guaranteed them pay rises, knowing that they couldn’t be sacked meant that everybody just dawdled along shuffling bits of paper and doing as little as possible. Well all except the 10% who were required to work flat out to make up for everybody else (I did promise a couple of these jobs when I was sorted). I couldn’t stand it, I was used to working hard and playing hard, this was more turning up to work, spending 50% of your time bitching about how slack everybody else was, the other 50% whinging about how your pay rise was never enough and then going home tired from actually doing nothing. It was not an existence I could ever grasp so I started making plans early, I had to spend the next few years gritting my death and baring it.

In order to break away my first job was to design a family budget. What exactly did we need to make as a family in order to survive (survive first, grow later!), once I’d analysed everything it turned out that we didn’t need that much it all. Take away my wife’s income and I needed to earn £1000 a month in order for us to survive. This was with cutting back on all the luxuries that we didn’t need, they key with this was to go through the list of direct debits that come out each month and see what you do and don’t need. In my mind up until this point I was thinking about going back into the world or private sector IT work (which had recovered slightly by this point), however with such a low amount I saw an opening of what would maybe be a once in a lifetime chance to work for myself. It would require some sacrifices but oh what an opportunity.

The next step was to plan just how I could make £1000 a month. At this point I already had a growing web empire, I started my first website in 2001 after the down turn in the IT sector and was now starting to make some money online. Adsense that started of as $20 a month and stayed that way for several years was now growing rapidly to the point where I was at first getting a cheque every month and then getting a four figure amount paid directly into my account each month. This gave me the confidence to start several more websites, my aim now was consistency. Whilst in a good month I could make more than enough to survive in a bad month we’d be very poor. My first tactic was to add Adsense to my new websites in the hope of providing extra sources of Adsense income and levelling out the peaks and troughs a bit. It never worked quite as well as I wanted as my time was now spread more thinly amongst more websites. Quality content rules. With working 8 hours a day in my normal job, supporting my free software and creating new web content I had to work my ass of for 18 months before things really started to come together.

I got lucky (If you can call 2 hours a day of keyword research lucky) with a few niches and then started looking at ways of diversifying my income streams and finding something other than Adsense that would pay. Affiliate marketing seemed an obvious answer for the large amount of traffic I was seeing. As with Adsense it started slowly but within 3 months I had another source of income that almost equalled my Adsense earnings. Commission Junction and Click Bank in particular were sending me payments every month. It was now coming up to Christmas 2006. I’d put 3 months worth of salary in my bank account, I’d made more than £1000 for at least 3 months with my online earnings…I handed in my notice…ready to start work for myself on the 1st of January 2007. On the first of January I transferred £500 of my savings into my newly created business bank account and that was me.

There were a couple of assumptions I’d made at this point that maybe others can learn from:-

1. Just because you put more time in does not mean that you will make more money
2. 3 months is not a long enough consistent time to base life changing decisions on

Of course within 2 weeks of starting the US Dollar GBP exchange rate was getting worse by the day, I was earning 100% of my income in Dollars but spending in Pounds. Initially working 14-18 hours a day was not directly increasing my income. This was not good. I shit myself. Fortunately as word spread that I was leaving my normal job I was being approached by people about helping them with websites. Whether is was golden balls, years of working with my own sites or just luck every website I’d created was doing very well in terms of natural traffic. I seemed to have a gift for SEO. I was entering markets that I had no right to do well and getting first page SERPs. Those skills were in demand and whilst at first I declined offers in order to concentrate on my own work I did accept a few jobs eventually. There was no point being big headed here, I needed the money. This was enough to get me through the first difficult months after which my new websites were in place, I’d spent serious amounts of time (14 hours a day) researching the best ways of making money from my traffic, increasing my traffic and was now taking this as a very serious job. Yes it was enjoyable but yes it was also very hard work. After 6 months working from home I made the decision to move into an office, this upped not only my output but also the quality of my work. It was another gamble though, more expense with no monetary gain. For me personally there is nothing like a proper work environment for producing proper work and the decision paid off. I’ve not looked back since, working for myself was without doubt the best thing I’ve ever done, I had a bit of luck, a good support network from friends and family and it has worked out great.

By sticking to what I knew, build, optimise, monetise and repeat my websites combined with software sales and the bits of freelance SEO work I do ensure that my family have a very good quality of life. We have our holidays, our own house, 2 cars and nice things. We certainly don’t live to our full means but that’s my cautious nature! I’m always waiting for something to go wrong. Governments, Microsoft and Google rarely disappoint in changing the rules of the game on a regular basis. By diversifying my income not only in terms of what websites make me money but also how they make me money I am building what I hope will be a future proof business. If all is well I’ll be forming a limited company in the next year. Who knows a little bit down the line I might get the chance to employ those civil service slackers I promised jobs! For some people setting up for yourself just happens after 1 great idea and a huge amount of luck, for me it was a careful plan that was years in the making.

If you can do it I can’t recommend working for yourself highly enough, get it right and it can give you a lifestyle that most people truly envy. These are my top 5 tips for deciding if making the break is right for you and what helped me:-

1. First of all make a realistic budget of what you and any dependents need as a minimum to survive. Do not fool yourself at this point.
2. Decide what you have to lose if you don’t succeed, for some people it may put them off, for others it is great motivation (either way give it some thought)
3. Working for yourself is not about taking holidays when you want and slacking, it’s about working harder for greater reward, if you can’t work hard for somebody else do you have a good reason for believing that you’ll be able to work hard for yourself?
4. Get out of the house as soon as you can, I can’t over emphasise how important it was to me to achieving that next level of income
5. You will need your friends and family, they can refer people to you, help out when you’re stuck or just tell you everything is alright when you think the world has it in for you (Believe me when the exchange rates altered I was in mourning)

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