Why it took me 6 years to try self employed life

The more Senior (i.e. old) I became, the more people were asking me why I hadn't started my own thing yet. The truth is I had been thinking about it on and off since just before Covid changed all our lives, just on 6 years ago.

It didn't ever really feel that straightforward to me though and as much as I'd love to believe in myself as much as the people who encouraged me to do it do, that's something I've always struggled with.

I basically left high school and went into full time work, with my longest break being 2 months in 25 years so I've definitely become handcuffed/addicted to a salary hitting my account every month, annual leave, sick leave and all the nice things about being employed that I've left behind.

If you haven't see, I've recently made the move to self employed under Hey Mitch, providing Recruitment and Talent Acquisition to Start up & Tech companies so I thought it might be useful to share the thought process I've had and what held me back for so long.

These were the most common doubts I've had popping in and out of my mind every few hours for the past few years:

I am the primary breadwinner in our house

It feels like 99% of the people I spoke to about going out on their own had their partners income to fall back on. Having been the main and sometimes only income in our house, the idea of not having an income coming in next month really didn't feel like an option.

Or an extremely risky one.

The thought of not being able to pay the mortgage honestly kept me at night. Sorry, keeps me up at night. So while there's an opportunity to earn more being self employed, the reality is I could also earn less. Or as my brain likes to think about more - especially around 3am - I could earn nothing.

So while there is so much "You have to do it. Take the leap. You won't regret it" out there, you just don't see enough people say "lets do some maths before you quit your job", IMO.

Would I even like it?

It is hard to know if you like something until you try it, so I did try and do some direct work with clients after hours wherever I could but tied to the reasons above there's always a concern of what if I do it, don't like it and then can't get back into employed life?

Yes I do tend to think of the worst case scenarios but being outside of a major city where remote roles are harder & harder to come by in maybe the toughest job market of my recruitment career, it's not a ludicrous fear.

What if no one wants to work with me?

People often brought up my LinkedIn following or that "everyone knows who I am" as a reason I should go out on my own. I agree that anyone starting out is trying to get their brand out there but I also have never thought that having followers on LinkedIn guarantees a pipeline of paying customers.

Many people who have seen me on LinkedIn, may just like to see an attempt at humour to break up the seemingly never ending self promotion, made up stories of wise children or AI slop.

I wasn't ready

I started in Recruitment agency world but for years I struggled with the traditional model; multiple agencies working on the same brief racing to get a CV to a client to claim ownership of a candidate.

There's so much of that I believe causes many of the frustrations with recruitment/recruiters and the best work I did was with clients that I worked really closely with. So I wanted to go internal and figure out that side of things first.

Then I wanted to do it with at least a few startups at different stages & then I would feel ready. Do I feel ready now? Not 100% but I think that's more of a self doubt thing than an actually not ready thing, I've lived with self doubt for so long I can sometimes tune it out enough to function like a normal person.

Had I wanted to start my own recruitment agency, I could have done that in 2020 although not knowing Covid was around the corner when I handed in my notice, it probably would have been a short lived agency.

I wasn't unhappy in my job

A few people I know made the move to self employed as a result of being in a job they didn't like, redundancies, not being able to find what they wanted etc. I've been lucky to be in jobs I like AND work remotely since we relocated to Queensland.

When I would weigh up the move, I would sometimes feel like I was being greedy or ungrateful for what I had.

There's been an increase in people reaching a similar level in their careers and trying the self employed / fractional / portfolio careers so if you're going through the same thing or thinking it might be something you'd like to try in the future, here's how I approached my move from employed to self employed:

I kept writing and posting, even though I often didn't want to

No one rolls their eyes more than me at some of the rules you are supposed to follow to "grow your personal brand". I don't even like the term "personal brand", not to offend anyone in that space it just feels like an overly manufactured term for being yourself.

But if all the encouraging people are right and that my LinkedIn presence will help me land business, I felt like I had to keep it up so that I hopefully wasn't starting from scratch the day I did do it.

LinkedIn content isn't the be all and end all that some people make it out to be but I'd rather post a few times a week than bother people with cold calls all day to build awareness of my brand.

I took on extra work when I was working full time to build some momentum

This might not be possible for everyone but I would always be open about it with my employers and I would do that work before and after hours and weekends. Again the idea being I was hoping that work might lead to repeat business in the future - which it has - but I did have to stop after 5 months of 70 hour weeks.

One benefit of experiencing burnout is you get better and realising when it's happening the next time, so I pushed myself as far as I could and then took my foot off the pedal.

I saved & made a budget

Potentially the most obvious thing but you know what us humans are like, we can skip the obvious things the most.

Going through all of our household expenses, looking at my wife's income and understanding what the baseline is each month was. Saving as much as I could from the extra work I did (never feels like enough with everything costing what it does these days) so there was at least a small buffer to start with.

And for everyone that sent me a message of support or offered their time to share their lessons from going out on their own, it really does mean a lot.

Thank you.