The steps I took to leave my “J.O.B”

There was a period during my business where frankly, the work wasn’t coming in and I wasn’t making any money.

I was still living at home, I had a girlfriend (now my wife) and I was totally flat broke.

So I did the exact opposite of what I had preached for the last few years.

I got a job.

I went back into full time employment.

I couldn’t see another way out.

And I didn’t even last a year.

I figured that having a job and a salary again would be livin’ on easy street compared to running a business.

Imagine just turning up to an office, doing some work and being paid.

Sounds awesome!

And like I said. I barely lasted 11 months.

It was almost like seeing what failure looked like.

Don’t get me wrong, I really liked most of my co-workers. I even enjoyed some of the work.

But there were two things that made the salary “not worth it”.

1. My immediate manager.
2. The leadership team

Of course you have less freedom. You need to turn up when they tell you to. And if you think something is wrong, you have to go through a lot of hierarchy to change it.

I stuck around long enough to secure a deposit on a mortgage and then – I was out of there.

I literally quit the second we got the keys to my house.

And frankly, even then, the salary would barely have covered the mortgage.

I knew that I’d rather work my ass off, trying to pay the mortgage (and for the first few years, we missed a few payments), than continue working for the manager I had.

So the steps I took to leave, were as follows:

1. I would write an insane amount of content. I.e. one blog post per day
2. I would record as many videos as I could (ended up as one per day)
3. I would reach out to my network and book as many calls as I could

I decided I was going to start  Sell Your Service there and then. I wanted to dedicate my life to helping other agency owners never experience what I experienced.

I wrote non-stop. During lunch breaks, in the morning before work, as soon as I got home. 

I recorded multiple videos all weekend and scheduled them to go out daily on YouTube.

I booked calls and would join them at midnight or 1am, just to catch the last US and Australian time zones.

I realised that I was willing to do all this, because the pain of working at this company was too much.

And an incredible thing happened.

My agency started getting work.

Because I focused down our niche and offer, we started to get more and more clients.

I started getting known in our industry.

Because I was documenting that journey, I was getting more referrals from people.

And eventually, I started working on Sell Your Service full time.

Now Sell Your Service has a team, software, coaching products, books.

Even better? I compiled those blog posts I wrote and it turned into a book. 

Which was picked up by a publisher and published. You might have read it, From Single To Scale.

But this all came from pain. The pain of working for someone like that. A manager who I could barley bring myself to thank and say goodbye to.

I don’t believe that it’s all about hard work.

But it was about focus. Focusing on ONE product, one service, one niche and one offer.

And any time I felt a pang of doubt, I’d remind myself that I’d rather earn nothing by myself, than work for someone like that ever again.