Use the skills, industry knowledge, and contacts you have today to set your business up for success.
Sick of working for someone else? Want to go out on your own as a solopreneur or running a small business, but not sure how to get started? Don’t try to make the leap all at once, advises Joanne Cleaver, author of The Career Lattice.
“We think of becoming an entrepreneur as a one-way street,” she says. “You ‘take the leap’ – that’s how we talk about it. You leave the staff job and you become an entrepreneur and never go back.” She recommends taking a more open-ended approach, and looking at the many ways the staff job you have now can set you up as a successful entrepreneur, as well as the ways having been an entrepreneur can set you up to be successful in case you decide to return to working for someone else.
With that approach in mind, these four steps can bridge the gap between employee and entrepreneur:
