Hello and welcome to Tweak. I am your host Joshua Iwata and the is episode number “Quitting your day job.” Tweak is a podcast for the creative entrepreneur you can check us out online at www.tweakcast.com. That’s tweak with a “k” and cast with a “c”.

So since this is the very first episode of Tweak introductions are in order. Let me tell you a little bit about myself and then I want to talk a little bit about Tweak and then we’ll jump into the topic of the day.

So I’m a designer based out of the Portland/Vancouver area on the west coast of the U.S. I’ve been doing web and graphic design for about five years now give or take six months. I run a small company called Fallout Media. You can check us out online at www.falloutmedia.com.

The idea for Tweak came about after I found myself having some pretty similar conversations with multiple friends that I had… can you believe it I have multiple friends. So anyway, I had some pretty similar conversations about making the switch to being self-employed. I actually didn’t quit my day job until a little over a year ago. I was just doing the part-time working at a job and then also doing freelance on the side part-time and since I’ve quit, the past year has truly been phenomenal. It’s been extremely rewarding but there’s also been a ton of obstacles and challenges I had to overcome along the way. I’ve learned a ton and grown a ton I’ve become a better designer, I’d like to say a better person and I thought that Tweak would be a great way to share with people what I’ve learned. And hopefully generate some dialogue about shared experiences of what you’re going through as well because I think that in this business it’s very easy to feel isolated and we work a lot of weird hours whether you’re in your home office or your studio. You’re working late nights and weekends. It’s easy to get in your groove and feel like no one else is doing what you’re doing. But you’re not alone. There’s plenty of people who are doing the exact same thing… well not the exact same thing, but very similar things facing the same challenges and being truly successful. So hopefully Tweak can offer a little bit of insight and a little nudge in the right direction. Tweak is really all about making small adjustments in your life and business. It can really bring about positive change and results.

So with that said let’s move into today’s topic: Quitting your day job. Now that’s a big topic to cover in a very short period of time because I really want to keep these podcasts to a reasonable amount of time. I’m not going to put a time limit on them but I don’t want to go into forty minutes or an hour; probably keep it more around ten to twenty minutes. And so we’ll see how this first one goes.

Well because this is such a huge topic, I want to break it into two sections. This episode we are going to be talking about the lead up to taking the plunge, and then episode two we are going to be talking about actually making the switch to being a full time freelance designer, photographer, artist, or whatever you want to call it. So, the first thing that I want to do is ask a couple questions because before you make.. I mean that is a huge decision. Abandoning a 9-5 and supporting yourself, there’s just a lot involved and a lot more than I think people think about. Intitally you kind of just think I want to be my own boss, this is going to be great. But you don’t think of everything that’s involved. So let’s start off small, let’s ask ourselves a small question. Is what you are doing, whatever it is, is it a hobby or is it a career? I’m going to explain what I mean by that. Now, whatever you’re doing you obviously enjoy. You’re thinking about switching to fulltime so you like doing it, but there’s a difference between liking it as a hobby and liking it as a career. If you like it as a hobby, the thought of doing it… well let me put it this way. If you can picture yourself doing it seven days a week, ten hours a day and not just the projects you like so for me as a web designer I’ve done a lot of sites that I didn’t really care for, a client I didn’t care for, the direction they wanted to go in design-wise or maybe just the project in general but you can’t always be picky especially starting out you are going to do projects that you don’t really want to do that are more production work than creative freedom. And so if you can picture yourself doing your work seven days a week, ten hours a day abandoning friends, okay that’s going a little far, but really putting off everything else to do it. And to work through it and not just do it because you enjoy it but to do it because you’re driven to do it because you want to do it or indefinitely maybe or at least for this period of time then it’s a career. But if you just enjoy doing it on the side and if you know you had to do it or if someone is making you hit a deadline stay up all night finish it, if it would stop being enjoyable to you and it would stop being fun then maybe you need to reconsider because liking your work as a hobby is not enough to keep you going through doing full time freelance work. Being self employed, there has got to be a bigger driving force than just enjoying it. So that’s the first question, is it a career or is it a hobby? So assuming that it is a career let’s move on to the next question.

The next question I want you to ask yourself is am I ready to be my own boss? Now, at first glance that question seems ridiculous of course you want to be your own boss. You’ve wanted to be your own boss since you were in elementary school and you entered that raffle where you could win being principal for a day and be the boss of everyone. It’s very appealing because it’s human nature to not want people to be in charge of us. You kind of want to do your own thing. But think about your boss and what they do and I don’t just mean your immediate manager. How about this, your employer. Think about what your employer does for you. They pay your benefits, they give you a pay check, they give you a schedule, they let you work go home and forget about work. Now picture yourself being the employer. There is no restrictions, there’s the lines of work and home and life and all that is immediately blurred. Now if you are doing this on the side it’s probably already blurred. But it’s going to be blurred even more because once you start doing this full time, if you’re working at a home, even if you have an office, your’e going to be working late nights. There’s going to be times where, I mean, I’ve worked with clients in Australia on the other side of the world where I had to have conference calls at like 2am in the morning, get out of bed, leave my wife sleeping so that I could go talk to these people, get it worked out, get their website up and running. If they had problems they would call me. There’s just a lot that goes into it and aside from timewise which is a huge thing, there’s the monetary aspect of it. You have to pay your own paycheck and I got to tell you I don’t know if everyone’s experience is like this and maybe you could write in and let me know but in my experience I don’t get consistent paychecks. And I mean it gets better the more clients you get, the longer you’ve been doing it but for the most part you’re going to get paid very infrequently. It will be sometimes a couple times a month, sometimes it will be once every two months. And you’ve really got to budget and then on top of that you’re paying for your own benefits so there’s a lot of things to consider. I don’t want to go over all of them but are you ready to be your own boss and the other side of that is also are you ready to be disciplined because if you don’t have someone looking over your shoulder, that’s great it’s an amazing feeling, but at the same time you have to be disciplined enough to keep yourself on track. You have to be disciplined enough to meet deadlines, to make clients happy, to choose to finish the work that’s in front of you instead of going and getting that cup of coffee, or instead of going in the other room and you know, playing your Xbox for an hour. There’s a lot of things and I think especially in the creative industry people tend to think that there’s this stereotype that you’re flaky, you just want to be artsy-fartsy and express yourself and if you’re going to be your own boss, you’ve got to be the boss. You’ve got to set down the rules, the guidelines, and you got to stick to them. Not because you’re going to get in trouble but because if you don’t you’re not going to make money, you’re not going to be successful, you are going to lost clients and there’s just a lot more at stake. So are you ready to be the boss?

The third and final question I’d like you to consider before you make the switch is Do you have what you need? So let me explain what I mean by that. Do you have the things that you need in order to be successful? A good example of how to put this question into practice is when I decided to go full time to be self-employed, to try and make up a business plan, do the whole shebang I actually made a list. I took a piece of paper split it down the middle, took out a pen and I wrote down what I have and what I need. So on the needs section I would write down the things that you need to be successful. So write down equipment, write down drive, write down clients, write down everything you can think of. Don’t isolate to a specific set of things that you need, but clients is a huge one. I want to touch on that real fast before we move on to the rest of that question. If you don’t have clients then you’re going to be in a world of hurt once you go fulltime and have no income. I think I have seen quite a few people think that they can do that. In the digital age especially, if you’re a web designer or graphic designer or photographer don’t expect just because you go full time that clients are going to start knocking on your door. Because in my experience it doesn’t work that way. You need to have a client base. You need to have a network. You need to have a reputation so that you can get work through word of mouth. Or you need to have a good plan for advertising and gaining clients. So clients is a huge one on the needs list.

Okay, let’s move on to the have list. Look at the things you have. So maybe you have a computer, good starting point. You have drive, you have determination, you have passion, you have talent, that’s awesome. So look at that and if the things you have are beginning to match up with the things that you need you’re starting to see that there’s this matching game and that you really are at a place where it’s realistic for you to make that switch, then I think that you are just one step closer to actually making the switch to actually going full time being your own boss.

So I want to review those three questions we just went over. Let’s review them one more time. And let’s look at the answers we need in order to move on to episode two. Which is quitting your day job. So the first question I asked was: Is it a career or is it a hobby? Is it a career? Is it something you could do seven days a week ten hours a day? Projects that you don’t really feel like doing because there’s a bigger picture because you want to do this because you have drive because you want to live the life of a freelance artist or designer or you want to start your own business. Or is it a hobby? Is it something that once you have to do it, it’s not going to be fun anymore? So hopefully the answer is it’s a career. It’s a choice. That doesn’t mean you have to move on to full time right away, but if it is a career then the outlook of you moving to doing that indefinitely as a career is big.

So, number two, are you ready to be the boss? Are you ready to be disciplined? To do the things you don’t want to do when you know you need to do them? Are you ready to take charge of your finances? Are you ready to actually sit down and write out a calendar and meet deadlines and meet with clients and take care of all of the things your boss might… your employer might be doing at the moment and hopefully the answer to that is yes you are ready to be the boss.

Number three: do you have what you need. Do you have the things that you need in order to be successful? Make a list, write it down, put it into practice and if your ‘haves’ and ‘needs’ match up then you’re just one step closer to actually becoming self employed, self reliant, being the boss, and being happy and successful in what you do because that really is the end goal. To be doing what you love for a living because that in itself is completely priceless. So thanks for tuning in to the very first episode of the Tweak podcast. I am your host Josh Iwata. Stay tuned next time for episode number two, which is part two in the two-part series of quitting your day job. If you like what you hear or have questions or comments I would love you hear from you. Please drop me a line at josh@tweakcast.com and just remember a little tweak goes a long way.