3 ways in which your employee mindset will wreck your business

How to avoid the pitfalls of transitioning from a full-time to your own business

The churn in the job market is at an all-time high. There’s even a term for it now: the Big Resignation, where more people than ever are quitting their jobs to find better opportunities or start their own businesses.

What people don’t realise is that quitting your 9–5 to start your own business isn’t just a matter of handing in your resignation letter. You’re still carrying your 9–5 over into your business through the programming that’s been instilled in you from years of holding a job, and which will limit your growth in your business.

Here are 3 programmings you need to undo if you want to successfully cross over from being an employee to a full-time business owner.

1. Valuing time spent doing the things over your creativity :

The corporate world has drummed into us the belief that money is a direct function of time spent working. That’s a hard one to undo since we’ve spent years being paid for the number of hours we’ve shown up at work. This mentality crosses over into entrepreneurship as we’re swamped with hustle porn stories of founders bragging about the number of hours they’ve had to put in to see a certain level of success.

That doesn’t mean you won’t be spending time working on your business. You absolutely will. But if you believe that success is directly correlated to the time spent working in the traditional sense we understand work to be, then you’ll still be a slave to the life you sought to escape from by quitting your job.

The truth is that setting up and running a business is a very creative process, and the typical 9–5 doesn’t do a lot in helping us nurture our creative edge, so much so that most of us have lost touch with that side of us.

I’ve worked with several clients who’ve spent months and arduous hours working on their offers only to see few clients come in, and make a lot more money from an idea they had in the shower that they just executed spontaneously.

The key is to find the right balance between working through your to-do list and nurturing your creativity. I’ve written about this here, and how I personally incorporate both in my business.

2. Being addicted to being told what to do :

We’ll never admit to it, but deep down, most of us love being told what to do.

If you’re still tied to other people telling you what to do: what business strategy to use, what morning routine to have, what success should look like …. you’ll find yourself running a business that you don’t want to run. That doesn’t mean you just put your head down and disregard everything and everyone around you. By all means, look around, take advice, learn and mimic till you find your own voice.

But the truth is that no one knows what they’re doing. Lots of people reverse engineer their success and package it up neatly into a process because it makes them look good, or because they want to sell you something.

To be a successful business owner, you’re going to have to learn that you’re your own authority. That ultimately, you accept decisions from none other than you because you’re the only one truly capable of leading your business in a way that suits you.

The urge is going to be strong, especially at the beginning, to take on one of the ‘tried and tested’ approaches, or to find what I call a ‘substitute boss’ under the guise of one of those business gurus. By all means, do that if you’re looking for your footing.

The important thing here is to do it with a level of self-awareness that’ll allow you to sift through and keep the things that really work for you and to be brave enough to let go of the things that don’t, and over time come up with a hybrid that really fits the life you’d like to build, and not someone else’s idea of an ideal life.

So the real key here is to cultivate self-awareness. I often tell my clients that building a business is a self-awareness journey where the goal is to get paid to discover who we truly are. It’s a beautiful but very often complicated and messy journey, but the fruits are well worth the effort if we’re willing to push our own limits and open the lid to some parts of ourselves we didn’t dare look in the eyes before.

3. Making things too complex :

You’re going to want to have all the bells and whistles when you set up your business. All the jobs I’ve worked at required that I do tons of things just to get started: get the computer up and running, all the programmes set up, coffee chats with tons of people, trainings that felt like I was back at school all over again, a good grasp on the company vision and values.

You’re going to want to do the same: get that website up, work on your branding and positioning, get all the amazing software that’s being used by other successful business owners, work on your vision.

Cut that all out. I believe you don’t even need a vision to get started, or clue in on your values.

What you need to understand first and foremost is that setting up a business is going to be all about one thing: your ability to serve people. Your ability to improve their lives in some way.

So start with helping one person in the way you’ve set out to. Just one. And then two. And then ten. By the time you’ve served 10 people, some patterns will emerge: what their actual needs are, and how you’re best wired to serve those needs in a way that makes the best use of your skills, your experience, your strengths. It’ll become clearer and clearer how you can set yourself apart from other people who are doing the same thing. And it’ll also become clear what your boundaries are and exactly how you actually enjoy serving those people. You’ll naturally adapt and gravitate towards the ways in which you have the most fun helping people, and from there will emerge a bigger and bigger vision for where you want to take things. Your vision is entirely organic and is going to evolve over time. So no need to spend days masterminding about your vision and values. Just focus on helping people. That’s it.

I believe you don’t even need a website to start. If you must, just have a landing page with a button where people can click and book with you. I signed my first few clients up with a Calendly link that my friend, who I did a free Human Design reading for, passed on to her network while raving about the reading. I didn’t have a website. I just picked 10 people from my network and gave them a free Human Design session, and asked them to pass the link around if they found value from the session with me. My website came later and even today I aim to keep it as simple as I can.

The main question you can ask yourself at the end of every day is : did I get one step closer to helping someone today?

Sure you can mess around with your branding, look for colors that pop and that showcase your bubbly, fun personality. But if you’re spending way too much time doing this at the expense of figuring out how on earth to get in front of people for the sole purpose of making a difference in their lives, then you need to re-evaluate where your time is going.

So there you have it. Starting off on your own can be daunting, but a few mindset shifts can go a long way in helping you build the life you really want.