3 Things You Must Do Before You Quit Your Job

Here are 3 things you must do before you quit your job:

Set Goals (specifically financial ones)
Be a ninja with your schedule
Make money moves

While I realize that there are many folks out there that have certainly quit their job before doing the three things I just shared with you, but from the students that I've worked with and stories that have been shared on the podcast, these are the three most important things to master before making your leap.

Number 1 - Set Goals (specifically financial ones)

The first goal you need to set is WHEN do you want to quit your job. Instead of trying to "figure out" when you should quit your job, decide for yourself and then work backwards. There never is perfect timing. One of my favorite quotes is by Tim Ferris…
“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way.”
There never is a perfect time. You have to make the decision and adjust along the way. Go with your gut on this. Let's say you decide "I want to quit my job in 6 months."
Whatever timeframe you decide, I want you to then figure out the exact date. Let’s say it is Thursday, June 6th, six months from now is Friday, December 6th. When you figure out YOUR LEAP date, resist the urge on questioning yourself about every possible reason why that date doesn't make sense. "Oh, that's right before Christmas, that might not work." "Oh, that's right before I receive my bonus" Whatever you do, resist the urge to come up with a solution or use your brain to rationalize the date.
When you find yourself doing that, you're going to bury yourself with logistics and when you start asking questions that your unsure of the answer, you won't feel good. And when you don't FEEL good, you don't make the best decisions.
Once you know your LEAP DATE, it is time to work backwards. The next goal I want you to set for yourself is a financially one. Again, do not focus on the HOW, focus on the what and why. Deciding a financial goal is going to look different to every person but here are a few suggestions on how to set a financial goal to get you started:
Deciding this number may require you to do some homework and dive into your personal financial situation to fully understand what you need to bring in. While I believe it is important to understand your risk tolerance, how much you want saved or how much debt you want paid off being making the ultimate leap, the most important thing you can do for yourself is focus on generating revenue.

At this point, you know your LEAP date and the financial goal to achieve on or before your leap date.

#2 - Become a Ninja with Your Schedule (and how you use your time)

Now that you know your financial goal, you need to figure out when you're going to have the time to work on your business. With anything in life, it isn't about needing or getting more time, it is about making time. You have to make time for the things that are most important to you and be intentional with your time. This will require you to set boundaries, understand how to leverage constraints and say NO.
The first step in becoming a ninja with your schedule is to identify the known constraints in your schedule. These are the things that you are currently committed to and happen on a routine basis:
- Traveling to and from your job
- Working at your job
- Any standing weekly meetings both personal and professional
- Time spent working out
You're going to actually block these out on your calendar. A great calendar that I recommend using is Google but you can use whatever you want. On the calendar you're also going to color code:
- Anything related to your current job (Red)
- Anything related to your personal life (Yellow)
- Anything related to you working on your business (Green)
At this point, you should only have the colors Red and Yellow, no green. At this point, once you have your constraints, you should be able to see the white space in your calendar. That white space is what we're going to work with when determining when you're going to carve out time to work on your business.
- Find chunks of time that you can commit to every week and build that routine of working on your business...
  - Maybe it is for 90 minutes every morning before going into your full-time job.
  - Maybe it is committing to 30 minutes every day over your lunch hour
  - Maybe it is 90 minutes after your kids go to sleep or simply after work.
- Decide how many hours a week you have and want to devote towards building your business. This also helps you understand how much client work you can take on.
Once you decide the time chunks you're going to spend working on your business, you MUST defend those time chunks. Only you can do this for yourself, no one else. This will require you to plan ahead, communicate ahead of time to others (friends and family), say NO and set boundaries. During moments when it came be seemingly tempting to cancel on yourself, resist that urge to procrastinate. You owe it to yourself.
What you do in those chunks will be determined by your client work and the type of business you want to pursue. The key thing is to make sure you're focusing on actually producing work that is going to lead to revenue, not just busy work, like checking email.

#3 - Make Money Moves

Goals shift overtime and things change. In step one, you set your financial goal. I've seen, in many cases where someone had set a financial goal and achieved in less time so they made their leap sooner than expected. I've seen people not achieve their financial goal entirely by their leap date and still quit their job because they had confidence in their ability.
That being said, the single most important and supportive thing you can do for yourself is growing your business while working full-time to at least the extent you have clients, you have some idea what type of work you enjoy doing and you have some idea of future revenue coming in. It may not be exactly to a T to the goals you set out for yourself, but if you can get yourself in a place where you have clients, you feel good about the work you're doing and confident in your ability to grown, than that can be all you need to make your LEAP.
Also, if the financial goal you set for yourself is difficult to achieve by that date and your full-time job is bottle necking you and you know that if you had more hours to dedicate towards your business, and you know that by quitting your job you could take on more clients that lead to more revenue then that might be enough for you to LEAP.

To recap, the first place you're going to start is to set your goals (leap date and financial goal), second you're going to schedule block your calendar and identify WHEN you're going to work on your business and step number three you're going to generate revenue in your business before your leap.

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