Before You Quit !

Before You Quit..

Leaving a plush job, and setting out on the Road, is a double edged sword, if you don’t do it, You keep crying about it all your life (worse , When you are 60! ), and if you do , you always tend to rethink your decision, every time you find your self helpless, and pushing far beyond you should.

At one point of life you break, and say, ‘Ok I quit’ , if I don’t enjoy what I do, if I do not find it the least meaningful enough, then why do I go about it. I am a loser anyway, but this way if I were to quit, I would be a happy loser.

However, there a certain things that you need to be clear, and rethink, before you jump in the back water, and say, ‘I will learn to swim, someday’.

Here are some of these.


Analyze the alternatives
Before you decide to quit, have the alternatives. Be it the change of job, or your profile, the geographical ecosystem, it has to be meaningful. To the least, you should know, before and after one month of quitting the job, how do you make your ends meet, how do you earn your bread?

When will I break even, and when can I break?
The first break signifies, the Tipping point, where the venture ceases to be a self funded, the point from where one can expect the profits to come in. And the second break is, when do you say, “Boss I quit, it had all been foolish!”


How much do I need before I hit the Road?
Give yourself plenty of time, a realistic soft bound frame, to achieve this goal. Let there be Milestones, and let them be as realistic as possible, accommodating all the “What If”, or risk factors.
Do not overlook, even the slightest chance of possibilities where risk could seep into your B model.
Taking a simple case, say Mr X earns some 30 K per month, and his expenditures (The must spend-not avoidable) cumulate to 15 K a month. Assuming he has a calculated break even period of an Year, then this implies for his survival for a month he would need 15 K, so 12*15 =1.8 Lakhs is what he needs for one year to feed himself.
All in all, when you have that much money to support you till you ‘Break Even’, Quit, assuming you have done your Homework well. And you SOP is not some random out of the box, and back to the box thinking.

Is there a Gap that my ‘B Plan’/Venture/ Service could fill in, or is it just following an existing model of making money, which ‘seems’ to be a potential contender.
What are the customers needs, what my Ideal customer will be like, what will be his expectations from my service, What will differentiate me from my potential competitor, will I be my Core Competency, do I put in into a lot of things and hope something works (The Stock broker theory, as I would call it, putting your cash in different baskets, not all will/can be a loss!), or do I concentrate on one, and believe that How can it fail, if I am working this hard to get things done.


Networking
This is the key area which needs to be worked on. There are a plenty of things that can be done to spread the word around, Viral marketing, Partnering with another start up (The Barter System Theory, When you can Exchange services for service, need not be a monetary support at all) Trust me, when you are in the market, people are bound to get to notice you, provided you make your presence felt. Meeting up with like minded people and generating Ideas. Go with a fresh mind, and soon will you realise, may be, its time to rethink and put on a different Hat that you never wore for so long (The SIX thinking Hats theory , Edward De Bono)

Ideas, Never Run out of them
May be you have been thinking about it all this while, but nothing of the sort, out of the box, that’s where Stagnation creeps in, and then you know again, ‘I m Sick again’. Key in some RSS feeds, collect data from users feature request, or subscribe to searches, see what are the customer’s ‘Touch points’ (The Acupressuretheory), and Hit them, when the hammer is still Hot! Yupp! There you go, so you provide a service , just tailored to what your customers were looking it, that’s how you have the Viral Marketing in the B model.
So the more frequently you Rethink, the faster you analyse what is going on, and how should you build on it.

What if it doesn’t work out?
Well I have always believed in “How can something manage so well, not to work out someway, Someday.” The only hurdle here is, realising that it does demand a lot of patience leaving a plush job, and more that than the belief, ‘if god be with us, who shall be against us.’


Need to know, where to start, Wait for the sequel to this!

Stay Hungry,Stay foolish..
Stable is Stagnation..

Cheers,
Ekta Grover