Don’t Burn the Boats | Leverage Your Day Job
Ep09
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Burn the Boats Myth
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[00:00:00]
Bryan Steele: Welcome back. I'm Bryan Steele. I'm excited to have you here today on the podcast. One of the things that I'm sure many of you have seen maybe some of you're attempted to do it yourselves, is to just say, I'm gonna burn the boats. I believe in this business that I want to create.
It's gonna create a new life for our family. I'm leaving the day job. I'm diving all in. I'm seeing what these people are sharing with online. I'm, I'm just going right. I'm here to tell you that your nine to five is your side hustle's best friend. If you're a dad and you leave your job right now, I would argue that's not [00:01:00] necessarily a brave thing to just burn the boats all right away. I think it's careless. There certainly is way, are ways to turn your side hustle into your full-time business. I have done that myself, but I would not say that's where you start. We're gonna reframe that today and understand that the day job is what's giving us. The opportunity to build something powerful, to build a legacy that has long-term legs that meets our goals.
Now in the earliest episode in episode one, we talked about the why we have to give a side hustle a specific job, and if you haven't listened to that episode, be sure to go back to that. And if you've got that wide defined and the side hustle is doing great, that's awesome. Okay. It is powerful. It is moving in the right direction, but you might be in the back of your mind going well, but I just, I like this.
I like what I'm building. We've got you, your first couple of clients, you're starting to move down that [00:02:00] direction. What if I spent all my time building this thing? And especially early, I really say that's a bad idea and we're gonna cover that today.
Day Job as Shield
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Bryan Steele: So the first thing is you lose the power of no.
When you have a nine to five, when you have a day job that is covering all of your typical expenses. Now maybe it's not to the level you want, which we've talked about before. You want to create additional financial freedom to pay off debt, to pay for your college education, for your kids to buy a new car, whatever it might be.
There's, there's a, there's a gap, the side hustle is intended to help you make up that gap within reason. But when the side hustle is all you've got, when that becomes the business, if you need money to pay the light bill.
You're gonna take on some bad clients, you're gonna take on vampire clients, right? It's easy to imagine. You're staring at a stack of bills [00:03:00] and somebody walks in the door or calls you or sends an email, and you can already tell they're going to be a total nightmare. They want a discount, they want you available 24 7, and you can tell instantly that they're just going to add stress and you're gonna end up.
Carrying that with you all the time, you're gonna take it out on your wife and your kids. If it's your only income, if this business is your only income, you have to say yes because you're, you're now trading peace for a paycheck. You need that income to be able to cover the bills.
But if you have the day job. if that is your baseline for your income and everything from the side, hustle is just on top of it, you have a much greater power of saying no. Say, I can tell this is a bad fit. Now, you don't have to be rude.
You can just be, Hey, appreciate you reaching out. You know, in our conversations or, or based on what you're asking for, I, I just really don't feel like [00:04:00] we'd be a good fit to work together, and so I'm gonna have to decline this opportunity.
Now, the nightmare clients, I don't necessarily like to send them to people who are also in the industry, you know, like the worst people to work with, but you have the power to say no. You've got a shield in a nine to five that protects you from, you know, bringing on those red flag clients. Those people who just are waving red flags like, do not work with me.
I'm going to be a nightmare, and I want you to be in that position where you can say no. 'cause early on it may be hard for you, especially early to know who those people are. And so you're gonna be learning a lot. Like you may say yes to some people. And I did in my past. I can think of a couple in my mind where I thought, yeah, this, this person I could work with.
And there were little red flags, you know, maybe they're bad mouthing a previous service provider. And I thought, well, I can help 'em. I, I do a good job. And that red flag [00:05:00] just came with them. You're gonna be learning early on, and so you want the ability to cut ties without it suddenly hurting your income.
Obviously, it could potentially hurt the side hustle income, but that's fine because you're not depending on it to live. It's just an extra boost over where you're currently at and having the day job, having that place that's giving you that steady paycheck gives you that ability to say no. So we really want to maintain that as long as possible.
Experiment Without Pressure
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Bryan Steele: The second thing is when we're building a side hustle, we need the ability to experiment and try new things. Innovation requires low stakes. If you're going to do something new, you need it to not, you know, the software thing is like fail fast. We're gonna just put it out there. We're gonna fail fast and fix it and just build and build and build.
If we're trying things that fail and we're depending on that business to pay the water bill and the cell phone bill and the [00:06:00] rent, all of a sudden all those little failures start to add stress and anxiety, and it's just shrinking the box that we have to work in. You have the advantage to be wrong.
You have the freedom to be wrong. When you're not depending on the business to put food on the table, you can try, you can treat your business like a laboratory. You can go out there and do different things. Go I, you know, we're doing this and it's going okay, but man, what about this other opportunity?
This could be really, maybe I need to do something different. And I went through some of those pivots myself. Right? I started as a music producer and I do still some of that, but I saw an opportunity to produce podcasts I said. That looks really cool too. And because it was a side hustle, I did not feel burdened by experimenting in that space and trying some things out and learning what I needed to learn and paying that [00:07:00] tax, that expense of trying to build up something different.
Because if I pivoted and I didn't know how it was gonna work, and I was needing all that income immediately, that's gonna add all this extra stress. And again, we're carrying that home, we're carrying that with us. And while we want to work hard, we want to deliver for our clients, for our customers. You know, that's a, that's a thing we need to give ourselves free freedom from.
We need to be willing to test some things. If it flops, if your crazy marketing idea doesn't work. If you pivot your service, you can test the new price point, right? I will say probably you're not charging enough. You're probably worth more than you think. And if you raise your rates and maybe you went too far and your clients dry up, Your mortgage is still paid, right? Your business is still allowing things to operate while you flesh out the mechanics of this side hustle. It gives you that financial safety to actually [00:08:00] innovate and create something new. And continue to move forward and try something different. And I think that that's an incredibly powerful thing that we take for granted.
And I'm not saying you have to love your job or say that you're going to stay in this nine to five forever and you're not going to move on to something else. But I am saying that it gives a buffer, it gives some shielding for your family financially while you're figuring all of this out.
Escape Golden Handcuffs
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Bryan Steele: Now finally, I would like to say maybe you're sitting there, you're going, yeah, that, that's great. And I understand that and I say, you know, I'm gonna keep the nine to five while I'm building this business. But you say, Brian, I, I'm doing this and I love it and I think I can make this a larger thing. Like, I think I could make this my full-time business.
It's literally what I went through myself. And when you're going through that. You know what I'm, you're, you're almost chomping at the bit, [00:09:00] and so you're like, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make this, I'm gonna make this leap. I'm gonna make this jump. And again, goes back to those other things. It put some burden on, on the family because now it becomes different.
So I want to give you a way to think about the nine to five that allows you to say, I found a way to let go of the golden handcuffs, right? Because there's the other side of this, right? You're just staying in a job because of the paycheck, even though it maybe burns you out, and that happens to a lot of people, right?
There's statistics on how many people are dissatisfied in their job, but they're wearing golden handcuffs. They've got 'em on and it pays the bills, and it gives them a cushy life, but they're just slaves to that day job. And so you need to be thinking about what's the strategy? And again, this goes back to communicating with your spouse, communicating with your partner.
You need something. [00:10:00] Tangible to point to, to understand where this is all headed. 'cause maybe you get into this, you go, actually now there's maybe a different goal, maybe there's a new job. So I don't want you to make the mistake of saying not quitting now is never leaving.
The goal is for you to be able to. Leave and decide things on your own terms to be intentional.
Set Your Launch Number
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Bryan Steele: If there's anything you learn from me is that we do everything intentionally and on purpose, so you might need to sit down with your spouse and define what a launch number is. You need to, you know, like, is that three months of your salary in the bank?
Is it matching your current? Like do you need to say that the side hustle business matches your day job income for six months? Like, once those numbers start to line up, is that a, a target? Like we can see that once you start to see that there's clear objectives to reach. You're not looking at a cage anymore, it's just a countdown.
You're, you're slowly building, you're giving yourself some architecture for saying, okay, [00:11:00] this is, this is how this would work.
Family Driven Milestones
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Bryan Steele: Now, when I was working my day job, my nine to five, it was a good job. Paid fantastic, great people to work with, but I was wondering if there was something else. And, and the thing that got me going, I want to do something different, is when my daughter said.
She wanted to spend more time with me, and this was after I'd started my side hustle and I knew that it wasn't because of my side hustle that she's saying this because I was doing all of this after bedtime, or I was getting up at five in the morning to work on my business. Those were my hours at that point in time.
So when she says, I wanna spend more time with you, it's the day job she gets, she gets home from school at, you know, three o'clock. Dad's not home from work for a couple more hours. He's still working the day job. So I knew something had to change. And so [00:12:00] that's when Abby, my wife and I, we talked about what, what does it look like, what things would make us feel like we've got an opportunity to.
Do something different or try something that didn't feel like it created stress. So for us, that was no debt. We eliminated all debt, no credit card debt, nothing. We paid off our mortgage, owned our house. That was what the side hustle income did. It achieved those goals. It eliminated all of our debt, and then we let that.
Money build up to create a nest egg that was gonna give us an extended period of time where I could build this business without having the stress of necessarily having to take on bad clients. That's what we built. We gave ourselves some milestones and some frameworks to say for us, for our family, this is how it would work.
So it's not a burn the boats and leave everybody in the dust and go, I'm, I'm. Throwing caution to the wind [00:13:00] because I believe in this mission. That's, that's not the, that's not the realistic approach. I mean, there's no guarantee that my business won't, you know, fall apart at some point. But we took intentional steps, we thought through frameworks that gave us a level of comfort to say, this is worth trying because of the benefit that it could bring to our family.
And that's what we wanted to focus on, is how it would potentially impact our family.
Be Strategic Not Impulsive
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Bryan Steele: So when you're thinking about your nine to five as just a, a place that's got you caged in that you can't escape, understand there's more to it than that. There's more nuance to that and look at it a little differently.
Maybe it does feel that way sometimes, but it can really be. The venture capital that allows you to build something different that allows you the security and the space and the [00:14:00] buffer to build something brand new that does get you where you want to be with your family. That does get you where you want to be with your finances.
So that's the thing I, I want to encourage you with is to be strategic, be intentional, not impulsive, right? Everything out there tells us react quick. Attention spans are short. Be dramatic, be bold, and there's times for that. This is not that time. So be intentional, be strategic. Think about that path, and let the side hustle, operate in a way that you can explore, that you can experiment, and that you can say no to clients that.
Very clearly aren't the right people to be working with, and you're going to have a business that matures in a way that you enjoy working in it. You're not creating just another job. Right. You're creating something you're excited about, you're passionate about, you're [00:15:00] excited to work with people in, you're excited to deliver your product.
You're excited to deliver your service because you've been intentional and because you haven't been put in a compromised position where you just had to take on bill paying work because you had to. And that's not what I want for you. I want you to really be able to operate effectively and from a place of abundance.
Wrap Up and Next Steps
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Bryan Steele: So hope that helps you today. I'm excited that you were here. If any of this sounded interesting, like I want to hear more about X, Y, z, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, leave a review, say, Hey, can you talk more about this? Would love to hear that. I do check that information and I look forward to seeing you on another episode real soon.
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