Steps For Starting An Online Business (Leaving Your 9 to 5)

Sep 27

Back in 2016 I got this crazy idea that I wanted to leave my nine-to-five. Just eight months later I did that, and here I am in 2021 writing this blog, and my entire life has changed. It all started with my road from nine-to-five to a six-figure ent…

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Back in 2016, in January to be specific, just one month after my son was born, I got this crazy idea that I wanted to leave my nine-to-five.

Just eight months later I did that, and here I am in 2021 at the time of recording this video and writing this blog, and my entire life has changed.

It all started with my road from nine-to-five to a six-figure entrepreneur in just one year.

But, how did I leave my nine to five and build this scalable business? That’s the purpose of today’s blog.

QUITTING MY 9 TO 5 JOB

Let’s go back to 2016 when my son was just one month old, and I decided that I wanted to leave my nine-to-five.

I didn't have experience being an entrepreneur, I didn't even know at the time what I wanted to focus on building my business around, but I had started to discover what was possible online through social media, and people I'd gone to college with suddenly posting about the businesses that they had created.

So I went into it a little bit rosy-eyed, thinking that I was going to be an overnight success.

Eight months later, after doing all of the things, I hadn't made any money in my business. Although it sucked at the time, I’m incredibly thankful for those first eight months, because they taught me what I am about to share with you today.

Once I implemented the pieces that I'm sharing with you today and continued to work on those and refine them and scale them I did hit six figures in one year, and have consistently had a six-figure business since then.

I ended up leaving my nine-to-five in September of 2016, and in the same month signed my first client.

Now, I'm going to be 100% transparent with you, in no way was I an overnight success, I had to work really, really hard those eight months before leaving my nine-to-five to have a solid business foundation.

But I did take a leap of faith, and for some of you reading this, you're going to be like, "Absolutely not, there is no way that I'm doing that," and that is absolutely fine.

The strategies I'm going to share with you are also going to support you while you are building your business and working a nine-to-five, and putting money in savings, and having those clients and stuff coming in before you decide to leave.

But some of you are also reading this and thinking, "This kind of sounds like fun. Maybe I could take a leap of faith?"

And this information is for you as well.

I ultimately decided to leave my nine-to-five before having income in my business, and that definitely meant we had to take a lot of risks.

We decided to just live off of my husband's income the best that we could for a few months, any money that came into the business did not go back into the business, I would put it into living expenses.

We were using it to buy groceries and pay bills, and I'm not going to lie, those first three months were incredibly difficult.

But I'm thankful for them, and they got me home quicker to be with my son, and to go all-in on building this business. For me, that was the aligned decision we made so I could focus and expand as an entrepreneur.

Both ways work!

STEPS FOR STARTING AN ONLINE BUSINESS
#1 DETERMINATION

The number one thing that I think you need to go from nine to five to a six-figure entrepreneur is determination. Whether you decide to leave your nine-to-five with an entire savings account and six months of salary in the bank, or you decide to just go for it and hope it all works out, you need determination.

You're going to hit roadblocks every single step of the way, and it's so incredibly important to remind yourself why you're doing this in the first place.

And if I'm being honest with you, it has to be a lot deeper than "I just want to make money," it has to be driven by an emotional feeling and mission.

For me, it was to be home with my son. I originally didn't plan to be home with him after my maternity leave, but I had this feeling, this fire that I needed to be home with him, that I wanted to experience those first few years with him.

I also had always thought about working for myself, and it felt like no better time.

So I was emotionally invested in this business, and as a result of that emotional investment and the determination, I optimized my time so that I could build these crucial pieces.

I'm going to share those pieces with you, of course, but it doesn't matter if you have the pieces and you know what to do, if you aren't dedicating specific time to work on your business, especially while you're working a nine-to-five, you're going to have a really hard time growing.

So when I was building those first few months of my business, building my website, planning out my offers, doing my marketing, I was still working my nine-to-five and I was utilizing every little pocket of time that I could find.

I'd wake up early in the morning and get some work done.

I would listen to trainings and record emails and social media posts driving to and from work every day.

I used my lunch time to watch webinars, to learn, to participate in a group program and attend calls.

And I would use my evenings after my son went to bed, late into the evening, to also work on my business.

I'm thankful that I did that, because today I have a business that allows me to travel to Greece for three months, and live in different parts of the country, but at the time, that was what was required of me.

So if you take one thing away from this video, I want you to know that it's 100% possible for you, but you've got to be determined and dedicated to putting in the time and the energy, and yes, sometimes money, into building your business.

STEPS FOR STARTING AN ONLINE BUSINESS
#2 RESILIENCE

Once you have become emotionally invested into the success of your business, you can see it, and you're dedicated to the highs and the lows, the ups and the downs, the failures and the wins, it is time to test your resilience and build your brand.

Now, when I'm talking about building your brand, I'm not talking about your logo, I'm not talking about the aesthetics, I'm not even really talking about your website.

That's what I thought branding was, that's why I wasted eight months not signing a client.

Today, I know better, I do better, and I actually teach entrepreneurs how to do branding the right way. I have an entire class on building a better brand, which you can watch at betterbrandmethod.com.

This first stage is incredibly important, because it's going to build the foundation for your business moving forward.

This is the stage when you identify your niche, this is when you start to decide who your ideal customer is, who you ultimately want to work with.

This is when you start to fine-tune and practice your communication skills, creating brand messaging and figuring out how you're going to introduce yourself into the world and the topics that you want to talk about as an extension of your brand.

It's also where you map out your offer.

Now, this is incredibly important, because if you're planning on leaving your nine-to-five and making money pretty quickly, you need to have something to sell, and you want to make sure that your marketing efforts, how you're showing up, are leading people directly to the sale.

Another piece of advice that I have as it relates to your offer that I didn't learn until much, much later is to focus on one thing.

You're going to have a much easier time focusing on selling one core service rather than a bunch of different ones that you have to figure out how to share in email and social media and all the different things. It's going to be really overwhelming and confusing.

It's just easier to focus on one core offer and drive all of your energy and attention to that.

Those are some of the core pieces of building a brand. I go into way more detail inside of my free class where I teach the Build a Better Brand Method, but it's so important that you take the time to do this, because this is going to set the solid foundation for your business.

I often say that you want to think of your business as a building, and you're going to add floors and stories to it, you're going to want to keep scaling up and go higher and higher and higher, and if you don't have that solid foundation, which is your brand, your building isn't going to scale, it's going to fall over.

You're going to eventually realize that "Oh no, I have to go back to ground zero."

Building your brand doesn't have to take a ton of time, there are very, very strategic ways to do it, but it is going to save you so much time, so many headaches, and a lot of pain, when you move into the marketing phase, which is where you ultimately bring in and attract your ideal customer.

STEPS FOR STARTING AN ONLINE BUSINESS
#3 MARKETING

At Brandmerry, we focus on two things, branding and marketing.

I recognized early on that once you have a solid brand, once you know who you are, who you want to work with, what you're ultimately going to offer, how you're going to make a difference in their lives by solving this problem, you have to let people know.

You have to market.
You have to put this information out in front of your ideal customer.

So one of the things that I recommend as you're building your business is get very strategic and focused on how you're going to market your business.

What I mean by that is don't try and do everything.

There are a million options when it comes to marketing. You can show up on Facebook, you can show up on Instagram, you could use Pinterest, you could use blogging, you can do YouTube, you can be on TikTok, you can use Clubhouse, you can use LinkedIn, the list goes on and on.

In the beginning, you have a small amount of time while you're working your nine-to-five and growing your business. If you've got kids, that's a whole 'nother level of time management that you have to deal with.

The more focused you are, the more success you are going to experience.

When you're starting out, think very strategically about where your ideal customer is and how you can get in front of them. Then use that to plan out a very strategic marketing plan.

Now, I talk about repurposing in this video right here, and repurposing is something that I accidentally did when I was building my business and working a nine-to-five because I recognized I didn't have a lot of time, and I really needed to use the time that I had efficiently.

When it came to content creation, I needed to be very strategic with the amount of content that I was writing and how I was getting it out in front of my audience.

So if you have a short amount of time, which many of you watching this probably do, repurposing is something you want to embrace really early on. So make sure you check out that video to learn how you can take a piece of content and push it out to various different platforms in front of your ideal customer without taking so much time and energy away from you.

You want to determine where you're going to be marketing your business. Specifically, how often you're going to be showing up, and that does take some education on what's best for that platform. This is something that we teach inside of my program, Roadmap to Freedom, where we teach you how to market your business, specifically off of social media.

You also want to create a solid workflow, as I mentioned in this repurposing video, on how you're going to actually execute that every single week. Then it's about repetition and consistency, and over time you're going to see that you're getting faster and faster.

Maybe you can add another platform, and your planning is going really, really well.

Maybe you can go from planning 30 days of content to 60, to 90 days of content.

There's power in that repetition and that consistency when it comes to marketing.

So again, we've got the focus, we've got the determination and the desire to do it, we've got the solid brand foundation, clarity, crystal clear clarity on who you are, your niche, the problem that you solve, who you solve it for, and how you solve that problem.

That's your brand foundation, and then from there, you can start marketing.

Now, you might be sitting there like, "But Michelle, you didn't talk to me about my logo, and you didn't talk to me about my website, you didn't talk to me about X, Y, and Z."

That's because those pieces, you can create as you're going through your marketing process, but it’s important that you don't wait to market.

This is something that I find so many entrepreneurs doing, and honestly I did it myself, which is probably why it took me eight months to sign my first client.

The longer that you wait to put your brand out into the world, the longer it's going to take to sign a client. In episode 12 of The Brandmerry Podcast, I share more about getting the confidence to show up and market your brand.

So as soon as you have that solid brand foundation, you feel like, "Okay, this is good, this is good for where it's at, I can always expand on it, I can always elevate it," start sharing it with the world.

STEPS FOR STARTING AN ONLINE BUSINESS
#4 BUILDING A COMMUNITY

You have nothing as an online business if you don't have someone to sell to.

At the end of the day, you're going to need money to leave your nine-to-five. So as you are starting out in marketing your business, you want to start growing that email list and that community right away.

Don't wait until you've been showing up on Instagram for 60 days, or writing blog posts for five months, to start building your email list.

It doesn't take a lot when you're starting out. There are so many awesome platforms for building your email list, some of which you don't even need your website just yet. Two of our favorites are Flodesk and ConvertKit. I use ConvertKit over here at Brandmerry.

Both of those platforms have landing pages, which means you don't even need a website, you can just send people to a landing page where they can put their name and their email address in, in exchange for a free gift, which gets them onto your email list.

This is a great practice to have in place, and it's going to allow you to not only attract your ideal customer with a quality lead magnet, but then also nurture those relationships and email them about your products and your services.

Do it right away, like right away, it is so, so important.

Then as you fine-tune your marketing, you'll add in different elements like blogging, maybe YouTube, maybe podcasting, maybe Pinterest, maybe advertising, where you can then scale up that list growth, quicker over time.

STEPS FOR STARTING AN ONLINE BUSINESS
#5 YOUR SOFTWARE

Another thing that I recommend is having the base systems in place.

This means that you have that email marketing platform, as I mentioned already and you have some sort of scheduler for your business. I use Acuity as it's just a great way for people to schedule meetings with you, to schedule discovery calls with you or consultation calls, as well as if you're having a group program or some sort of coaching or something like that, you can give your clients the link so they can easily schedule with your availability.

This is huge, because when I was working my nine-to-five, I wanted to make it so that if I had a discovery call, it was only available in the evening and I wasn't doing it when I was at work. So having a scheduler in place is really, really important.

And, of course, you do want to invest in your website.

Now, I've mentioned a few times that I don't want you to spend all of your time and energy building your website, that your website should come in the marketing phase, once you have the brand foundation.

Then we move into the marketing phase, that's when you start to build your website.

You take the information that you know about your brand, and you start to write amazing copy and implement SEO strategies, all of which I teach inside of Roadmap to Freedom, to build a home base for your brand.

Early on, you want to decide where you are going to build that website, and maybe start chipping away at that process. At Brandmerry, we use Squarespace and recommend it to all of our clients.

Now, your website should not take you months. In fact, I recommend it should only take you 30 days. Set a limiter on it, get your website set up, bare minimum, strong copy, awesome photos of you, build that relationship, and know that you can always elevate it as you go.

The thing that I really, really, really want to stress with you here is that things don't have to be perfect before you start marketing.

In fact, if you keep waiting and waiting and waiting to get started, you're just postponing the income coming into your bank account which is ultimately going to help you leave your nine-to-five.

So don't spend all of your time building the most perfect website before you start showing up and sharing your brand with the world.

In terms of software, those three are our favorite: email marketing, scheduling software and website platform (many of which can link to Stripe or Paypal to process payments).

STEPS FOR STARTING AN ONLINE BUSINESS
#6 AUDIT YOUR PROGRESS

The last thing that I have for you is to audit your progress every 30 days. Now in my business, we're focused more on 90 days, because we have a lot of systems in place.

It's been five years now since I left my nine-to-five, but that first year, almost two years, every 30 days I was looking at the data.

I made it a top priority to evaluate the data:

The data shows this lead magnet is working really, really well, but my emails aren't doing great. Let me fix my emails by improving either the open rate or body of the email to increase the click through rate.
I'm talking about this offer in this way, and people seem to respond, so I'm going to keep going with that.
Every time I offer a price increase people are responding. Okay, I’m going to do that," because I was slowly scaling my prices.
Every time I would do a challenge, and I did a challenge every single month for the first year of my business, I would sign a client. The data shows this is a great way for me to sign clients so I continued to run with that.
I had a website and the data showed me nobody was visiting it, so I started to explore blogging.

I only knew this information because I looked at the data.

Every 30 days, I would audit what was happening in my business.

What of my products and services were selling?
How were they selling?
What strategies was I using?
Where were these people coming from?
How could I just throw more fuel onto that fire to help it grow faster?

In that first year of business, I focused primarily on one-on-one work, meaning I would work one-on-one with my clients from anywhere from three months to six months, and that was awesome, because it didn't require a lot of overhead, it was just me getting on the phone, and I got to take a few clients at a time.

That information and that income allowed me to then invest in advertising when I launched my very first program, Roadmap to Freedom, back in 2017.

So much of your business is about auditing what is working and what is not working, making those small adjustments, and continuing to put in the work. Don't shy away from doing the work.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, it takes a determination to be an entrepreneur, to leave your nine-to-five.

That determination is going to take work, but it's about really strategic work, it's not about just being busy to be busy and doing things to do things. It's very, very strategic, and the only way that you're going to know to make those small adjustments is by really looking at what's working and what's not working and shifting those pieces in your business.

So much of your brand and your marketing strategy is going to evolve and elevate over time, that is the fun part of being an entrepreneur, but you only know what needs to shift and elevate if you actually look at the data.

That's why some of those systems and those processes are so important. Like ConvertKit for your email or Squarespace for your website, because they will give you the data that you need to make those decisions.

CONCLUSION

Another thing that is incredibly helpful that I have done since the beginning of my business is invest in support. Even when I didn't really have the money, and I had to move things around and figure it out, I was investing in some sort of coach or consultant or program to help me scale my business.

It's one of the reasons I created my program, Roadmap to Freedom, why I have Brandmerry Academy to support entrepreneurs in consistently marketing their business, because I understand how important that is.

So I also recommend that you have some sort of guidance, some sort of strategist, some sort of mentor or support, that is going to give you the motivation and love that you need to grow your business.

Most of the people that you're around don't understand what you're doing.

Your spouse might not even fully understand it, although hopefully they support you, my husband definitely did.

You're going to need people that understand what you're going through, that understand what it's like to grow this business, and are there cheering you on and offering really strategic support along the way.

I really hope that this gave you a clear step-by-step on where you should be focusing your energy as you plan to leave your nine-to-five. I also hope that it gives you a little bit of motivation that you can absolutely do this, but you've got to dedicate the time and the energy to make it happen.

I don't regret any of those decisions that I made in those first few years of running my business, and they really taught me how to strategically hustle. Yeah, I'm going to say that H-word, so that I didn't burn out or lose energy, but I knew that I was giving it my all.

If you are ready, like ready today, to start building your brand, I want to invite you to watch my training, The Better Brand Method. Go to betterbrandmethod.com to get signed up for that.

You can also explore how to join us in this upcoming program of Roadmap to Freedom, doors opening January 2023. Learn more and join the waitlist here.

P.S. Roadmap to Freedom doors are opening soon! This live group program will help you create an online business that allows you to create a life of abundant experiences and impact. This high-touch program helps you simplify the process so you can make more money on your terms. And, the 2023 cohort is going to be better than ever with updated content, lifetime access, new bonus content, and more! Join the waitlist and be the first to join in January 2023.