How To Grow Your Startup With A Full Time Job

One of the toughest decision an Entrepreneur will have to make is when to leave their full-time job to work on their start-up full time. But this step does not happen in the beginning stages and often you will have to work two jobs.

About 40% of Americans have some side hustle they do outside their, so working two occupations is not uncommon. To be successful with dual occupations, there are two key items you must do first, and that is having the correct mindset and optimizing your output. This article will help you with both and talk about how the support community Untapped Founders aides entrepreneurs in this process.

If You Do Not Do It, No One Else Will Mindset

For first time Entrepreneurs, one of the most critical lessons they must learn is that they are entirely responsible for the success and failure of their business. In a typical job, you have co-workers, teammates, manager and even interns that you are working with. If you have to go on vacation, cannot work because you are sick, or there is a task is outside your skill set, someone else will pick up your slack.

When you are part of a startup, this does not happen. You might be the only developer, the single sales professional on the team, the only person capable of accomplishing a specific task. If you do not do it, it does not get done. Period. If you do not pull your weight, it can be detrimental to the startup, and I do mean failure.

Likewise, if you have partners that you are working with and there is an overlapping skill, everyone is still expected to carry their weight. When a team member does not do their share of the work, it is self-evident and can hurt team morale. When there is an equity split or title split(i.e., co-founder), it is super important of equal division among labor, responsibility, and power.

The takeaway, for the startup to succeed, it will require the mindset of everyone being entirely responsible for their roles.

Knowing When & How You Work Best

Without saying, you should not be working on your start-up during the working hours of your full-time employment. You have to figure out how to efficiently work on your side project and that initially starts knowing when you work best.

First, you need a work area/environment that you designate as your “office”. This environment you want to set up for yourself should be distraction free and allow you to focus. If you have kids or a significant other, can you set a time where they will not be of hindrance to you? Can you separate other social distractions such as events, friends, Facebook from your work environment? Finding a good workspace will help you be productive, and because you are working part-time, every minute counts.

Second important factor, know when you work best. Are you most productive in the morning or the evenings? Personally, I get up around 4 am because there are no distractions and I feel most focused then. 4 am sounds early, right? Well on the flipside many Entrepreneurs stay up to 2 am or 3 am in the morning after their 9 to 5, but they can do so because they are “night owls”.

Setting up an environment and your optimal work times will allow you to be more productive on a limited schedule.

Implementing and Following Processes

Processes are procedures will all you to perform complex tasks in an almost thoughtless manner. Processes can are present in every element of running a business from marketing, to sales and even development. For example, when you are creating a social media post, you may have a set of hashtags you automatically use for your brand and have a structured posting time that optimizes engagement.

Setting up processes for every part of your business will be time-consuming and even boring at first. But this step is essential because it will streamline your activities to make the best use of your already limited time.

One caveat of setting up processes is that they are teachable to others. Using our marketing example, you can use one of the many sites such as Fivver to find part-time help, and pay someone $50–100 a week to grow your social presence based off of the processes you have already set up, which gives you more time to focus on other activities in your business.

When you combine your highly productive work environment with time-saving processes, you suddenly can output a lot of work with limited time.

My Part-time Schedule When I Worked Full-Time

I am going to share when I was part-time on a start-up while having a full-time job, how I was able to work efficiently by having processes, a work schedule, and environment that helped me produce the best outcomes. My roles were both engineering the product and performing sales.

4:30 AM: I would wake up and go to my home office. Working in bed would result in my going back to sleep. Everything was quiet at this hour, and it was easy to focus.

4:40 AM: I would write emails to everyone ranging from sales prospects to team members. I would use Hubspot’s scheduled email sending to send emails at 9:45 am. I want people to read my stuff after they have gone through last night’s email spam.

5:00 AM: I would spend the next 30 minutes managing the sales process.I used the tool Pipedrive to manage sales contacts at different stages so I could see my path to closing sales partnerships.

5:30 AM: For the next 30 minutes I was prospecting clients and partners. The team had already set the sales requirements on who we were looking for, and I only had to find the companies and the contacts and enter them into a spreadsheet.

6:30 AM: Get Ready for work and drive down to the station.

7:00 AM: Get on the train. I like taking the train to work because I could bring out my laptop, put my headphones and start coding. For the next hour and a half, I booted up docker and started writing code that I would later test and review.

8:30 AM: Arrive at work and start my work day, with an accomplished morning.

5:30 pm: I get off work, and I catch the train home. On the train ride home, I again write more code.

6:30 pm: I test my code for bugs and errors, and I do a release.

7:00pm: I review the progress with sales and operations, and take the appropriate next steps.

Overall Result — I’ve managed to ‘comfortably’ spend about 2 hours doing sales and 2 hours coding each day.

Final Word To New Entrepreneurs

Being an Entrepreneur will be the most amount of work for the least amount of pay, at least at the beginning. It requires a lot of discipline to be successful in the endeavor because success or failure comes down to you.

In Untapped Founders, there are several Entrepreneurs who are now fully funded and run their own companies but at some point had to work two and sometimes three jobs when they starting out. The advantage of the Untapped network is you can leverage their past knowledge of how they became successful.

I encourage those of you who are working full-time times with part-time dreams and ambitions, to exam your work schedule and habits and find ways of optimizing them. If you can do this now while you are small, you will be able to easily scale out these process easily as you grow.