Updated May 11, 2023

Subtitle
How to use your employment as a resource for starting your business

Synopsis
Learn how to utilize your current job best to significantly improve your chances of success when starting your own business.

What You Will Learn
1. You will learn how and why your current job might be the best way to prepare for starting or buying your own business.
2. You will learn how to view your current job as a win-win situation for you and your employer.
3. You will learn several ways to improve your chances of success within your job and after you leave.

Introduction
In an ideal world, you would have at least a year's salary saved up, and you are in a safe position to quit your day job to focus entirely on your new business. Unfortunately, this is not feasible or practical for many first-time business owners.

But, on the flip side, keeping your day job will give you access to crucial ingredients essential to a new business: money, customers, contacts, suppliers, sub-contractors, market research, health insurance, and personnel.

And, because of these ingredients, you must look at your job as a blessing, not a time-wasting hassle. Looking at your job as a learning opportunity, a way to build your credibility, build meaningful business relationships, and learn all the customers' wants, needs, and demands, is priceless.

It does not matter if your new business is related to your current job. All the management, finance, negotiating, and marketing skills you learn on the job will directly benefit your new business. Learn to love your job, and find a way to make it work to your benefit.

Here are a few innovative strategies to use your job to help prepare you for starting your own successful business:

Strategy #1. Network
Help your network get to know you and see how good you are at your job. Learn how to network, and then grow your network everywhere, inside and outside the company, as broadly and as diversely as possible.

You can network with suppliers, contractors, customers, and other employees. You might need these people after you leave your job and start your own business, possibly as mentors, partners, employees, and customers.

Strategy #2. Take On More Responsibilities
Take on additional job tasks and duties. Some of these should be proactive and done independently, and for others, you should ask your boss for additional responsibilities.

The company management will see you as an accountable and dependable person. The other employees will respect you more and depend on you and your abilities.

Strategy #3. Help Others
Helping others to be successful on the job will also help make you indispensable to the company. The employees will also see you as someone of authority and credibility – as someone who can be trusted and respected.

Helping also means learning to be a good team member and leader. Go out of your way to work with those in other departments. Offer to help colleagues that are busy or shorthanded. Be quick to volunteer to help others and take on new tasks.

Strategy #4. Be the Expert
Figure out how to become THE expert. Be known for something and become the go-to person for that subject at your job. Ensure you are good at something and learn how to love that subject.

Choose something not so simple that someone else can quickly learn how to do it. This strategy increases your credibility and will help new opportunities inside and outside the company to come your way.

Strategy #5. Manage Your Career
You must have a well-thought-out plan. Think of yourself as a business. Where is it that you want to go? What do you want to accomplish at this job? Are you learning a trade that will enable you to start your own business?

Are you working at this job for a specific reason? Is it to make good contacts? Do you want to work at a prestigious company so that their name on your resume will help open doors for you when you start your own busi...