How Do I Move From Being An Employee To Being A Business Owner?

To make the move from corporate employee to entrepreneur, you need to develop a new mindset. Here are six steps to help ease the transition:

#1 Read the fine print on your corporate employment agreement.

When leaving a company to start your own, closely review your written employment agreement.

Some companies will include confidentiality and non compete provisions that hinders you from disclosing their proprietary information and from working in a certain market or geographic radius for a period of time.

Just because such restrictions are in writing, doesn't mean they're valid or that you can't change them.In such cases, professional legal help is advisable. "The last thing you want is your former employer threatening to sue you when you are starting your [company],".

#2. Be prepared to put in even longer hours.

Often, people want to become their own boss because they're tired of the long thankless hours in a corporate job. But be wary. "If you are making this change because you are fed up with the corporate world and no longer want to work 12 hours a day…. you might be in for a shock,"  "You're going to be doing a lot of stuff on your own."

#3. Look outside for help. 

Because you no longer have vast corporate resources at your disposal, everything falls on your shoulders in a small business. That means it's important to seek outside help and expertise.

"We can be faster and have a lot higher quality when we are willing to team with others to bring things to market,".

Making outside connections also means leaving the office and picking up the phone more often than you did in your corporate job.

You could go from somebody who people were calling all day to [making] a hundred phone calls a day.

#4. Choose a target market wisely.

In a large corporation, it's easy to think in terms of capturing very large markets, but as a small-business owner, you'll probably need to zero in on a specific consumer segment.

"In the corporate world… you really have the power to get the entire market,"

"As a start-up you are going to get a subset of the entire market."

Choosing that subset may require some trial and error.

#5. Risks are Unavoidable.

In large corporate organisations, major decisions are seldom made in a hurry.

But as an entrepreneur, be ready to take more risks and make more decisions on the fly.

"When you are building a start up. . . you need to be more aggressive about taking risks to build your brand,"

All in all if you feel and know the time is right- GO FOR IT.