McStartup

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve talked to people who were “planning” on starting a company, or “staring to work on it in the evenings”, maybe even with “a group of people who all have other jobs right now.” Some of these folks have asked questions I’ve responded to here at McStartup, others are just casual conversations. Both here on the site and in these conversations, I’m happy to try and provide some advice, but at some point, I have to lay out the biggest piece of advice for these folks:

You need to quit your job, and you need to do this full time.

I am not naïve. I know that you’ve got bills and mortgages and student loans and car payments and you really wanted a new hamster. Those things aren’t going to go away, and there is really no substitute for jumping in full time.

There are really three reasons: First, unless you are planning on working in the US and selling stuff to China (or vice versa), all of your customers are going to be sleeping when you are working, or at least, wanting to work. Business gets done live, whether that’s in-person, on the phone, or email. You’ll never get enough done, and you’ll never be responsive enough with your customers if there is a 16 hour lag between every piece of an email conversation. Think about it – if you were there in front of the computer trading emails with someone, you might go back and forth 8 times in an hour answering and asking questions. That would take a full WEEK or more if you could only respond once a day. The inefficiency is going to kill your fledgling startup, and you’ll be discouraged at the lack of progress.

Second, you are going to be too darn tired to really put in a full day of work after you’ve already put in a full day of work. You’ll either kill yourself with Red Bull trying to plow through it, or you’ll simply stop after spending an hour or two working on the business. Again, you could accomplish in a single day what you’d get done in a week or two part-time.

Third, there is nothing more motivating to making your business work than NEEDING it to work in order to make that mortgage payment or feed your family. If you are working part time, the reality is that your primary source of income is elsewhere, and mentally you will be dedicating resources to maintaining that source of income either consciously or sub-consciously.

Finally (I did say there were four reasons, right? LOL), there’s the simple matter of spending time on the business, and learning how a business works. In the book Outliers, the assertion is made that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. That’s a crapload (official term) of time. You just can’t get there, or even close to there, spending part time on something. It’s for this reason that I regularly encourage those graduating from college to go straight into business for themselves. There is something to be said for spending time learning your trade, but the “trade” of running a business is something you just can’t learn from a book. You don’t learn to shoot a basketball by reading books on the subject, and you won’t learn to run a business purely by reading books. You certainly can learn a lot from books, but it’s no substitute from picking up the ball and shooting. Great books and great coaching will make all that practice much more effective, but you still have to shoot. Business is the same way, and you can’t start taking shots until you get fully engaged in the game.

If you think about this 10,000-hour number for a minute, it’s pretty clear why you need to go full time. If you jump in full time, spend, say, 60 hours a week working on your startup, you’ll be a business-master in little over 3 years. That’s a lot of hours. But, you’ll be well above novice in a short while, and will show steady improvement all along the way. And of course, you’ll keep getting better even after 10,000 hours. However, the point is, that if you’ll have a VAST amount of experience and knowledge after 3 years compared to where you started. That experience, those hours of “practice”, makes a huge difference.

Compare that to the “part-timer”. 10 hours a week spent working on the business (and that’s probably a stretch for a part timer) is going to get you to 10,000 hours in 20 years. Seriously. So forget it – you’re never going to stick it out that long.

Even if you want to go part-time to gain some experience, how many hours do you need to get to make it that far. Outliers suggests it’s about 4,000 hours to make it to a professional type status. That’s 8 years of part time work, versus 15 MONTHS full time. In other words, if you jump in, you’ll start to fell reasonably confident in your abilities right around your 1-year anniversary. The alternative is to wait until your Kindergarten student is in high school. No chance. I just don’t see anyone working away, steadily and without interruption, part-time for a decade of life, just to get the the point where they MIGHT go full time. Ugh.  The knowledge of a decade-long part-timer is equivalent to a 15-month full-timer.

About two years ago I decided to learn to play the drums. On a perfect week, I might get 7 or 8 hours of practice in. On a bad week I get an hour or two. So, lets say on average I get 4 hours a week, which is probably not far off.

If I wanted to become a rock star, I’m looking at 48 years of practice at my current level. Over 2 years I’ve racked up something like 420 hours of drumming practice.  I'd better start looking for rock bands that will need an 83 year old drummer to hit the world tour when I'm finally ready...

So, now lets say some freshman in high school decides to take up the drums, and comes home every day after school and starts banging on those things. Maybe he or she gets 4 hours of practice a day. They’re going to hit 10,000 hours in 7 years, and they’re going to pass up where I am right now, after 2 years of steady, part-time practice, in just over 3 MONTHS.

I give you that example because it illustrates that you need to really think about what it is you are trying to do. I am not trying to become a rock star. I play drums because I like to play them, I find it a challenge, and I enjoy it. It is not my profession. I wish I could spend an hour or two a day consistently practicing, but I can not, and that’s fine, because I have other areas where I choose to focus my time. Essentially, I’m just jacking around on the drums for enjoyment.  Sure, I WISH I could play like someone with 4,000 hours of practice when I have just 400, but that's just not happening, no matter how much I wish it were the case.

So, if you want to jack around with business for the enjoyment of it, then by all means go part time. But, if you intend to make some real money at it – to become a professional entrepreneur who has a thriving business that sustains them, then you need to quit your job and get practicing, because you’ve got 10,000 hours of experience to start racking up to get there.