Five tips for starting your own business while working full-time

Be prepared for when you’re ready to strike out on your own.

With the internet enabling access to knowledge, becoming an entrepreneur no longer means going in blind and learning through the “school of hard knocks”. Anyone can learn from the lived experiences of famous entrepreneurs, and build their business alongside a safety net of a full-time job.

Make no mistake: building a business is a challenge, but this guide can help you turn your business idea into a practical venture while working full-time.

A group photo of people at the LaunchHub Pitch Showcase

The LaunchHub program at RMIT gives you access to the Activator co-working space, where you will be surrounded by like-minded entrepreneurs.

Identify the market need for your idea

An issue at the heart of why new businesses fail is the lack of a market need for your business, product or service. The idea in your head may have the potential to become a billion-dollar reality, but you’ll need to do your research first.

Talk to your potential customers to find out if they’re interested in your idea, and whether your product fits in with the assumptions you’ve made about the market (also known as customer validation).

Scour the market for competitors and analyse their strengths and weaknesses. Brainstorm with a few trusted people to make sense of this raw data, then use it to refine your idea and repeat the entire process until you’ve moulded your idea into a cutting-edge business idea.

The RMIT LaunchHub advantage

Early customer validation is critical to creating a competitive advantage in the market. First-time entrepreneurs are often unaware of this, which can mean the difference between success and failure.

The RMIT LaunchHub program runs a series of growth sessions on achieving product-market fit by understanding your product and its potential customers.

In fact, these sessions and growth opportunities are what attracted the founders of FireThrive to the RMIT LaunchHub program.

“FireThrive is a social enterprise that has global aspirations to address under preparedness to extreme weather events. We develop interactive experiences that help build resilient and thriving disaster-prone communities,” said Rachael Vorwerk, co-founder of the enterprise and alumnus of the Master of Communication.

“RMIT Activator seemed like a great fit because it was really hands-on and spanned 12 weeks, so we felt like we could accomplish a lot over that three-month period. We were really looking for some clarity and direction with our business.”

Commit to your vision and plan your schedule

If there’s ever a time when maintaining a schedule is essential, it’s when you’re working full-time while running a business. In your calendar, you may want to factor in your daily personal obligations with friends and family, schedule weekly exercise, or perhaps even pencil in a meditation session.

Most importantly, however, you need to separate your personal life and business early on, and the best way to do it is to set up a workspace for yourself. A dedicated workspace goes a long way in giving you the ability to structure your business hours in a way that doesn’t impact your job or your personal life.

The RMIT LaunchHub advantage

The LaunchHub program gives you access to the Activator co-working space, where you will be surrounded by like-minded entrepreneurs. An environment of support, mentorshop and competition will be the perfect space for you to make the most of your commitment outside your full-time job.

Danielle Teychenné worked full-time in her first six months of managing FireThrive. She said the practical approach of LaunchHub helped her navigate this time.

"The activities that we undertook in the LaunchHub program helped us target our efforts and validate our ideas, in contrast to me previously running around and trying to achieve too much. It was and still is a constant process of creating a hypothesis, collecting data and validating what ideas work.”

Adopt a goal-oriented mindset

Start off with setting daily, weekly, and monthly achievements. Build your goals into quarterly and yearly milestones, along with and long-term business goals.

Remember, you also have a day job, so you need to set realistic timelines for achieving these goals. Finding a mentor or buddy can help keep you accountable to your business goals.

"Working as a team helps with accountability, keeps things moving and lightens the load. Coaching and mentoring also really helped us follow through and commit,” said FireThrive’s Dan Steen, who was mentored by Co-Founder and CEO of Pride Cup James Lolicato alongside his co-founders Rachael and Danielle.

The RMIT LaunchHub advantage

RMIT Activator has a wealth of mentorship and knowledge to help you plan for success, while the LaunchHub program has weekly stand-ups to track your achievements as you build towards your business goals.

"A highlight of LaunchHub was the structure and community that the program provided to me through a very long lockdown that we experienced in 2020,” said Danielle.

“I had tasks, goals, drive and ambition during what was a very unpredictable and unstructured time. It kept me incredibly grounded.”

Build for success

Building for success means finding smarter and faster ways to complete tasks, and it’s vital to master when juggling entrepreneurship and full-time work.

You can’t do everything yourself, but you can invest in tools and solutions that help speed up your workflows, automate tedious processes, or outsource tasks to skilled individuals who can do them significantly faster.

The RMIT LaunchHub advantage

Many modern-era startups are beholden to services like Amazon Web Services, Google’s suite of products or services like Stripe to help them get to market faster, rather than having to build everything from scratch.

LaunchHub has exclusive deals with these major digital services and more, empowering you with the best tech the industry has to offer with additional benefits available to help lower the running costs of your startup.

Through RMIT Activator, the founders of FireThrive also received financial support that helped them invest in one of their key products.

"We were very proud to receive a $25,000 interest-free loan from the RMIT Capital Board, which we used to create our minimal viable product called ‘How prepared are you for a bushfire?’. Without this opportunity from Activator, we would not be where we are today!” said Rachael.

Persevere with your business goals

Balancing a startup with full-time work is both a sprint and a marathon. The sheer challenge of that journey can sometimes be overwhelming.

Managing your business never stops and your startup needs to grow to meet evolving customer demands, but neither does your job, and you can end up performing incredible mental gymnastics to stay on top of both.

Perseverance is the name of the game if you want to succeed, and you will find that perseverance and success become easier when you’re prepared for the challenge and have already broken it down into attainable, measurable targets.

After that, all that’s left to do is enjoy both the journey, and the destination it leads to.

Story: Hassaan Ahmed

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