The Smart Way to Quit Your Corporate Job and Start Your ADHD Business

Welcome to another episode of The Weeniecast, the podcast for ADHD entrepreneurs looking to level up their business strategy.

In this episode, titled "Quit your corporate job and start your business the smart way!", I'm going to share my experiences ditching out of the 9-5 job world and plunging headfirst into entrepreneurship. I'll also share how my clients are doing it!

Hi! I'm Katie McManus, ADHD entrepreneur business strategist and money mindset coach.

The Freedom Overload: Creating Structure and Setting Priorities in Your Business

This episode of "The Weeniecast" is intended to shares valuable insights and strategies for starting a business, whether to quit the corporate job or build it as a side hustle.

I'm discussing the importance of considering financial factors, such as savings, monthly revenue, and health insurance, as well as planning for unexpected expenses.

Plus, I've got some essential advice on giving notice, maintaining a good relationship with your employer, and leveraging your expertise to continue making money from your previous company.

I also want to name that managing fear and anxiety, creating structure, setting boundaries with loved ones, and seeking support through therapy and coaching are super important.

So let's get into it.

I'm hopeful that you'll listen and get started with taking the brave step towards building a successful ADHD entrepreneur journey with confidence and smart strategies.

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Mentioned in this episode:

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Katie's May Birthday challenge

Clients can't hire you if they don't know you exist... Which is why it's SO important to post content to Social Media. Consistently. But that's easier said than done... To learn how to post consistently, you have to DO consistently. Which is why I've created the 31 Day Challenge- to hold your feet to the fire so you can create content, post, and finally attract your ideal clients to you, rather than chase them down...

Squirrel. In this episode, I'm going to tell you the smart way you can quit

your corporate job and start your business when you have ADHD squirrel.

Hi. I'm Katie McManus. Business strategist and money mindset. Coach. And welcome

to the Weenie cast. One of the most

exciting questions that I get as a business coach is how do I quit

my corporate job to go full time in my business? And

let me tell you, I have helped a lot of my clients do this. There

are a lot of things to consider, but it is one of the most

freeing, satisfying

and empowered things you're ever going to do. But it does

have a lot of things that you have to figure out. There are a few

ways you can do this when you're starting a business. You can either quit your

job to start your business and have all your time

available for your business, or you can do

what I tend to recommend, which is starting your business on the

side of your nine to five. This does a couple of things. It gives you

that buffer so you can build up a monthly revenue while you're

still pulling a salary. All that money that you make from your business

in that time, you can put into savings, which will give you a runway.

If you are good with money and you've saved and you've

planned for this, there is nothing wrong with you quitting your

job and going full time in your business. It

really depends on how strong your stomach is

for risk. If you can handle the not knowing

when things are really going to pick up, then do

whatever you want to do. But if you tend to be risk

averse, if you tend to not thrive

when the pressure is on, then I highly

recommend building it as a side hustle.

Whichever way you decide to go, the first thing you want to consider

when you're thinking about going full time in your business and quitting your corporate

job is doing the money math. This is

figuring out how much runway you have to go with. And

runway typically means, like, how much money do you have to live off of while

you're ramping up your business? Are you going to be going off of

savings? Are you going to borrow money? Do you have enough

monthly recurring revenue coming from your business already that can

cover some stuff? One of

the things that most people are most stressed out about, especially in the United

States, is what am I going to do about health insurance? Right?

Because typically when you're employed, that's one of the main reasons people like to be

employed, is because you get health insurance through your employer. They

subsidize a good chunk of it so you don't have to pay for the full

policy yourself, and it's just automatically taken out of your paycheck every

week. Now, thanks to former President Barack

Obama getting healthcare insurance on the open market

is so much easier for Americans now.

It's also a lot more affordable. A lot of

employers, when you quit, will give you the option to stay on

their insurance plan through a program called Cobra. Do your own

research on this. But I have found that Cobra

programs are so stupidly expensive.

I paid for Cobra for a little bit when I first went out on my

own, and let me tell you, it was $500 more

expensive than the insurance that I qualified for through covered

California. So do your research. Figure out what

you can get on the open market. If you're married and your spouse has

the option to put the whole family on their

insurance, that's also an option. That's an option I did not have because when

I started my business, I was single, single, single. The other thing you want to

think about after you give notice, because this isn't really something you can ask before

you give notice is you want to go to HR and you want to ask

them if you can carry over the disability insurance

that they have on you when you go full time on your

own. When I started my business, this is something that I

thought of after the fact, and I went to a financial advisor to try

to figure out if this is something that I could sign up for. And they

told me the hindsight story is that it would have been

better if I'd thought of this six months before, like after I'd given notice

and was about to quit, because it's a lot more affordable if you get it

through an employer. And some policies will allow for you to carry

on a single policy as you break out on your own. Other

things you want to think about are, like, what are your retirement

accounts? How much money do you want to be able to put towards those? What

are your daily, weekly, monthly expenses, what is

your absolute baseline for survival, and what will set

you up for success?

You also want to plan for the unexpected. I

highly recommend having an emergency fund

for things that come up. A flat tire, an unexpected medical

bill, your child being accepted to some

premier athletic club where you're going to have to spend

a stupid amount on fees and travel. That's something that

I did not have when I started my business. I did not have an emergency

fund. I ate through my savings. And you know my whole story.

I got myself into some serious debt in those first few months

of me being full time on my own, and I don't want that for you.

Do as I say, not as I do. Once

you figure out all that math, you're going to have all the information you need

to be able to create a plan as to when and

how you're going to go full time in your business. When you're

thinking about leaving your job. You also want to consider

what is your notice period going to be, how much notice

are you going to give this employer? Now, I want you to remember that the

more notice you give, the better the relationship is going to be long

term. So if you're able to give them a couple or a few

months notice so you can really wrap up projects, you're going to

be on fairly good terms with them going forward. Now, one of the

things that your employer probably doesn't want to lose is your institutional

knowledge. So one of the things that you can offer when you

give notice if you've been involved in certain projects that are

ongoing, if you've already been mentoring other people

within the company and helping them climb the ranks, is you can

offer to continue coaching those individuals

or working in an advisory capacity on those

projects. I've had numerous clients like quit

their jobs and through the quitting process, land

clients that help them ramp up their initial monthly

revenue. And it's one of the best feelings ever to be able to quit your

job, but still kind of be involved and still make money from the company

that you escaped from while you're starting work on your

dreams. A few models you can do here is you can do classic

coaching for any individuals who are going to be taking on responsibilities you

had or who maybe will be taking over

projects that you are doing. You can do the consulting model where

you are involved in a few meetings a week and just

continuing to put your two cent in on what should happen.

So coaching is one way that you can continue working for your employer

after you quit. Another way is to be an advisor, a paid

advisor. So basically you would be available for the occasional phone call

and maybe one meeting a week to be able to point people in the

right direction, answer questions, tell them who

to turn to for certain problems. You could also continue

doing some consulting work where you're doing some of the work that your

previous role required you to do. This is especially possible

if there's no one else in your company who's qualified to do that or

who has the capabilities of doing it within their available time.

Now, you can only do this if you leave on good terms. They're not hiring

you if you kick over a bunch of chairs, emptied the garbage on the floor,

and try to burn the building down on the way out. Okay,

if this has been a miserable job, if you've hated everyone, if it was

toxic, if you need to just walk out one day, you do, you

boo. I support you in whatever you feel you need to

do. But I'm also a big fan of you making money.

So if at all possible to

maintain that relationship and continue making money from this company

while you're working for yourself. I think that is a win win

situation. Now

let's talk about managing the fear and the

anxiety that comes up when you go out on your

own, right.

Your nervous system has gotten acclimatized to

getting a weekly biweekly paycheck. It's on a

schedule for here's when we get the resources that allow us to get other

resources that cover our survival needs. When you

break away from that and you start your own company, that

cycle goes away and your nervous system really does

have to recalibrate to whatever schedule

it is that you're bringing in money. This is particularly hard

for people with ADHD who tend to be

impulsive spenders. And especially when

we are stressed out, we tend to spend to get a little

dopamine drip. I'm sure you've had that experience of having

a really rough day and thinking, you know what, I'm just going to swing by

Target on my way home and buy a little

knickknack and treat myself and I'm going to feel a whole lot better.

Now, that's fine when you have consistent income coming in every

other week from your job. But if you're in the early stages of

your business and you're not making a lot of money and it's not

consistent, you want to find other ways

to manage your anxiety and to give yourself that dopamine drip.

Because here's what ultimately happens is what used to give

you that feel good energy when you were full time employed,

it would give you that little drip of dopamine that would help you turn

that day around and actually enjoy your evening with whoever you're spending time

with. When you're full time

employed and stressed out about money, it'll help for about

five minutes. You'll walk out of the store with your bag, you'll

feel good about this silly thing you bought, but five minutes will

pass and you'll start punishing yourself, thinking, god,

I'm such an idiot. Why did I spend money on this stupid

thing that I don't need when I'm not sure when money's coming in

again? Which, as you know, when we start punishing ourselves

for something, we tend to get into kind of a downward spiral and

we start looking at all the things that we're doing wrong. And

once we start looking at all the things that we're doing wrong, we start spiraling

even more about how this is never going to work. And we

all know that for you to have a successful business, one of

the first steps is you have to actually believe that it's possible. If you

spend too much time in this downward spiral of, oh my God, this is

never going to work, you're right. It's never going to work.

And so these little decisions that you set yourself up for of

going and doing some emotional spending, you want to be

very conscious about when you do this because I'm not

saying you can't do it at all, but you want to

be very aware of what the consequences

are going to be. Some things that really helped me when I went full

time and I really had to figure out how to manage my anxiety

was meditating, going for walks, talking to

friends. I started going back to

therapy when I started my business. I've been in and out of

therapy as an adult. I think most of us have.

Sometimes I'll get on the phone with someone who has experienced a lot of trauma,

either through work or relationships, and

they are burned out on being part of a system.

So they want to break away from their corporate job and they think that starting

a business is going to be that ticket to freedom.

Unfortunately, if you have any underlying shadow work

that needs to be addressed, starting a business will bring it all to the surface

all at once and you will have to address it as you're trying to

build this. Do the mental and emotional work first. I

cannot recommend therapy enough for new

entrepreneurs. You are walking into the unknown. You're

doing something that you've never done before. There is no guarantee

that it's going to work. And literally,

unless you are independently wealthy and you are doing this for fun,

what hangs in the balance is your ability to survive.

That's what money represents for us in this world.

If we don't have money, we can't afford food, we can't afford shelter, we can't

afford water. All very important things,

I will say. Also, a big part that got me through that fear

and that anxiety was working with a coach, working with

someone who even when I doubted myself and my ability

to succeed, they believed in me. Someone who could talk

me off the ledge and point me in a direction, just say,

hey, go do that. That was a

massive help for me to manage my fear and my anxiety as I started

full time. Things you want to be very careful of.

I know during the pandemic, a lot of people turn to

wine to manage their anxiety. I remember there was that

classic TikTok or reel of that man who went for a run through

his suburban neighborhood and as he's running, he's filming

all the recycling bins and all the bottles of booze

and all the empty containers and just saying, yeah, we're all

freaking out about this. When you're starting a business,

it's really easy to reach for things that will numb the

feelings of anxiety and fear. But as we know

from research and from experience in the world, people with

ADHD do have a predisposition to addiction. So you want

to be very careful with that, something that will create a

little more anxiety and fear for you. And I'm sorry to laugh, but this

happens for absolutely every one of my clients. ADHD and

neurotypical is that you are

going to have what I call kind of freedom overload

in those first few months of working for yourself. Especially

if you've worked in a structured nine to five corporate job

where you showed up. You had to sit at your desk, you had to go

to the meetings, and you were constantly paying attention to your corporate

calendar. When you go full time on your own, you're not going to

be as busy as you were in your nine to five. You're going to have

a lot to do, but you're not going to be beholden to a very

specific schedule because you make the schedule and

I guarantee you in your first two or three months, you will

miss calls that happens to every single one

of my clients. They miss a call, either a sales call or a

client call, because they get out of the habit very quickly of

checking their calendar. And I say this not to be

like, don't do this, this is terrible. But to normalize it

and to tell you you're not alone. If this happens to you,

it happens to the best of us and it's not going to be the end

of the world. One of the tricky bits about having ADHD is we oh, what

am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out.

But first squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

One of the tricky bits about having ADHD is we thrive in

structure, but we also have a very difficult time creating

structure for ourselves. So some things that

will really help you ease yourself into some kind of structure for

yourself as you go full time is signing up for stuff that will

create structure for you. So for instance, signing up

for a daily yoga class that you have to go to,

committing to doing a boot camp maybe. There

are regular networking meetings that you can go to

in your area that help you create a structure around it.

Things that make you do something that's outside of your

home that you have to prepare for and you have to plan travel around and

then you have to come back to your desk. Your inclination when you start this

business is as soon as you have free time to make all that

free time available to all of your clients and all your potential

clients and anyone who wants to talk to you at any point. This

is going to be one of the biggest mistakes you make in starting your business.

I don't know a single store that's owned by one person and

has only one employee that's open for 24 hours a day.

Because if you're just one person, you're going to have to sleep, you're going to

have to eat, you're going to have to go to the bathroom at some point.

You're going to have to be a human. You're going to have to go out

and have fun with your friends and be with your family. You're going to have

to have a holiday sometime. When I first started my business. One of the pits

of chaos that I fell into was making my

calendar open nine to nine every day, Monday through

Friday, and having some availability on the weekends. Also. I figured

this would make me so hyper accessible that people would just sign up for

anything. This actually just made my life a

living hell because whenever I'm waiting for

something to happen, I'm not actually getting done. I'm in waiting mode.

And so if I had a client call at 10:00 A.m. And then my next

one at 03:00 P.m., guess what happened between eleven and 03:00

P.m.? Not a whole lot. I might answer a couple of

emails. I might respond to people on social media. But I

wasn't getting into flow. I wasn't able to really get into the bigger projects

that would have helped me move the needle on my business. So one of

the things that I really recommend to new business owners is limit the

times that your clients can book with you. This will help you

time batch your different activities in your business. You will get

so much more done than if you make

yourself super widely available to everyone. This

also creates that structure for you. If you

only allow client calls to happen on Tuesdays and Fridays, guess what's

happening on Tuesdays and Fridays? You're going to be on calls.

That allows for you to create different systems that you're going to do on Mondays,

Wednesdays, and Thursdays. On Mondays you create content and that's all

you do on Mondays that's going to allow for you to really get into

the flow of that. Maybe on Wednesdays that's when you do your sales

calls. Maybe that's the only thing that Wednesday is available for.

And you'll be able to go through sales call and sales call and sales call

and follow up with everyone with any more information that they need to make a

decision with you. And then you make the rules here. So maybe you

take Thursdays off. Like live on the wild side.

This is your life. This is your business. You set the hours.

You can do whatever you want. There's this

incredible amount of guilt that happens when you start

your business that no one expects. You know that guilt you

have when a coworker or your boss walks by behind you and

you've been checking Facebook. That like sinking feeling of,

oh God, they're going to think I'm not working. Oh my God, they're going to

think I'm slacking off. It's incredible how you

will actually feel that immense amount of guilt for being on Facebook

during the working days of the first six months of you running your business.

Even if part of your marketing strategy is to post on

Facebook, you're going to have this

overhang of all the like, oh, I shouldn't be doing this. Oh,

I shouldn't be doing this. Oh, I shouldn't be doing this. For that you need

to be doing for your work because it was something that could have gotten

you in trouble in your previous job. If

this happens for you, just want you to know you're not nuts.

It's normal. It's just something that your nervous system is going to have

to get over. Because remember, your brain is designed to

identify danger. When you worked for a corporate company

and being on Facebook was bad, and if you got caught on it, it could

get you in trouble. That's a dangerous thing because it could cost you your

job. So when you start your business, your brain

doesn't switch over immediately. The danger sensors in your

brain do not automatically correct for your new environment.

So you're going to feel anxiety doing stuff on social media when

you're working in your business. And that's so normal. And I promise you

you'll get over it. The

final thing I want to talk about that happens when you break

away from your full time corporate job and go full time in your

business is you have to train the people in

your life to honor your new work

hours. I

can't tell you how many times this happened for me and how often this happens

for my clients that once they go out full time on their own and they

quote, unquote, have all this free time, their friends and

family are like, oh, are you free on Tuesday? Because we're

going wine tasting. Would you like to come with? Oh,

would you mind babysitting our child on Thursday afternoon?

Because we have some appointments we have to go to. Oh, I see

that you are standing around the house not really

doing anything that's perceivable to me. Would you mind

doing this and this and this many tasks around the house since you're

just here not doing anything to your friends and family,

you will look unemployed. You will

appear unemployed until you start

honoring your working hours.

During the pandemic. When I was locked down with my family, this

was something that I had to train my parents on because

I do a lot of work on my cell phone. And I totally get

how being on your cell phone writing something or

being on social media looks like you're just fucking around.

It looks like you're just kind of like texting people and messing

around and having fun. That was my work.

And I can't tell you how many times I'd be like mid writing a whole

marketing post for my business. And my dad would start telling me

about something really interesting that he saw in the news and he'd start telling

me his story. And I felt so bad in those moments because I'd have to

stop him and be like, dad, I'm right in the middle of writing something and

I have a train of thought and I don't want to lose it. Can you

hold this for a little while? Can you tell me about this later? Because I

can't focus on this right now. Because I'm going to forget what I'm trying to

say here and I'm actually sitting here doing work right

now. There's also to combine the

previous point with this point. You'll be sitting at home and on

social media and you could be on social media taking a break

from the work. You could be playing a game on your computer, taking a break

from the work, and your spouse or your child or your

roommate will walk past and you're going to feel judged by

them. And they may make a snide comment of, oh, must be

nice to do that. Must be nice to not have to do work

all day. If you let those comments get to you,

you're going to be less productive. Those comments are dopamine

killers. You

one of the best things that you can do for yourself as you're building this

business is to keep your mood positive.

And some things that keep your mood positive are playing games on

your phone, watching cute cat videos on YouTube,

death scrolling on Instagram, or TikTok for funny

reels. Those things actually do make you

happier in the moment, which makes you more able to

learn, which gives you more access to your creativity. Both

are incredibly important things for you to

have when you're starting this business. This is going to be something that you

have to learn so much in so little time with a lot of

pressure on you. Being able to learn faster is just going to

help. If watching 20 minutes of cat videos is going

to help you be happier and learn better, go and watch the cat

videos. Don't let anyone shame you for that. At its core,

you just have to get really good at setting boundaries with your loved ones.

I will also add that starting a business and going full time into it

and betting on yourself in this way is one of the

bravest, hardest things you're ever going to do.

And I know you're smart and I know you're capable and I know you have

figured out tough things before. This is not

a test to prove how smart you are, though. This is not a test to

prove how capable you are of figuring shit out. This is

starting a business. So if you get up and running

and if you're struggling to land clients and if you're

struggling to figure out what to do for your marketing or how to create an

offer or any part of the business, I want you to recognize

that you were never taught this in school. They don't teach

entrepreneurship in elementary school, middle school, high school, or

college unless you take a very specific

entrepreneur class, which I have had clients who've

taken entrepreneurial classes and they said that it was completely

useless in actually starting a business. You also did not come out of the

uterus naturally knowing these things. Some things that you

did come out of the uterus with, knowing how to breathe, knowing to

blink, knowing to cry when you're hungry.

Okay? Nowhere in that list is knowing how

to find a niche, create an offer, market the

offer, sell the offer, all those things. It's not something

that you have to expect yourself to know inherently. And

also, I want to remind you, the only reason I train on this is

because I had a ten year career in sales and

marketing. I just so happened to work in

industries that had business models

that were very similar could be transferred over into

service based entrepreneurship. I hit the

jackpot with all the things that I did that led me up to knowing how

to do this stuff. If you didn't have that list of

experiences, it's okay that you don't know what you're

doing. It's acceptable. It's not proof that you're not smart.

It's not proof that you're not capable. It's not proof that you can't figure out.

You absolutely could. But how long do you want to take?

Figuring it out is the big question. If you're

independently wealthy and you're doing this for fun and you just really

love complicated puzzles and putting random

shit together and just throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what works, then

absolutely take as long as you want. But if you need this business

to actually make money so you can pay the bills, then you have

to figure out, what is that figure it out timeline.

And when is that moment that you're going to have to say, you know what?

I either need help or I need to give up. And if you hit that

point, or if you realize you just don't want to waste the time trying to

figure it out, then I want you to go to the link in the show

notes and I want you to book a generate income strategy call with

me, and the link for that is

Weeniecast.com strategy.

On this call, we will break down exactly what your big dream is for

this business. Talk through all the things that you're getting stuck on in building

it by yourself. And if it's a fit for both of us, we'll talk about

different ways to work together. And if it's not a fit for both of us,

I will point you in the direction of some resources that will massively help

you.

You one of our neighbors has this massive, like,

120 pound Irish wolfhound. And Luna doesn't like dogs that are

bigger than her. She is really vocally mean

to them. Squirrel. Squirrel,

squirrel, squirrel. Squirrel.