Easily listen to NursePreneur Academy

Artwork for podcast NursePreneur Academy

Do you need to QUIT nursing to build a nurse led business? Avoid the costly mistakes I made.

Episode 209 • 26th March 2025 • NursePreneur Academy • Liam Caswell

e six-figure nurse preneur in: 2021

Everything changed for me in my career. I left my senior nursing role to build an online nurse-led personal brand, one that gives me the freedom to work from anywhere, leverage the skills the hospital paid me to learn and create. Both the income and impact. I always knew I was capable of. Now it's your turn.

I'm here to show you the possibilities beyond bedside and help you transition into a nurse-led business that fits your needs and life. Whether you dream of working from home, earning what you're truly worth, or making an impact on your own terms, I'm gonna guide you every step of the way together. My friends will make traditional nursing as you know it, optional.

Now, let's get down to it and let's build your profitable business.

Do you need to quit nursing to build your business? Let's talk about my biggest mistake and what I'd do differently if I was building my business today as an aspiring entrepreneur. I personally will never forget the day that I walked out of my nurse unit manager job for the last time. I'm very dramatic and I had a very big cinematic moment in my head.

Picture me stepping out of the hospital, taking a deep breath, feeling a rush of freedom as I left behind 12 hour days, which were supposed to be eight hour days. The exhaustion and a career that had drained me for years. I thought that I was doing the brave thing, the right thing, but what happened next?

Let's discuss not long after quitting my job. Moving from Canberra to Sydney, I was sitting at my desk staring at my laptop, blank heart racing because I realized. I had no paycheck coming in. I had no backup or transition plan, and I had no idea how long it would take me to make this business work.

And suddenly the excitement inhalation that I'd felt from walking outta the hospital and literally throwing my uniforms back at the uniform office, it vanished very quickly. So here's what I wish I had known before I put myself in that situation. I. Put myself under so much financial pressure. That is my first mistake.

I thought that quitting meant I could go all in my business and make it work faster, but I was wrong and I was misled. In fact, my coach at the time told me it would be a great idea, and that's the first lesson. Now, I don't tell people to quit the jobs. You will know when it's time to quit, but instead of feeling free, I felt trapped.

Every decision that I had to make. Like down to what boxes I would wear on the day felt like life or death because I needed to make money. I just moved from Canberra to Sydney and whilst my partner was making money and I had a buffer, I was digging into my savings and that desperation showed through all aspects of my business, through my content.

Through my selling, through the investments that I made, through what we were eating every evening like, and it led to such stress and overwhelm and it's not something that I would recommend. So that's mistake number one. Don't put yourself under too much pressure. Number two was I made rushed and bad business decisions.

Oh boy. If I could go back and restart and reset, I would completely, and hindsight is a beautiful thing, right? But instead of building a business that felt aligned, that just worked with a business model that made sense, I took. Any client that would come my way at any price point, I kept dropping my price.

I kept discounting myself. I worked with people who were nightmares to work with literal nightmares. Some of the most. Problematic clients I had were the cheapest clients, right? I don't say that lightly 'cause I don't wanna be rude, but paid me taps, unexpected the world. But because I hadn't set myself up and because I didn't have a business model that worked and a clear pathway, I was saying yes to everyone.

I had a fear and not strategy. So I made terrible business decisions and that led to me over. The next two to three years, having to effectively restart, refine, burn down, and rebuild my business on a number of occasions, which takes a lot of time and directly impacted my ability to scale my business.

Mistake number three was that I thought burnout would not follow me into entrepreneurship. Call me naive, it won't be the first time. I thought quitting nursing would just solve all of my problems solve the exhaustion. It would heal my burnout. I'd finally be free. But instead of feeling drained from patient care and from the relatives, and from being a nurse unit manager, I completely overworked and undervalued.

I was drained from the overwhelm of trying to survive knowing what I know now. My nervous system was in a complete dysregulated state, and it was showing through all of my actions. It was showing through how I was thinking, how I was feeling, how I was showing up in my life. It showed up in how I treated myself, but also my partner and my broader friends and family.

It meant that I was operating from a constant place of survival, adrenaline surging through my mind and through my body, and that was leading to monkey mind in the amygdala running the show. I had no time or space for rest of recovery, and I did not feel safe at all. And we know from the literature that building a business from a place of lack of safety just means that you're not making informed cognitive clear decisions.

There was no safety net. I had no stability to lean on, no extra time to refine my business model. No space to breathe. I was having to build a business and deliver to clients at the same time while still trying to Scrappily messily, take some income from nursing through agency work and through a couple of paid university contracts where I was marking, but they would ebb and flow. So I just basically swapped one stress in healthcare for another. And so if I had to do it again, and I had to do it differently. This is what I teach people to do and I would not have quit so soon. So instead, what I would be doing is I'd be leveraging the time that I have available, that at the time I was actually funneling into a second job, which was working at the uni and doing some TAFE work, marking and clinical facilitating.

I would be stepping back from that and I'd be looking at how I could keep my nursing job. Or find a lower stress, lower impact role, or if possible, quiet quit to the level of safety in your current nursing role so that you can start to. Gain back some energy that you can reinvest into building your business.

Even a casual or part-time role can give you the financial freedom that I didn't have. I really struggled at that point in time. There wasn't a lot of contract work despite it being covid. It was just one of those weird dry agency patches. And plus, I didn't want to do any more clinical. I needed a break.

So we want to find or keep a nursing job of some variety. That you can do either part-time, full-time, or casual. That gives you the financial stability so that you're not expecting your brand new baby business, your brand new newborn business to be generating income within the first few months.

'cause that is actually insanity. The next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna manage our time and our energy. So I would be funneling one to two hours a day, or collectively clustering your time into starting to build out my brand, work on my niche, create an irresistible offer, start building and growing an audience without the weight of needing it to instantly produce income.

So many of us think that just because we have a business, we should be making money. But business is about building equity. Not nowhere in the world do you just start something and you get money immediately, right? You buy a house, you've gotta wait for the equity to build, you buy shares and stocks.

You've gotta wait for the equity to build. So I don't know where we get it in business that just because we paid to learn how to do a business, that we should make money immediately. It's gonna take time, but like I talk about all the time, it's time well spent because that time will compound and you build brand equity and you'll be able to take withdrawals from your business as you move forward.

And you'd rather do that at the right time than doing it preemptively too early because then you're gonna convince yourself and collect a lot of data that your business is not working. And then what I'd also be doing is thinking about letting my business prove to me when it's time to quit. We talk a lot about freedom numbers and what is your freedom number to make nursing optional In the Nurse Neuro Academy, I would be waiting until my business was constantly, consistently bringing in.

Whatever my freedom number was, and we work that number out. We look at our expenses, we look at our business expenses, and we look at what that would need to be in order for you to have business safety instability. So that could be 5,000, 10,000, $15,000 a month before you give yourself permission to step back or to step away.

That way you can then leave nursing or make nursing optional, or just do it on your terms from a place of confidence and not desperation. So my friend, you can have stability and success and I know you're tired. I know that you want to quit tomorrow and I know that you're looking for your next option.

But trust me when I say this, the best way out is creating your bedside transition and exit plan. When you build your business, the nurse academy way, you won't have to gamble with your stability. We're gonna have a period of time where we need to build, and you're gonna be juggling a couple of things.

You're a nurse and you do that anyway, but the compounding factors over time and the brand equity you're gonna build will outweigh. Anything that you could get from nursing in terms of income and salary raises as you move forwards, you won't have to rush into decisions that don't serve you because you have the stability.

You're not making decisions from a place of scarcity. I would highly recommend saving and having a pocket of money that you can tap into. As a savings fund, just in case you need them. Whether that's to invest in your business or just to invest in your life and what's happening, and that way you're gonna create a business that supports your life without burning yourself out.

The burnout that you chose to leave healthcare for, you want to leave. We don't want to recreate that in your business. Okay. I did that. You don't have to do that. You can learn the better way. I learned the hard way. So you can have both a steady income and a thriving business. The key is starting to think about how you can leverage that hybrid nursing career, part-time business full-time.

Sorry. F part-time, full-time nursing, and then building a business on the side of that until it gets to a point where it replaces your nursing income. It's so doable, and there are so many examples of this happening globally. So why would you think that couldn't happen for you? So if I had my time, again, I would not quit like I did in a very dramatic cinematic manner.

I would be building a hybrid nursing career. Giving myself the luxurious space to build out my offering and my business as a side hustle and letting it compound over time so that then I could one day make nursing optional. I would love to hear from you, what have you learned from this lesson? What key takeaways do you have?

Come and have a chat with me at the Nurse Entrepreneur Academy and make sure that you are on our wait list for our next intake for an entrepreneur academy. I would love to help you build your hybrid career, build your offering, and make nursing optional.

A pay rise bedside nursing could never provide freedom from hospital politics and the flexibility to work on your own terms without the shift work. You my friend, are one step closer to creating your bedside escape plan. I want to hear your insights, takeaways, and questions. Connect with me over on Instagram at Nurse Preneur Academy or email me at hello@liamcastle.com.

If you're the type of nurse that's ready to explore your options for building a Northside business. Leave us a review, screenshot it, and send it to my email or my Instagram, and I'll send you my bedside to business roadmap, my step-by-step process to building a six figure nurse-led business as a thank you.

Until next week, keep dreaming big, take in bold action and betting on yourself because this is the year you make nursing optional.

More Episodes

209. Do you need to QUIT nursing to build a nurse led business? Avoid the costly mistakes I made.