A former engineering manager lays out the four-step Evening Exit Plan he used to build an online business around a full-time job and then quit.
Posted
3 days ago
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sincere
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13.9K
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
You can replace a salary without quitting first by pulling effort out of your job, protecting your evenings, and testing lean business models against a clear monthly income target.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
An employee with a mortgage and bills who wants to build an online business on the side but doesn't know how to structure the week.
Someone who spends evenings on TV and games and suspects those hours are the reason nothing has started yet.
A person afraid that starting a business means a big upfront spend on stock or tools they can't afford to lose.
SKIP IF…
You want a specific business model or niche to copy, since the video deliberately stays at the level of daily routine.
You already work for yourself and need growth tactics rather than a path out of a job.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Jack replaced a two-to-three-thousand-pound monthly engineering salary using what he calls the Evening Exit Plan. Step one is knowing the monthly number you actually need, which is usually lower than expected once you work from home. Step two is quiet quitting: dropping overtime and extra responsibility so you keep energy for yourself. Step three is treating the hours between work and bed as your most important time, spent learning and testing. Step four is starting lean with a low-cost model rather than ordering thousands in stock. He tried dropshipping, Amazon, ebooks and print on demand, and only dropshipping paid.
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okay so this is how i replaced my income using just my evenings and for context i'm jack i was an engineer for 12 years started there as an apprentice and i worked my way up to managing the design department managed to build an online business and left there two years ago to go full -time as an entrepreneur and i call this the evening exit plan the reason i'm making this video is because i've had a lot of dms a lot of comments recently from people who want to start their own business to eventually replace their income and go full -time and you know this is what i like this channel to be about this is what i want to talk about i'm really passionate about helping people think differently and build an income online that can replace your salary so i've broken this up into four steps these are the four steps i took the first step is understanding your numbers because you'll be surprised how many people don't actually know how much they need to make every single month to just survive and i'll give you an example so i was making around two to three thousand pounds a month at work so i knew i obviously needed to make roughly the same because i had a mortgage i had bills i had credit cards loans to pay back and all all the other good stuff right that we have to pay so
We need to get clear on the numbers because that gives us a goal in mind to know what to work towards. So how much do you actually need to make every single month to go full time as an entrepreneur? Some people will say, oh, you need to make a lot more than you think.
But I disagree because when I quit my job, I found that I didn't spend as much. I didn't go out for lunch every day. I didn't waste money on fuel.
I could live a lot leaner when working from home. Because you can just cut back on a few things. And if that means you can leave your job sooner, then so be it.
Because that gives you more energy to put into your own business. But we need to just get clear on how much we need to make. You don't need to make millions.
You don't need to make hundreds of thousands. You don't even need to make tens of thousands. You just need to be able to make a consistent monthly income to be able to support yourself and replace your salary.
which is usually a lot less than you think. So that's the first step, knowing your numbers. The second step is freeing up your time.
So most of us who work a traditional nine to five, we're already spending... you know 40 hours a week at work and some people spend more time because you're doing all the extra overtime you're commuting so the first step to fix this we need to apply this term called quiet quitting and what this essentially means is you need to take a step back from using all of your mental energy your physical energy at your workplace because you need to have the time and energy to put into your own business when you come home if you're traveling to work commuting sitting in traffic all the time you're doing all this extra overtime you're taking on loads more responsibility than you need to when you get home in the evening you're not going to have the dedication the energy and the motivation to start building your own business and the reason we call it quiet quitting is because we've decided in our minds that we're eventually going to quit that job so before we hand in our notice we go through this process where we start taking this step back we start putting ourselves first thinking about our future building our own business on the side and not caring as much about where you work i'm not saying you need to get in trouble you don't need to do a bad job but if you're someone who is going above and beyond now is the time to start putting yourself first and thinking about that time in the evening so saving
that mental energy for when you get home so i used to do lots of overtime i used to try and take on more responsibility because i always thought that it would give me extra money more pay rises and more responsibility usually comes with a higher pay so what tends to happen is people climb this invisible ladder and before you know it you know in my situation i was managing a department i had all these extra things to worry about And that started to impact me mentally and felt like I just didn't have the energy to focus on my own stuff.
So I made a conscious effort to stop doing overtime. So I took a cut in terms of the money I was making every single month. because i was doing around 10 to 20 hours overtime a month extra and also trying to reduce the responsibilities that i had that gave me more time in the evenings and i could actually focus on my own businesses and that leads us on to the third step which is owning your evenings so those hours from when you get home from work to when you go to bed are the most important part of your day now because this is the time that you can actually start working on yourself So firstly, we need to educate ourself.
We need to learn things. We need to practice. We need to make mistakes.
Just try things, throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks. It's okay to do that in this phase. Most people get home from work and they put on Netflix.
Maybe they play games or go down the pub with friends or just go out and waste their evenings. Now, I'm not saying you need to become a slave to a laptop, but you need to start focusing on what can I do? after work to move my business forwards or to even start thinking about growing a business or starting a business so those hours become super important so i used to finish at five o 'clock and then head straight to the gym i train for an hour and then as soon as i get home Other than eating dinner, everything was about sitting in front of my computer, learning and applying things and just trying to build businesses.
Those are the important hours that we get every single day. And that's why stage two is important because we are reducing the responsibility that we have at work. We're reducing the time that we spend there and we're putting those hours and we're putting that energy into our evenings.
So let's say 7 p .m. till 10 p .m. now becomes the most important part of your day.
This is the only time you get to focus on your own goals. Now, if you work different hours, obviously this needs to be moved around depending on what sort of job you have, what hours you work. But the principle is after you finish work or even before you start work, you really need to focus on these hours because they're the most important part of the day.
So step four is starting lean. you don't need to go away and start an incredibly difficult business model that you need to invest thousands of pounds into you can start with a model that doesn't cost much to set up isn't a huge risk financially and just start lean start with a business model that can you can get going with just your time in the evenings maybe that'd be a service -based business for example you start building a website you can Figure out what services you're going to offer, start reaching out to people, start posting on social media, start creating assets that you're going to use to market your business and get the name out there.
And that is what I mean by starting small. You don't necessarily need to go away and order loads of stock, for example, like I did for an econ brand, because that will cost you, I think my first order was around £4 ,000. So it's much more risky to do that because you don't know if that product is going to sell.
So there's much leaner ways of doing things. And if it doesn't go well, then you haven't really wasted any money. Yes, you've wasted some time, but it's not wasting.
You're learning skill sets. You're learning from those failures. So if I were to go back and start again from scratch, when I built my business five years ago now, I wouldn't get into a business model that is going to be ridiculously risky.
and expensive to start. I would just start with something lean, cost -effective, that I can get off the ground with relatively little effort and risk. And that will take away a lot of the pressure from starting a business.
Because one of the reasons people don't start is because they think that you do need to invest a bunch of money, but you don't. And I know this because I've started multiple businesses since. that have been so easy to set up haven't cost a penny really other than a website maybe you need like a domain and a monthly subscription to shopify or some other hosting platforms but outside of that you don't really have to spend much money social media is free doesn't cost anything to create youtube videos if you haven't got a laptop obviously you're going to need some form of computer or some way to do this work but it shouldn't need to be super expensive and super risky because it will just add to the stress if you do that it will make it harder and if you are planning to quit your job you've now added a huge lump sum to making that more difficult so try to do it as lean as possible so they're really the four steps that I took so I'd get home from work I would stop doing the overtime and then I would just consume podcasts, I would consume books, sign up to mentorships, courses and just learn from anyone that I could and just start trying different business models.
So I started with dropshipping, I started with Amazon business, at one point I was writing ebooks and trying to do print on demand. ebay selling i was doing all sorts of different stuff and none of it really worked other than the drop shipping i'm not saying you should start drop shipping you know this is five years ago now but there's loads of different ways that you can try to make money online and once you find an avenue that starts to pay you double down on it triple down on it and see if you can figure out how to grow it this is more about what you should do around your daily routine to start focusing on your own goals Most people go to work, they spend a bunch of money on stuff they don't need, they get home from work, waste all that time consuming TV, consuming games, and just doing pointless shit that doesn't move you forward.
And before you know it, weeks passed, months passed, and years passed. In my case, 12 years passed before I started to take action. And I regret that now because if I would have started sooner, I would be a lot further ahead than I am now.
But there's never a bad time to start. What's important is that we actually give this a go. So if you want to build one of these online businesses for yourself and replace your salary, start doing these four steps.
And I know they probably sound quite obvious to a lot of you, but for some people, they just don't know what steps to take. They don't know how to go about doing this, how to structure their days. And these small decisions are the things that hold us back and then we never make progress.
So these simple four steps will encourage you to start focusing on yourself, be selfish and put that valuable time that you have into your future. Most of us always think in days and weeks, but we need to start thinking in years. What do I want to be doing in five years?
Do I want to be continuing to work? at the same job in the next five to ten years can you see yourself doing that if you if the answer is no then this is why you need to start spending these evenings to build your own stuff so thanks for watching this video guys let me know what sort of businesses that you're building in the comments and i will see if i can provide any value give some tips and yeah let me know how you get on but thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Jack spent twelve years as an engineer and now makes his living online. In twelve minutes he walks through the four steps that got him out, none of which require quitting first.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:20list
The Evening Exit Plan
Know your numbers
Free up your time
Own your evenings
Start lean
Four sequential steps for building a replacement income around a full-time job.
Steal foranyone planning to leave a job
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
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