8th Anniversary of Quitting My Job & Finding Financial Freedom
8 years ago today, I started my first online business, quit my job, and I’m still jobless and happy today.
If you’re frustrated with work and looking to get financially free so that you too can quit your job, or you’ve started a business, but aren’t sure what it takes to make it last past the first few years, then watch on. Because in today’s episode we’ll go through
- the most important things you need to do,
- the things I did well and so would do the same all over again, or
- the painful mistakes, and what I would do differently this time…
And stick around till the end, cos I’ll be showing you how you can start getting financially free, even without quitting your job…
We’ll run through all of them in today’s episode, so that you can learn from my mistakes instead of making your own, and so you too can get financially free sustainably, and stay financially free, Mastery Not Required…
Background to quitting my job & finding financial freedom
My name’s Tim Low, and I help people create multiple income streams using their Purpose instead of mastery, so that they can AFFORD to live, purposeful, meaningful, lives.
In 2016, I quit a perfectly good corporate law career. By then, I’d been a corporate lawyer for 20 years, I was the head of the law office of a global household name, I had been on the board of directors of a number of companies, investment committees of funds, and I was burnt out. The thing is, I believed I had no choice but to stay in that job, afterall, I paid well, and it was the responsible thing to do. Perhaps you can relate.
That all changed on Valentine’s Day 2016. Over dinner, my wife asked me to sell some of my guitars, cos we were moving to a new place, and it was perhaps a good time to thin the herd, so to speak. Being the overworked lawyer, I needed an outlet. For me, that was guitars. I’d never gotten very good at playing it, didn’t have the time to practice. But I did have money, and so I kept buying one guitar after another, hoping, that one would suit me, and that’ll be my breakthrough guitar. Of course things don’t happen that way…
And I always had a good reason to buy a guitar, I was playing guitar in church, some guitars make for great investments… for instance 1959 Les Pauls often go for half a million or more, and can sometimes fetch over a million dollars. Back in 1959, that would have cost less than $250, inflation adjusted, that’ll still be less than $3000 today. As I was researching this episode, I recall an anecdote about the late, great Bernie Marsden of Whitesnake, Here I go again and all that… and I recall hearing that he had once told his daughters that after he passed, his guitars shouldn’t be undervalued, and so his guitars would be labelled “sell for an apartment in London” or something along those lines. Regretfully, I couldn’t find the article, so if you know it, or I’m mistaken, tell me in the comments below.
The point here, is that I always a good reason to buy a guitar… it’s a great investment, the price will go up, the only thing is, I never sold one, because I never knew how to.
I had never sold a thing in my life, sure, I’ve sold shares I’ve owned, or sold a home to buy a new one, but never actually sold a product.
And so after Valentine’s Day dinner, I go home and I google, “how to sell guitars”, and then end up buying an online course on selling stuff online. The irony…
Shortly after, I started an online store selling guitar and pro audio gear. I didn’t get very far. Then I pivoted to selling other people’s knowledge products, and earning a commission. Within months, I replaced my corporate law income. And that leads me to the first lesson for today’s video…
Lesson 1: You need to be able to take it to the bank.
A lot is said about turning your passion or purpose into a business. In fact, my own tag line is that I help people create multiple income streams using their purpose instead of mastery, so that they can live a purposeful, meaningful life…
And I’ll explain that shortly, but the #1 thing you need to focus on if you want to quit your job, and not have to go back to one, is to make money
How does the importance of making money jive with me teaching people to use their Purpose to create income streams?
I’ll use myself as an example, so you can see how this works…
My life’s purpose is to help people see the root of their problems so that they can live better lives. Above that, my deep purpose or why is to bring Understanding.
The purpose of my main business, Purpostry, isn’t my passion, like guitar or pro audio… but it is aligned to my purpose. In Purpostry, I help people create multiple income streams and to show them that trying to master those income streams is the root of their problems and the reason they never successfully get those income streams sustainable.
I’ve also owned golf club fitting businesses, e-commerce businesses which help busy parents put together a quick healthy meal for their kids. They all point back to helping people see the root of their problems.
At Purpostry, we teach that a person has levels or layers of Purpose, and that these levels of Purpose need to all be aligned. I call that the 4 Levels of Purpose, and this is powerful because we’re not limiting ourselves to doing just one thing, we can be fully self-expressed, but everything we do leads us to our life’s purpose and fulfillment, and all this takes into account our individual strengths and values…
So, another level of my Purpose is to be able to afford to do all of this, and I won’t be able to if I’m broke, or I’m stuck in a job. And so that level of Purpose also involves being able to provide for my family, and all that requires me to make money.
After pivoting from the online guitar and pro audio store, which was my passion business and a money drain that would have certainly put me back in a job, I switched to selling knowledge products, started making money and in fact, replaced my corporate law income in a few months, and then went on to grow that into a 7 figure business within the next year or so, and if you want to know more about that, there’s a link in the description.
When you get results like that, lots of people wanted to know how I did it. Afterall, I was the corporate lawyer who hadn’t sold a thing before. And I started coaching people, some made it, but most didn’t. Until I started teaching them not to master things, because I certainly didn’t master anything. My wife and I agreed I would take a year to figure out if I could make this new venture work. There wouldn’t have been enough time to master all those new skills.
Now, you can’t just tell people not to master something…
…cos most people are either trying to master a skill or they just dabble. So I needed to teach them purpose led proficiency. If you’re not familiar with my programs, Purpose Led Proficiency works like this – if you’re driving your kids to school, you don’t need to be a master driver like Lewis Hamilton or Richard Petty. You just need the proficiency for your purpose, hence, purpose led proficiency, which I call Purpostry. But to do that, you need to be clear on your purpose, which in this case, is to drive your kids to school. You bigger purpose might be to be a great parent, and within that, you’ve got driving your kids, or cooking for them.
Once people figure that out, they start getting more skills faster, and start making money.
Making money is so important for a new business.
Most businesses don’t last beyond a year cos they’re not making money, and when you’re not, you just feel like you’re spinning your wheels. There’s a lot to do in business. Get the brand up, social media, Youtube…
So go back to your Purpose, are you doing that to make money, and live a better life, or are you doing it to get famous or be an influencer. For me, it was the former, so I didn’t bother with social media, I focused on making money. This is my 8th year in business, and only now, am I starting to focus on making Youtube videos, so if you’re enjoying this video, and want me to keep making content like this, then do give it a like, and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.
Making money is good for your morale, it lowers stress, it proves what you’re selling works, cos if what you’re selling isn’t helping people more than the price of what they pay you, they won’t pay you. Mostly, once you have money coming into your business, you can compound your growth…
Lesson #2: Reinvest in your business, but don’t reinvest everything.
A lot of people asked how I grew from zero to a 7 figure business that quickly, and the answer is I reinvested everything into that business. And if you do a quick google search you’ll see that the Return on Advertising Spend on a lot of ad platforms can be as high as 8x. Imagine if you spend a dollar and it returns you 8. And when you’re selling other people’s products, like I was, you don’t have much cost aside from advertising. Link in the description below if you want more info on this type of business.
Now at the time, I wasn’t quite getting a 8x return, but good enough that I was tempted to reinvest everything into the business.
And with reinvesting, you get a compounding effect, and you’ll see that it’s not difficult to get to a 7 figure business if you’re multiplying money that way.
And so I reinvested everything for about a couple of years.
For years, I understood that I needed to diversify. But it’s a long way from understanding it, to actually living it. And I kept telling myself, this is great, I’ll diversify next month. And then next month comes and goes.
And when you’re selling other people’s products like I was, I was dependent on them keeping things the same. Then one of the businesses I was promoting changed their model, and the commissions dropped. Another redefined their partnerships model. And so my revenue started taking hit.
And after coaching numerous business owners, a lot of us, especially the more successful ones are guilty of this same thing, because if we’re anything alike, you might be thinking that there’s no investment that’ll be anywhere near as good as your own business. Am I right?
These days, despite that temptation, I split my reinvestment profits into roughly 3 buckets. The reinvestment bucket, the spending bucket and the passive income bucket.
The reinvestment bucket goes back to growing the business, which we’ve just spoken about.
The spending bucket, I get to spend. And at Purpostry we believe in having a purpose led spending plan, where we come up with a spending plan, rather than a savings plan, and spend it on things that are aligned with our purpose, which we saw earlier, doesn’t need to be pie in the sky stuff, and may include things like enjoying a holiday, a really nice meal, or a better car if you’re driving your kids often. What ever makes you happy.
The third bucket is the passive income bucket. Part of my reinvestments now go to passive income streams that make me money on complete autopilot. A lot of my business is automated, but even with all the automation, I still need to be the face of the brand, shoot the videos, teach the courses. But a part of my income needs to happen without me, and the best part, is this is something that anyone can – even if you’re still in a job, by diverting a part of your earnings to things like index funds, REITs, and good assets. And I’ve linked a video here that’ll get into that in a lot more detail, because while I intend to work on my businesses for as long as I can, I mean, afterall it’s part of my purpose, I want to have the security of knowing that there’s money coming in whether I do or not.
There’s honestly not a lot of point in running a business or having investments, and being stressed about it constantly…
Lesson #3: If you want to have financial freedom and stay fulfilled and not go back to unfulfillment, whether that’s a job or a business, whatever you do needs to be aligned with your purpose and bring you joy.
Because while there’s a lot of hype and misinformation about financial freedom. Financial freedom doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be in a job. Financial freedom doesn’t mean you need to be in a business. I’m in a business because my business is aligned with my purpose. And I believe that you’ll always have more upside in a business, because if a business owner hires someone, we’ve got to be making more by hiring that person, than what we pay that person.
That said, if your job is aligned with your purpose, and brings you joy, then financial freedom could mean that you’re in a job, but you have enough passive income that going to work becomes something that you get to do – not HAVE to. And you’ll find your job will bring you even greater joy then. And we have students like that, where once they’ve discovered their purpose, they realize that they don’t hate their jobs as much as popular culture believes they should. Instead, we help them create income streams that replace their job income, just as we described in point 2 earlier.
It all comes down to your purpose, and whether your purpose is best lived out in that job, or in a business.
And what brings you the most joy.
Don’t get me wrong, either way, there will be challenges. And when challenges come, it is in the awareness of what our purpose is, and that we’re living it, that we will find joy, and peace and the strength to overcome those challenges.
Victor Frankl did say that “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.”
And the how we need to bear, whether it’s in a job or our own business is nothing compared to what he needed to bear in the concentration camp…
Creating multiple income streams does not need to be difficult, and it certainly does not require mastery. So, to learn how to create multiple income streams using your Purpose instead of mastery, go to start.purpostry.com/workshop on the screen now, subscribe to this channel, and you need to watch these videos…
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