The Great Resignation

I called a friend over the weekend just to check on her and found out that she's quitting her job next month to launch her coaching business in January.

I had no idea she was about to quit.

I've gone through all the hard knocks of quitting a job and starting a business with no knowledge whatsoever of what it actually takes to run a full time business.

I had so much information to share with her...just simple, basic things (to me, an experienced business owner) that she had no clue about. Things that will put her on the right track from the beginning, instead of her having to figure everything out on her own, which takes years.

For example, Trello is the tool she had in mind for building her business.

Trello is a project management tool, not a CRM (customer relationship management) tool.

Trying to build her business using Trello would have been to take a wrong turn at the very first intersection.

You can't manage customers through Trello. You can't do marketing through Trello. You can't sell your services and collect payments through Trello.

So Trello is absolutely the wrong tool for her to try to use to build her coaching business.

How much time and energy and money was she going to waste figuring that out?...and then likely moving on to another wrong tool for the job and wasting even more resources?

I pointed her to a tool that is purpose-built for the kind of business she's building so she gets off on the right foot from the beginning.

I also gave her a bunch of other insights that I've learned from building a coaching business the hard way so she can go straight to the right answer for the things where there's an easy right answer.

There's always going to be a learning curve with building a business. There's just no avoiding that.

But that learning curve should not include easily avoided wrong turns because there's nothing gained from everybody driving their car down a dead end street just to learn it's a dead end street.

The point of this story is if you're planning to be part of The Great Resignation, before you do it, talk to somebody who is already doing what you want to do so you can get some basic information to help you avoid the dead end streets.

Many of those dead end streets will prove to be very expensive toll roads that you will gain nothing from having traveled on, except a lighter wallet and a lot of frustration.