Be prepared

Corporate Escapology is all about getting prepared. The subtitle, so far, is “A practical guide to breaking free and moving on”.  ‘Practical’ is important to me because I want to help people move forward, not just with information and ideas, but also with the tools, the self-belief and the plans to achieve a soft landing.

This week I’ve spoken to several of you thinking about new pastures and this word “preparation” has come up again and again.  It makes sense because it’s a risk to leave a job without a plan – and if there’s one thing us corporate people hate it’s a risk we don’t need to take.

One person I spoke to was building networks that he can deploy later on, another re-skilling in her free time, another exploring new business ventures and one more dealing with an impending redundancy, which may affect him, or may not.

Each one of these people is pretty fortunate because they have ‘time at the crossroads’.  They aren’t being bounced into turning right or left – and most aren’t facing an aggressive driver in the car behind (think HR) hammering the horn to make them decide.

From the relative safety of a corporate job we often have at least some time to get prepared.

Time is good, but we also need structure and tools as well as self-discipline.  Without these things our dreams and ideas tend to hang in the ether, only coming to the fore when we fall out of love with our jobs: the Sunday nights, the last day of holidays, the days we feel like a hamster on a wheel, the days we’re not treated so well. 

Relying on those days as impetus for change introduces a risk that we’re blind-sided by a change made by our employer: a restructuring, a project you don’t want, a team you really don’t want, a backward step. We become a victim.

Getting prepared will be determined by your unique situation, but in my experience there are five broad considerations you’re likely to need to invest time in – so that when you wake up at 3am after you’ve made the decision, you’ve got some answers and can fall back to sleep.

I call them Your 3AM Answers:

1.     Finances: I hate it being the first, but I feel naïve pretending it’s not the most important factor for many.  It may not be for you, but if it is, you need to work out how you’re going to afford to leave.  Part of your preparation may be building a back-up fund, or securing some contract work, or something part-time.  You might find a way to make money from a side-hustle without even leaving – the ultimate Minimum Viable Product.  Or you might get lucky with a payoff.

2.     Whys:  after the finances, getting crystal clear about why I wanted to leave and what I expected from leaving was the most important consideration. Even now it continues to be, so I would recommend investing time here. The grass is rarely greener, so you need to keep kicking your Whys to make sure they stand up to scrutiny from you and from others who matter to you.

3.     Buy-in: stakeholders were one of the Things only we’re good at I wrote about in last week’s blog, so don’t miss securing their buy-in as one of your most key considerations.  Your most important stakeholders are likely to be your family, especially your dependents.  Make sure you understand what’s really important to them and keep focusing on that.  My wife Megan, who had sacrificed her career when we chose to start our family, blocked me leaving bp several times (in hindsight quite reasonably). When I finally left, I had to talk her through (many times) how we would stay afloat, as well as showing her I understood the risks and had mitigations in place - and that I hadn’t become some reckless cowboy.

4.     Options: I’m not saying they need hard coding into your plan, but you need some fairly good ideas what you’re going to do next; what corporate people might call “worked-up options”.  You need to be able to write them down with minimal arm-waving,  ideally along with some evidence that they aren’t based on some elaborate Ponzi scheme that only you’ve spotted.

5.     Gaps: the whole premise of Corporate Escapology is that people like us have a valuable set of skills, experiences and know-how to share with the world when we decide to leave. But still you’re likely to have gaps.  Knowing ‘what you don’t know’ is important, but take time to also think through ‘what you don’t know you, you don’t know’.  Yes, Prime Minister.

These five are my recommended considerations to prepare yourself when making any career move – especially a significant one into something different that doesn’t have a guaranteed salary each month.

If you can’t provide convincing answers to yourself in the day time, you haven’t a hope in hell at 3AM.

My book will go into each one of these considerations in more detail, with exercises to help readers think more deeply and take practical actions – be patient, it’s coming.  As is an online course that I’ve begun to design.

The final point I want to make, which I suspect is a future blog post and definitely a chapter, is how do you use your time in your corporate job to get prepared BEFORE you leave, rather than AFTER. Or as you get issued the redundancy letter, not when you’re walking out the door.  How do you keep the control?  I’ve got lots of ideas to share here.

This week’s exercise is pretty obvious: do this work.  Create a table like this and fill in the gaps – what are your answers to a future you waking up at 3AM or when challenged by a colleague or friend?

If you think this blog can help someone thinking about life outside their corporate job, do share this blog with them. Maybe it will help them find a practical path to follow their dream, which would be a nice thing to do.