About the author: Joe Hruska (pictured below) works a full-time job, owns Vendalay Industries and is the co-founder of Laughing My App Off. For more on Hruska, see the note that follows this post.
As the sayings go, Joe Hruska wears many hats and has several irons in the fire.
I am an entrepreneur at heart and have been as long as I can remember. My earliest entrepreneurial memory was a difficult decision on whether to raise the price of the coloring book pages I sold to my classmates from a nickel to a dime. (I decided to keep the price stable.) When I was ten, I took my first side job mopping the floors of my grade school for $2.50 a day. I’ve had lemonade stands, I sold pop and gum to my friends in high school. I’ve sold everything from my own blood to calculators.
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Our society broadcasts the message that at some point you just have to “grow up” and get a “real job,” and once I finished my bachelor’s degree and started my family I did just this. I was lucky enough to find a job that allowed me to work three 12-hour shifts and be off for four days. The job was full-time and provided me with benefits for my family, but it just didn’t satisfy my entrepreneurial itch (a verifiable disease)!
Along the way I never lost the entrepreneurial spirit, it was just put on the backburner. Once my son started preschool, the non-standard shift allowed me with time on my hands to start up some businesses. The first was an epic failure in the beef jerky business (meat regulations are rightfully very strict). The second a successful vending route which I still run to this day. The third rental properties, and the fourth an iPhone and Android app development company. I was able to do all of this while working a “full-time job.” A job that had started out as a perfect way to spend time with my newborn son (now four-and-half years old), had morphed into the perfect way to pay the bills and to keep my entrepreneurial spirit alive.
Now I have read 1,000 times that the only way to make it as a business owner is to quit your 9 to 5 and just go full speed at your business. I wanted to write this piece to let you know that while that works for some people, it is not the only route available. The corporate world is changing rapidly and there are more and more full-time jobs being created on non-standard shifts (aka non 9 to 5). Aside from the consistent pay check and benefits, it has also provided me with an inside look at how businesses are ran. This added benefit has given me endless ideas of the way I want to run my business, and even more importantly things I want my businesses to never do.
If you are like me and read Silicon Prairie News while at your corporate job, longing to be like the startup whizzes you see on the site all the time, see if there isn’t a way you too could start up a business in your own time. Doing both can be a challenge on your time management skills but it is completely worth it. For me it has allowed me to make a softer transition from the corporate world to the entrepreneurial world by adding a middle step where I do both. I can’t wait for the day when I can leave the corporate world behind me, but until I’m ready I’m going to enjoy the ride!
Image credit: Photo of Joe Hruska courtesy of Hruska.
About the author: Joe Hruska works a full-time job, owns Vendalay Industries (a 100-machine vending company) and is co-founder of Laughing My App Off. Follow his journey away from the corporate world at his site, Escaping Corporate.
You can contact Hruska at omahajoe@gmail.com, or find him on Twitter, @lmappo.
