Choosing when to leave corporate world to strike out on your own, is a very dicey decision to say the least. It reminds me of the decisions friends were making twenty or so years ago, about having children or not. Waiting until you think you can afford children, will pretty much exclude you from ever having any. Likewise, waiting ntil you can afford to leave the corporate world, where things are relatively safe and secure, might also exclude you from ever doing that as well. It only complicates things if you are starting up a venture that is unrelated to your present line of work. How will you know? How will you even have a clue, about the potential success of a dream venture?

The Internet can make things simpler, and I will tell you about my path of leaving a job I had held, and hated for the most part, of nineteen years. A job that provided me and my family, health care, generous vacation, and an honest to goodness old fashioned pension. And left me with an ever growing feeling that I had sold out my entire life for these securities and my natural fear of risk. Indeed, it always came down to health care, and not for me but my children. When my two oldest were toddlers, the papers were constantly reporting on children needing transplants and surgeries, that were not going to be performed because the parents lacked health care. It seemed health care was the only way to secure medical care when the need arose. My wife also was a stay at home mom, and was not open to even considering me leaving my job. Divorcing her three years ago in a way, was the first necessary step to my jump to entrepreneurship, even though just days ago she called making sure her alimony would be forthcoming as per usual. Having it deducted from my paycheck was her way of still exerting control onto my life. Or was that just my bitter perception?

OK, my path. I had begun using a hobby to sell things on eBay. Nothing relly unusual about that. Except my wife did not support me in actually making money doing something I enjoyed. Within six month we were separated, something I must say has worked out great for me and my kids, and those of you staying together for the sake of the children ought to have your heads examined, because your children deserve to see their parents as happy people. Anyway I digress. In two years I took my hobby from eBay to the world wide web, and was making something like $700 month. The problem was, I couldn't make any more at it without quitting my job, and I couldn't quit because when you actually brought it down to the nuts and bolts, I would never make enough being my own supplier. I, then advertised for other hobbyists to sell me their wares, and that worked not at all. People were gung ho, for about two months and then bagged it. Well, one June, a full two years after I began I had a house guest for the summer. I was complaining that my days off were filled with filling orders, and the whole summer was going to be done, and I wouldn't even had had time to enjoy it. And he said 'so quit', I thought about it for about two seconds and went fishing. I closed the website, and took all the auctions off eBay, closed the eBay store, and viola, I was done.

The last six months or so of this two year period, I had toyed with the idea of importing my product, and selling them on eBay and a new website. I enjoyed marketing the website, I enjoyed writing articles on the hobby, I enjoyed everything else about the business except producing the product. The only problem was, the risk. Sending money to third world countries and waiting a month for the product to arrive, went against every grain in my being. And this is where being single paid off, because if it didn't work I would never have to hear about it again. So I contacted some manufacturing companies, and sent them money via Western Union and fretted. But the items came. I sold them on eBay for way less than I did when I produced them myself. I had to change my marketing spiel, come up with a new target audience, and began developing a new website.

This went on for fourteen months, and I was back to working all my free time again. Yet now I was making over $2,000 a month with no limits in sight. In other words the more time I put in the more I would make, and I even had my sons help me, and I paid them. There was no cutting corners this time, Google ads, eBay power seller, the sky was the limit. But also limited was my time. I had specific goals in mind to reach before quitting my job, but burn out became more and more pronounced. I asked my supervisor if I could be down sized so I could collect unemployment, which would make up the difference I needed between my business and my salary. I was stockpiling cash like never before in my life. But, what I wanted was there to be no risk.

And then one day I snapped, I snapped at our sales director, and he went to my supervisor, and viola I was laid off. And I, immediately felt the shackles of slavedom released. Now I am free. Read the chronicles of my new entrepreneurial venture, learn Internet marketing, learn from my trial and error, and read my thoughts, on the loneliness, the singular existence, the life of no going back.

Learn from my mistakes, learn from my victories at http://ebusinessman.blogspot.com.

Among other things CT Larsen writes the blog; http://ebusinessman.blogspot.com/