How to start as an IB without quitting your job
Almost nobody starts late for lack of desire. They look at their week, find no gap and decide to wait for one. The gap never shows up on its own. This is the honest answer to how to start as an IB —a broker's partner— while you still have a job: you don't need to empty your calendar, you need to reserve a small space and defend it.
You don't need more hours. You need the same hour every day
When someone tells me they have no time, they're usually right about the amount and wrong about the problem. Two loose hours on Saturday build nothing: every week you start over, because between one and the next nobody remembers you.
A fixed hour leaves a trail. The conversations you opened on Monday are still alive on Tuesday, and the person who read you yesterday recognises you today. The problem isn't that you have no time. It's that your business doesn't have an hour assigned to it yet.
What fits into one hour
More than it seems, because an IB's daily work is three short things, not one long task. In the academy those daily minimums add up to about an hour, and they're always the same:
- Open new conversations with people who don't know you yet.
- Pick up again with whoever left you unanswered last week.
- Walk the next step with whoever has already decided to start.
None of the three demands that you be available all day. They demand that you exist every day. And if you're still not clear on what the job is, start with what an IB is and how they actually earn: that's where the list that gives you your first names is.
The three mistakes of someone starting with little time
They're always the same, and all three look sensible from the outside:
- Saving it all for the weekend and doing it in one go.
- Moving the hour every day, depending on how the day goes.
- Waiting to have more time before starting for real.
The third one is the most expensive, because it dresses up as prudence. Whoever waits to have time isn't preparing: they're postponing day one, and day one is the only one you can't get back later.
When to go full time
It's the question I get most, and the answer isn't a number. I'm not going to tell you how much you have to earn to quit your job: that depends on your life, your country and your costs, and nobody honest can promise you a figure.
What I can tell you is which signal to watch. The signal isn't how much comes in; it's that your hour no longer covers the people who trusted you. The day you serve your current clients worse because you ran out of time, your business is asking you for more space. Before that day, adding hours doesn't speed up much.
Starting for real isn't starting with everything; it's starting with something you can repeat tomorrow
Pick an hour. Any one, but the same one every day: before work, in the midday break or after dinner. Write it in your calendar the way you'd write a meeting with another person, because that's what it is.
Keep it for five working days. If one day it isn't enough, don't move the hour: do less inside it —that's your minimum day. On Friday, count how many of the five days you kept it. That number, not your motivation, is what tells you whether you already have a business or still have an intention.
On what happens when that hour starts to weigh —and why motivation doesn't fix it— I wrote here: Consistency doesn't break for lack of motivation.
Your hour, on your schedule: Stage 2 of the academy
In IB ACADEMY, Stage 2 is called The Daily Discipline. There you split your day into blocks and place the minimums on YOUR schedule and in YOUR time zone, not the other way round. If you have less time than you'd like, we adjust the daily number, not the method.
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I work with the IBs in our network so their community grows with a system, not with improvisation: attract, support, retain and organise a portfolio. Here I write about that work, with no income promises.