For all the times that our craft as business coaches is doubted, one of the instances at which its value shines through the brightest is when 9-5ers stuck in the rat race come to us for some advice on how to escape their routine-driven, dead-end jobs. That’s just how it is – working a nine-to-five job is a career commitment which is designed to squeeze the maximum amount of productivity out of you. You are made to work so hard that you have no time or energy left over to even think about ways of escaping and perhaps doing your own thing.

This is where business coaches relish the prospect of helping out because we’re pretty much right at the heart of that transition point. So here’s the plan:

Find nine other people looking to escape the rat-race

This is a very challenging step which kicks-off the definitive 9-5 escape plan, but it’s the ultimate make-or-break test of your chances to succeed in making the transition from working your dead-end nine-to-five job to running your own thing and enjoying more financial freedom. It is indeed very challenging to find nine other people who are in the same boat as you, particularly people whom you can trust and who are just as serious as you are about abandoning the rat-race.

Once you’ve found nine other fellow rat-race loathers, register a business and make it official.

Commence business

It’s important to formalize the business structure so that a certain level of commitment beyond lip-service is established. Once the business has officially been registered, which would ideally be one which is listed as trading in all aspects (or the equivalent status in your state), look for business operations to get into.

Between the 10 of you, there will always be some means and ways to raise micro capital required to fund small ventures. For example, if everyone contributes a mere $100 each for a stand and some stock to be pushed at an open-air weekend flea-market, that’s enough to test the market to see exactly what direction a more targeted focus of yours will be in.

This is just a simple example I’m going with as there are plenty of micro-ventures to pursue, some of which are similar to the one described while others would naturally be totally different. For example, you could have a membership site developed to which you charge a small fee for access and then through that site you operate something like a social trading platform.

The funds you would put together could go towards funding a known skilled trader and then making an agreement with them to share and explain all their trades, thereby creating the value which can be sold to the public as a membership to the site. Again, that’s just another example.

The idea to complete the 9-5 escape plan is to use a little bit of the money you collect amongst yourselves to search for an income generation channel that can be scaled up as time goes by.