When to take the entrepreneurial plunge

ON THE CUSP: Hayley Anne-Brown has an impressive portfolio and growing client list, but taking the plunge into business is still a tough decision.

Dan Khan

When is it time to give up your day job? It's a quandary many entrepreneurs face, and Auckland interior designer Hayley-Anne Brown is standing at that crossroad.

The 30-year-old works 40 hours from Monday to Thursday as Manukau Institute of Technology's resident interior designer. Meanwhile, she is flat out running her interior design firm, Lou Brown Design, from Friday to Sunday.

While the day job has led to her single-handedly overseeing the colourful fit-out of the polytechnic's new campus, demand in her own business is growing so quickly that soon the time will come for her to go it alone.

"In the next six months to a year I will go fulltime [into my business]. I can work seven days and hold down two jobs for a while because I don't have kids but, at some point, I just need to go for it," Brown says.

"I don't have backup and I need to pay my bills so, to run this business, I have to have enough money coming in and a solid base of customers. I don't want to be fretting about cashflow and invoices - I want to hit the ground running."

Serial entrepreneur and startup mentor Dan Khan says it's particularly hard to make the leap into a fulltime business in a service-orientated profession such as interior design.

"It's often harder to make the shift with this type of firm because building the business takes time," he says.

"With a product-based business it takes a lot of tweaking before you can scale it up but it's a lot easier to do that on the side.

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When to take the entrepreneurial plunge