Leaving academia and becoming an online entrepreneur: embracing the good, the bad and the ugly

 

Today is the end of the fiscal quarter and I’m in my home office processing bills for my accountant. Within a few weeks we will know how much VAT he has to pay for his business activities.

Five years ago, I didn’t know. I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dutch Ecological Institute in Wageningen, pursuing a career path ending in a professorship. I was constantly immersed in the pain of data analysis or anxiously waiting for manuscript decisions. At the time, I wasn’t looking at the year in terms of fiscal quarters.

Now I run an educational business, writing focused and helping other scientists improve their productivity and writing skills.

It all started when we couldn’t find a position on the tenure track. After asking myself whether science was really for me during my postdoc days, I trained as a yoga teacher.

Then, by applying the mindful side of yoga to my writing, I was able to complete an important piece of work without the usual procrastination and self-doubt. I was so excited about this new way of writing that I wanted all scientists to know about it.

After designing and teaching yoga and science writing courses based on this approach at the University of Alicante, Spain, COVID-19 struck and I was only able to teach online. So I hired a business coach to teach me the basics of online marketing and sales.

Online education companies have a relatively low cost of entry. There is no need to raise capital or develop a complicated business plan. This transition has not been easy, but I was on a mission to meet the needs of scholars better than ever. To help scholars build happier, more creative, and more productive academic lives.

This mission has empowered me to overcome my ups and downs as an entrepreneur. But it also benefits from privileges that not everyone has.

For one thing, my family’s financial situation allowed me to withhold my salary and take risks. Secondly, my academic experience at a prestigious institution helped me get my first clients. Finally, the support from mentors, family, and friends made me feel at ease.

Entrepreneurship is tough, and many of the great struggles of working in academia also exist in running a business. Here are the pros and cons of my role as an entrepreneur.

Good:

Spiritual freedom and autonomy. Entrepreneurship gives you the freedom to create courses with your own ideas to help other scientists. I can choose the direction of my business. For example, my first course combined scientific writing with yoga and meditation, a surprising combination for many young scientists. My Productivity Course also includes lessons on energy management and planning around the menstrual cycle, which are not commonly found in time management courses. Do people buy courses or read articles?

Geographic Freedom i run an online business.

My classes are a combination of pre-recorded videos, Zoom calls, and interaction with the student community via Slack Messenger channels. You can do this from anywhere as long as you have a good internet connection and timezones don’t matter.This opens up a lot of possibilities. It is a great privilege to work with people from all over the world, live in the best place for my family and do what I love.

hours of freedom. I am my own boss, so I decide how I spend my time. That doesn’t mean I do less work than science. As a postdoc, I worked him four days a week. This is a common schedule in Holland, especially if you have young children. I still work four days a week.

The biggest difference is that you can organize your schedule in a way that works best for you and your family. That might mean I don’t work on Fridays because I’m helping my kid’s class project, but I spend Saturday mornings writing and planning social media posts. , I think the separation of work and private life is more difficult than science.

Financial Freedom. My salary does not depend on the university’s benchmarking system without the opportunity to negotiate. Theoretically the sky is the limit.

But in reality, the average annual income of a full-time entrepreneur in the United States is about $68,000, which is the average annual income of a scientist. And this number depends on the person’s years of experience. This is not the true salary of many entrepreneurs just starting their business.

Entrepreneurial salaries vary widely due to several other factors. But for reference, her first year salary in this role was less than $1,000 a month. I would like to finish my third year in business with the same salary as when I was working as a postdoc five years ago. For now, I am happy with this result. But I also know that if the financial side of becoming an entrepreneur had been my main goal, I would have preferred to look for another career.

Having a good idea is not enough. As a scientist, it’s not enough to make amazing discoveries. We need to publish it and let the whole scientific community know. Businesses also need ideas that provide solutions to specific problems.

Others should be willing to pay for this solution. And I need to find ways to reach those people, mostly through social media, paid advertising, and email marketing.Without these guarantees, the chances of a small business surviving five years are about 50%. only 33% chance of long-term survival.

Uncertainty. The instability of postdoctoral research careers is one of the main reasons why scientists leave academia.But my salary as an entrepreneur depends on me generating income, which is not a certainty. In fact, lack of revenue and funding is one of the main reasons small businesses fail. My salary is about 50% of what I earn.

The rest are expenses and taxes. Often times, people are unaware of all the costs involved when thinking about starting a business. But scaling and specializing an online business also requires investment and risk. For this reason, most business professionals recommend starting this career path as a side hustle or setting aside cash equivalent to 12 months of living expenses.

Imposter Syndrome. This self-doubt shapes my career today just as it did when I was an academic.Impostor syndrome is especially noticeable when I do something new and stretch my comfort zone.

Two years ago I wrote a column on meditation for Nature Careers. For weeks, I feared that I would be exposed as an impostor or bullied on Twitter for talking about meditation. I was. And I know it will reappear soon. But now I have some strategies to keep these feelings from holding me back.

Originally published at https://businessdor.com on January 25, 2023.