Did you walk out on the job? Give notice?

What made you *finally* take the plunge into operating your own business? I have visions of just not showing up tomorrow taking the risk and going at it full bore. Not realistic right now, but fun to think about It's a landscaping company, and I want to go at in on my own now, tired of working for others!

Let's hear the motivational backgrounds and stories!

I do have some stories about quitting, but not the last job I had before starting my own business. For me it was a series of layoffs from tech jobs. The last of which came about a month after I had been told that my temp position was going to become permanent. It would have been along with about a dozen other people in the same position except that IBM had bought the company a couple of months earlier and decided to scrap the program our company made in Boulder. Not only did my job not become permanent, but all but 20 people in the office got laid off as well.

I had been wanting to start my own business for years and when a friend decided she wanted to as well we became partners and formed a web design business. That company is no longer around and my friend has gone on to other things. (we're still good friends though) I took what I learned from that business and started up again with this one. Hopefully I learned enough.

The tech world is crazy. I have a friend who has worked at Oracle for 14 years now, and was so sick and tired of it that he volunteered to be laid off last month (I guess they did a huge sweep of layoffs). He was depressed alot, but made a ton of money. In his words "My severance package is gonna allow me to live for a few years without working" Must be nice! I wish I had that kind of backing, I would be stoked! Hmmm maybe I will talk him into starting his own sort of business.

The job I worked at before the one described above was one of the dotcoms that sprung up in the bubble a few years back. The company expaned from 100 employees to 500 emplyess in the span of a year. I was probably one of the last 50 hired. There were getting ready to take the company public at the time only a couple months later the market crashed. They never really had a plan after that and started letting go of people.

The way they generally did it was to let people finish working on the project they were on and then let go of the entire department. There wasn't exactly much reason to work all the hard once you saw that. The harder you worked the sooner your priject would be finished and the sooner you would be out of a job.

The ceo of the company would always send out some positive email about how well things were going just before there were layoff so anytime he said something good you knew it meant you might not be working there the following week. Not exactly great for morale.

The last job that I quit - it was not good. I was working between 80-100 hours a week running a call center and mainly for physicians. Sometimes I would have to work the graveyard shift or splt the shift and go in early. There was not one day that went by that I was not cussed out or yelled at or both.

I literally burnt out. I never called in sick and always worked when needed. I was the manager - so I had to set a good example. And then one day in January - after working about 14-16 hours a day in a row for about five days, I left. And I just left - no plan, nothing. Fortunately things worked out and chances are - I would have to do it again.

That industry is one of the hardest, you do not get paid much and the employees are mainly minimum wage to put up with the things they do.

Of course with the Air Force, I did my four year and got an honorable discharge

I worked for a smallish company doing consulting. I was making $14/hr (back in 1997) and it took my rather young and unjaded self a while to figure out I was getting screwed - it wasn't until I got recruitedby another company that I figured out I could make 2 or 3 times as much.

A friend of mine and I had been working at the same company - he hit burnout, quit, and moved to Michigan. We contemplated starting our own company but the timing wasn't right.

A few months later we had made some really good contacts for going independent and I had to have hernia surgery. So he came to hang out with me while I was getting better. I was on percocet which is a narcotic - needless to say I was heavily under the influence and had no inhibitions.

I promise you that when you are completely stoked on painkillers you have NO inhibitions. So it's a REALLY great time to write your resignation letter, CC a bunch of bigwigs in the company, and pretty much guarantee that you will never work for that company again. Those bridges were not only burned they were destroyed beyond recognition.

The good part is our company started a week later and I never looked back. We are now in our 10th year. I feel restless now because I think it might soon be time to try other things but I'll never regret it.

Hear is a little advise that you can take it or leave it. First of all I have to say that I walked off on a couple of jobs in my carreer as a carpenter. Till this day I regreat doing so. As a young man I had the oppertuinty to work for a superintendent while Living in New Orleans. He took a liking to me as if I were his own son. He was a great guy and taught me so much about things in life. I still use alot of his preachings in my life today.

Too make a long story short. He told me once to never quit a job. He said make them fire you first. Don't give them the satifaction of thinking they have come out ahead. Plus getting fired looks better on your resume then to be labbled as a quitter. I know eaiser said then done because like I said I've quit a couple of jobs in my day.

lol I spent 21 years (late 1969-early1991) in the US military. Walking off the job was not really an option.

However, since retiring, I've done it three times. And contrary to Mak's experience, it was the exact right thing for me. The first time was within three months of retirment. I'd taken a job as a construction superintendent and was supervising six crews of 8-12 tradesmen each. The overall boss (the company owner) was playing the crew leaders against one another, behind my back, promising raises, promotions, etc. He enjoyed playing two ends against the middle. All he accomplished in reality was friction, resentment and the creation of several juvenile little tattle-tailers.

Anyway, it took me about a month to see something was drastically wrong, another month to sort it out enough to put the pieces together and make a trip to the bosses office. Actually, I think he called me in to get my take on a problem that was brewing.

Long story short, I ended up telling him I didn't need, or want, a job in any business in which he was involved. I walked that very minute and never looked back. Within another four months the company was bankrupt, most of the employees were not having much luck finding work, and within another several months the courts had all the property.

Sometimes it's nice to see things for what they are and be in a position to walk away with no regrets.

I'll tell the other two stories another time.

I knew that would never happen. Heck some employees were thrown into jail, never showed up to work, etc and they were never terminated.

We did fire some employees but they were some of the ones that missed 20 days of work a month. So they were not missed anyway