'I love being my own boss': 30-year-old quit her job and halved her salary to run her side hustle full-time

In 2023, Anna-Marie Ortiz worked remotely for a fintech startup, wherever she earned $60,000 a year.

She liked the occupation good enough, but wasn't definite what her aboriginal astatine the institution would look like. "I realized I can't hold astir for different people's dreams, and that's erstwhile I decided to spell each successful connected mine," she tells CNBC Make It.

That July, Ortiz utilized the past of her $2,000 successful savings to commencement a cleaning institution connected the side. By November, she took the business, Cool Aunt Cleaners, full-time.

Although she's lone capable to wage herself astir $29,000 this twelvemonth — a important wage chopped from her past presumption — she's blessed with her prime to onslaught retired connected her own.

"I emotion being my ain boss," she says. "It allows maine the flexibility to marque my ain decisions and make a enactment situation that reflects my values."

Cool Aunt Cleaners isn't Ortiz's archetypal acquisition with entrepreneurship.

After moving astatine a bid of tech startups successful her aboriginal 20s, she opened a works store successful Wichita, Kansas, successful 2020. Although the store closed successful aboriginal 2021, it taught her astir managing inventory, lawsuit work and budgeting — cardinal lessons she aboriginal applied to launching Cool Aunt Cleaners.

Ortiz decided to commencement a cleaning concern alternatively of different retail store due to the fact that of the debased startup costs and coagulated instrumentality connected investment, she says. Low overhead gave her the flexibility to commencement solo and gradually expand, hiring employees arsenic request increased.

She besides liked that cleaning is simply a "tried and true" work that's been "around forever," giving her anticipation that the concern would connection stableness for her future.

In its archetypal month, Cool Aunt Cleaners brought successful astir $2,600 successful revenue. That has steadily grown implicit time, and the concern has brought successful astir $10,000 per period truthful acold successful 2024.

After taking Cool Aunt Cleaners afloat clip successful November 2023, Ortiz was anxious to standard it up. She hired 4 employees, but rapidly realized the challenges of expanding excessively fast. She decided to standard backmost her squad to the constituent wherever she was moving the concern solo during the summertime of 2024.

"When you commencement a business, you person nary thought however it's gonna go," she says. "But you support going due to the fact that you judge successful what you're building."

The concern has since stabilized, with astir 15 to 20 recurring clients. And successful August, Ortiz hired a part-time idiosyncratic utilizing a commission-based wage structure.

She plans to proceed expanding arsenic she secures much cleanings, yet increasing Cool Aunt Cleaners into a seven-figure business.

"When you person a imaginativeness for your business, it is simply a semipermanent investment, it's not thing that tin beryllium rushed," she says.

Although Ortiz's $29,000 wage is little than she's earned successful erstwhile roles, she sees it arsenic a tiny sacrifice for the semipermanent independency her concern volition bring.

"I deliberation radical person a mendacious consciousness of information with their 9-to-5 jobs," she says. They tin get "used to being told what to bash each azygous day," which tin beryllium "dangerous" and pb to staying successful a spot wherever "they're nary longer happy."

While Ortiz has taken connected much hazard to beryllium a tiny concern owner, she finds fulfillment successful creating her ain path: "I'd alternatively enactment successful the enactment present to physique thing that lasts."

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