When people tell you how to start a business they start with the wrong pieces. Build a website. Get a logo. Post on social. Here is how to think about your brand. All of that is infrastructure, and none of it is the path to revenue. You get tactical micro-advice at each stage and never the macro narrative — the story you have to put yourself into to get from where you are to where you want to be.
This is the narrative. It is what I did over about a year and a half, going from a role I did not love in an industry I did not understand, to a higher-paying role, to starting a business, to scaling it. None of it is guaranteed. It is what I did and how I understand it.
The 5-to-9, not the 9-to-5
Most people assume they will build the way out during the workday. You will not. The work happens in the 5-to-9 — five to nine in the morning and five to nine at night — which is Alex Hormozi's framing and it is the right one. The whole premise is that you use the 5-to-9 to raise the value of the 9-to-5.
The ladder you are climbing has five rungs: amateur, company employee, agency employee, freelancer, agency owner. Four stages move you along it — personal interest, industry awareness, role achievement, self-employed — and then a growth stage after that.
One: personal interest
You are interested in something, usually because you are already good at it. Say it is social media, and what you want eventually is your own agency with your own clients at your own rates. Fine. That is the starting point and it is the only part most people have.
Two: industry awareness — and this is where everyone gets stuck
The instinct here is to ask how to get clients for a social media agency. That is the cart in front of the horse. What you want is to observe people already doing the thing inside companies — not at agencies. Who runs social at Wendy's, and how do you get to that seat?
My version of this: I was doing SEO, writing website content for a tech company, which had nothing to do with where I wanted to end up. I watched the app developers at that company building iOS applications and had no idea how anyone entered that world. There was this phrase, learn to code, and I did not know what it meant. So I went to the director of engineering and asked him how to do what he did. He told me to download MIMO and learn Swift.Looking back he was answering from inside his own path, and there was probably better advice available. I still appreciated that he gave me the time. The part that mattered was not which language — it was that the answer was about what to do outside working hours.
Then you use the 5-to-9 to upskill against a chosen learning path, and you volunteer inside the 9-to-5 so the upskilling has somewhere to land. People resist the volunteering — my time is worth money — and the experience and the networking you get from it are worth far more than the hours.
A micro business or a micro brand is a good exercise here, as long as it stays an exercise. I have watched people make the trappings of upskilling into the project and cannibalise the whole thing. The point is the skills.
This stage is the bottleneck, and it is a brutal one. I was in it for two years. Mornings and nights: coding courses, building a portfolio, JavaScript, then more JavaScript, then TypeScript, React, HTTP, servers, Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, Git. This was before AI. Up early, to bed late, and during the day doing something unrelated to any of it.
Three: role achievement
Now you apply, and you get the job doing the thing full-time inside a company. I parlayed the coding into a full-time coding role.
From here the 9-to-5 and the 5-to-9 swap jobs. In the day you document everything you are learning. At night you freelance — with the emphasis on free — building a point of view and building testimonials. That is the whole output of this stage: documentation, a point of view, and proof.
Four: crossing over
Two things have to be true before you go, and most people only count the first. You need runway, meaning savings. And you need sales pipeline. The testimonials are what generate it — referrals, case studies, cold outreach, ads if you want them. Freelance is the foundation the leads sit on, and the volunteering and upskilling are the foundation the freelance sits on.
The documentation becomes your process, and your process is your product.
Then the growth season
Once you are out, the 5-to-9 changes job again: now it is for growth. More leads and higher-quality leads, so you can charge more. Hiring to outsource the low-wage work so your own hours go to the billable, high-value work. How you actually grow a business from there is a separate subject.
And you end up in the earnings loop, which is the thing that compounds. Work produces testimonials. Testimonials produce higher-quality leads. Higher-quality leads bring more interesting and more challenging work. That work forces you to upskill. Which gets you more work. The longer you are in it the easier the leads and the referrals get, and the rates follow.
What it is actually for
The sequence is: observe, upskill, freelance, then grow and refine — all of it in the hours outside the job. The advantage is simply that most people spend that time having fun.
And the reason to do it is a straight comparison of two boxes. One is low-value work with no upside, where you do not receive the benefit of what gets produced. The other is high-value, high-leverage work where you do. The whole thing is about being able to see the second box clearly enough to spend two years walking toward it.