Building a Business While Employed: What Five Years Taught Me

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The version of this story people expect goes like this. Frustrated employee has an idea, quits, risks everything, succeeds. It makes for a good post. It is not what happened.

I started Devsio Services in August 2017. I did not leave my job at IKAS Trading until May 2022. For four years and nine months I did both.

• It started earlier than the company did
• Why building a business while employed beat burning the boats
• What the days actually looked like
• What it cost
• When I actually left
• Five rules for building a business while employed
• The money maths of building a business while employed
• The client mix you end up with
• Systems that made two jobs fit into one week
• Building a business while employed in Pakistan is a different game
• Questions people ask me about building a business while employed
• A first year plan for building a business while employed
• Who building a business while employed suits
• What I would do differently about building a business while employed
• If you are building something alongside a job

It started earlier than the company did

In January 2016 I took a remote WordPress developer role with SprintOps, a company in the United States. I was still working full-time at IKAS in Islamabad. That year was the actual turning point, well before there was any company to speak of.

Working for an American client while sitting in Rawalpindi teaches you things quickly. That the standard you thought was good enough is not. That "I will look into it" is not an acceptable answer when someone is paying by the hour. That a nine or ten hour time difference means you either write clearly the first time or you lose a whole day to a misunderstanding.

It also settled a question I had been carrying around, which was whether people outside Pakistan would pay me to build things. They did. Everything after that was a scaling problem rather than a confidence problem.

Why building a business while employed beat burning the boats

By 2017 I had enough work coming in to register a company. I had nowhere near enough to replace a salary I was supporting a family on, and I knew the difference.

The advice you read online is to burn the boats. It is written almost entirely by people who had somewhere to land. In Pakistan, with no savings buffer and no investor, quitting early does not make you focused. It makes you desperate, and desperate freelancers take bad clients, quote too low and agree to scopes they should refuse. I have watched several people do exactly that and close within eighteen months.

Keeping the salary meant I could say no. That single thing is worth more in the first three years than any amount of hustle.

What the days actually looked like

Not romantic. Office through the day, running a sales team of five and handling billing and reconciliation on the kind of accounting and inventory software Pakistani traders use. Client work in the evening and at night. Weekends were when anything substantial got built.

The hard part was not tiredness. It was context switching. Going from a supplier negotiation to debugging someone's checkout takes a gear change that costs you twenty minutes each way, and on a bad day you never really arrive in either.

What made it survivable was that the two jobs were not as separate as they looked. The reconciliation work sharpened how I thought about data. The sales work taught me to write a proposal a business owner would actually read. Managing five people taught me that the bottleneck in any project is almost never the code.

What it cost

Time, mostly, and the kind you do not get back. Five years of evenings is five years of evenings.

It also made Devsio grow more slowly than it could have. There were projects I could not take because I could not be available at nine in the morning. There were clients who wanted a full-time agency and correctly went elsewhere. I do not think that was the wrong trade, but it was a real one, and anybody telling you that you can build a company on evenings with no cost attached is selling something.

When I actually left

Not when the business felt exciting. When the numbers were boring enough to be trusted. Repeat clients, work booked ahead rather than hoped for, and enough coming in that a single quiet month would not be a crisis.

The month after I left IKAS I took on the retail business manager role at Star Electric Enterprises. So I have never actually done the thing where you sit at home and do only your own company. I still run a trading operation alongside Devsio today, and at this point I think that is a feature rather than something to apologise for. It keeps me next to the problems I sell software to solve, which I wrote about in what nine years in electrical trading taught me about building software.

Five rules for building a business while employed

None of this is advice about passion. It is advice about not running out of money while you get good enough.

• Get one paying client before you get a company name, a logo or a website. In that order specifically.
• Keep the job until the business could survive a bad quarter, not until it has a good month.
• Take the remote or overseas contract if it appears, even at an awkward rate, because the standard it forces on you is the actual value.
• Protect your ability to say no. It is the only real asset you have early on.
• Expect it to take about five years, and be pleasantly surprised if it does not.

The money maths of building a business while employed

Everyone wants a revenue target for when to leave. I never had one. What I had was a months-of-cover number, and it is a better question. Add up what your household genuinely needs in a month. Not what you would like it to be, what it needs. Rent, utilities, school fees, food, the medical bill nobody planned for. Then ask how many of those months the business could cover on its own if every new enquiry stopped tomorrow.

For most of those four years the honest answer was under two. That is not a business you quit a job for. That is a business you feed.

The second number is the one people skip entirely. A salary is not only money. It is a floor under your pricing. When I quoted a project in 2019 I could quote what the work was actually worth, because if the client walked away I still ate that month. The freelancer who quit last week cannot do that. He quotes well under the real number, wins the job, discovers the scope is twice what he assumed, and then either delivers something poor or works for nothing for six weeks. I have watched that cycle enough times that it stopped being interesting.

Building a business while employed buys you that floor. It is the cheapest insurance available in this trade and nobody is selling it, so nobody talks about it.

There is a third cost that surprises people. Registering and running a company in Pakistan costs money before you earn a single rupee. Company registration, an NTN, filing returns on time, a business bank account, an accountant who actually knows the rules rather than a relative who is good with numbers. The Federal Board of Revenue sets out what is required at fbr.gov.pk, and it is worth reading properly instead of taking a cousin's word for it. A salary absorbs that early overhead so quietly you barely notice it. Without one, it comes straight out of your survival money in the worst possible month.

The client mix you end up with

Building a business while employed decides who hires you, and not always in a way you would have chosen.

Clients who need somebody reachable at nine in the morning will not hire you. Clients who want a daily call will not hire you. What is left is project work with clear deliverables, retainers judged on output rather than hours, and overseas clients whose working morning happens to be your evening anyway.

That last group is the quiet advantage and it is the reason the SprintOps contract worked at all. A nine hour difference meant their morning was my night, and my night was already free. If you are in Islamabad or Lahore and you are building a business while employed, the UK and European market fits your calendar better than the one outside your window does. Their afternoon is your evening. Nobody has to compromise.

The cost is real though. You lose the walk-in local client who wants to sit across a desk and be talked through it. I lost those for years and I do not think there was a version where I kept both.

It also pushed me towards work that could be specified properly up front, because vague work eats evenings. Website builds, POS systems, automation jobs with a defined start and a defined end. If you want to see the shape of scope that survives limited hours, the custom software for small businesses page sets out how we split a build into stages, and the pricing page shows what sits inside each one.

Systems that made two jobs fit into one week

Nothing clever saved me. Three dull habits did, and I would hand all three to anyone building a business while employed today.

The first was fixed windows. Client work happened between eight and eleven at night on weekdays and from mid-morning on Saturday. Outside those windows I did not open the laptop, and inside them I did not answer anything from the day job. The point was not discipline for its own sake. It was that context switching was the thing actually draining me, and windows are the only cure for it I ever found.

The second was one written source of truth per project. Not WhatsApp. A document the client could open that said what we agreed, what was in scope, what changed and when. When you have three hours a night you cannot afford to spend forty minutes reconstructing a conversation from a chat thread. Writing it down once is the cheapest hour you will ever spend.

The third was a flat refusal on anything requiring daytime availability. No exceptions, even for good money, because one exception turns into a pattern and the pattern turns into a conversation with your employer that you do not want to have. Being straight about your hours up front loses you a few clients and keeps you out of a much worse position.

Building a business while employed in Pakistan is a different game

Most of the advice on this subject is written by people in countries with a benefits system, cheap credit and parents who are not depending on them. Strip those three things out and the calculation changes completely.

Here, a bad quarter does not mean a smaller holiday. It means somebody in the family goes without something. That is why building a business while employed is not a lack of nerve in this market. It is the correct reading of the risk in front of you.

Then there is the practical side. Getting paid from abroad took me longer to solve than getting the work did. Invoicing, receiving, the paperwork trail that keeps everything clean at tax time, and the days when the internet decides not to cooperate during the one call that mattered. A salary means none of those problems are existential while you work them out. They are just annoying, which is a completely different category.

There is also a cultural cost nobody warns you about. Explaining to relatives that you have a company and a job and are doing both deliberately is a conversation you will have roughly two hundred times. Most people will assume one of them is failing. Let them.

Questions people ask me about building a business while employed

Do I need to tell my employer?
Read your contract first, then decide. What matters more than the legal position is whether the two ever compete. Mine did not. I was not building software for electrical suppliers while working for one, and I never took a client who could have been my employer's. Keep that line clean and the conversation, if it comes, is a short one.

How many clients before it is real?
Not a client count. Repeat work. One client who comes back three times is worth more than nine who never do, because the second one tells you the delivery worked and the first one only tells you the sales pitch did.

Should I build a website first?
No. Get paid once, then build the site around what you actually sold rather than what you imagined you would sell. Mine was wrong for two years because I wrote it before I knew. When you do build it, build the thing that brings enquiries in rather than the thing that looks impressive, which is the whole argument on our small business website development page.

Does building a business while employed slow you down?
Yes, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling a course. It cost me projects and it cost me years. It also meant I was still standing at the end of those years, which is the part the fast version usually skips.

A first year plan for building a business while employed

Building a business while employed for a year looks like this, if I were starting again tomorrow. It is not a course. It is the order I would put things in, and most of it costs nothing.

Months one to three: find one paying client. Not a brand, not a website, not a logo. One person who transfers money for work you finished. Building a business while employed gives you the room to be picky here, so be picky. Take the job you can deliver well at nine at night, and turn down the one that needs you on a call at eleven in the morning.

Months four to six: write down what that job really took. Hours, revisions, the bits you underquoted. Most people building a business while employed skip this and then guess at prices for years. I did. Two evenings of record keeping in month five would have saved me about three years of charging too little.

Months seven to nine: get a second and a third client, and watch whether the first one comes back. Repeat work is the signal. New work only proves you can sell.

Months ten to twelve: write your exit condition down and put a date beside it. This is the part I got wrong. Building a business while employed without a written exit turns into building a business while employed forever, which is a different decision and one you should make on purpose rather than drift into.

Through all of it, keep the day job boring and keep it clean. Building a business while employed only works while the salary is stable, so do not let the evenings start eating the mornings. The month that happens is the month you have to choose, and you want to choose on your own terms.

Who building a business while employed suits

It is not right for everyone and I would rather say so. Building a business while employed suits you if you have dependants, no savings buffer, and work that can be delivered on your own schedule. Web builds, software, design, writing, anything with a defined start and a defined end.

It suits you less if your trade needs you physically present in working hours, or if the thing you are building needs full attention from day one to be worth anything at all. A shop is a poor candidate. A restaurant is a worse one. Building a business while employed works best where the work is portable and the clock is flexible.

And it stops suiting you the moment the evenings can no longer hold the workload. That is the signal, not a revenue figure. When you are turning down good work every week because there is nowhere to put it, building a business while employed has done its job and you are ready for the next decision. Five years of building a business while employed got me to a point where quitting was boring, and boring is the whole aim.

What I would do differently about building a business while employed

Building a business while employed was the right call. Doing it for four years and nine months without a plan for ending it was not, and that is the part I would change.

I drifted. The arrangement worked, so I kept it, and somewhere around year three it stopped being a strategy and became a habit. Building a business while employed should have a written exit condition from the first month. Mine existed only in my head, which meant I could keep moving it.

I would also hire earlier. For most of that stretch every hour of delivery was mine, which capped the business at whatever I could personally do after dark. One reliable person handling the routine builds would have doubled what those evenings produced. I told myself I could not afford it. What I actually could not afford was staying the bottleneck.

Building a business while employed also made me lazy about marketing, because referrals kept arriving and I never had to solve the problem. The month I went full-time was the month I discovered I had no repeatable way to generate enquiries. Five years of evenings and I had built a delivery machine with no front door on it. If you take one thing from this, take that: use the safety of the salary to test how you get customers, not just how you serve them.

And I would write things down as I went. Prices, scopes, what a build actually took versus what I quoted. Building a business while employed gives you a slow, honest dataset about your own work, and I threw most of mine away because I was too tired at midnight to record it. The AI automation work we do now exists partly because I eventually got sick of my own manual record keeping.

None of that changes the core answer. If you are in Pakistan, supporting people, and wondering whether building a business while employed makes you less serious than the person who quit, it does not. It makes you likelier to still be trading in five years, which is the only measure that has ever mattered to me.

If you are building something alongside a job

I am happy to talk to you about it, and I am not going to sell you anything. If you want an outside view on whether your thing is ready, or on what to build first, get in touch at devsioservices.com/contact.