WHO is Ron de Wit?
I’m both a corporate employee and entrepreneur. Or as they say in the Netherlands -where I’m born and raised- I’m both a “wage slave”, trading time for money… and an entrepreneur, creating a passive income, online, based on leverage and automation.
I’m fully dedicated and relentlessly pursuing a life of freedom: financial, geographical, time and mental freedom. And I’m doing this by helping other people do the same and live their best life, building their own business around their passion.
WHY did I want to change my career?
It would go too far, to say that I had to change. Becoming an entrepreneur has been 100% my own, personal choice. And I’ve done this whilst continuing working in my full-time corporate job. So, right now, I’m juggling 2 jobs: my “day job” and my entrepreneurship journey. I do the latter in my free time. I.e. in the evenings and weekends. So, then, why did I make this decision to start my own business? And why am I keeping my day job?
A few things have driven me to this decision.
Let’s start with answering the first question. Oddly enough, I never really had the ambition to work in the area of financial accounting, an area that has dominated pretty much my whole career (for the past 25 years!) But… like many of us, I’ve kinda rolled into this.
So how did that happen?
Well, towards the end of my masters, I was studying a liberal arts curriculum in Lima, Peru as part of a 6-month university exchange program. And one of the friends I made over there, indicated he wanted to travel a bit more across South America, after our semester had finished. And his main target was Buenos Aires, Argentina, as he wanted to try and land a job or, at least, an internship with one of the “big 6” global accounting firms. At that time, like many of my fellow students, I still had no clue what I wanted to do, after graduating. So, I thought: “why not do the same?” And so we set of travelling … and we travelled, short of cash, so mainly by bus... across Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and back to Peru. And yes, we did get to talk to a few accountants (i.e. audit managers) in Buenos Aires as well. As a matter of fact, I did end up receiving an offer a few months later to start working as an accountant for Arthur Andersen (AA) in Buenos Aires.
Now that I was back home again: (1) I didn’t really feel like becoming an accountant to begin with and (2) I was too scared to not to finish the writing of my thesis, that I’d chosen to write the same with their biggest competitor in The Hague.
The reason being: (1) they paid me to do so 🙂 and (2) I wasn’t working with accountants, but with IT auditors instead. And that was a different ballgame altogether… Either way, I recon we all know how the world changed for both AA and Argentina only a few years later…. So, in hindsight, it turns out I did make the better of the two choices.
And that’s the story about how I ended up working in the area that I do. Because, after starting and getting certified as an IT auditor, I never really managed to get out of the area of both “IT” and “Financial accounting”. The former was fine … but the latter... less so. Actually, I do like IT, and I’ve got no issues with finance in general either. I'd be tempted to say, on the contrary. But 'financial accounting’ really still is not quite "my thing".
Too often we are scared ... scared of what we might not be able to do, scared of what people might think if we tried. We let our fears stand in the way of our hopes.
Either way, this is what haunted me for most of my career. Working in an environment that I never really wanted, but not being able to get out of it, because headhunters and HR folks alike seem too eager to put labels on people.
Either way, when I turned 40, and I my kids were born, I started to realise that, if I wanted to change, I better do it now. Rather than regret not having made a change, for the rest of my life. But hey … what to do after 20+ years in 'finance and IT’? Could I still change? Could I really change my career and still become successful at my age? And, probably more importantly, WHAT would I like to do? And WHO would hire me?
So... HOW did I do it?
Early 2019, my wife introduced me to a video from “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, by Robert Kyosaki. That story resounded with me. Therefore, I started watching some related videos on YouTube. And at some point, not much later, I came across an ad, that mentioned an organisation that provided specific mindset and technical training, related processes and systems that enabled the guy in the ad to quit his own job and become his own boss, based on the business he had built by following the training himself. And I ended watching the free video series that opened up my world as well!
And, after following the training curriculum, I started my own business late 2019/early 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit(!) I’ve decided to keep working my day job, and doing my online businesses* on the side. Nevertheless, I might follow the guy in the ad** at some point.
