What to do before you quit your job and start your own business in Calgary, Alberta
Claire Roberts: Welcome! My name is Claire and today I’m joined here by Imtiaz. Today we are on site at Osuji & Smith lawyers. We currently practice 10 different areas of law, predominantly in business employment. We’ve recently had an influx of clients coming in with similar variations of the same question so we put this employment and business segment together and hopes to provide some clarity and context for anyone facing a similar issue.
Claire Roberts: Imtiaz thanks for joining me today, how are you?
Imtiaz Hafiz: I’m good thank you very much.
Claire Roberts: Excellent! So today we’re going to jump right into it. Let’s say I’m somebody, I’m an employee currently at a company and I’m thinking about quitting my job and starting my own business inside of the same practice area. Do you have any advice for me?
Imtiaz Hafiz: Yeah, so the first thing you want to do before you quit your job is to ask yourself a question of what do you want to do, what sort of business you want to do like if it’s the same thing that you’re doing as your employer and you want to cater to the same customer base then you should probably start by looking at your Employment contract, any other employment documents that you have to see if there’s non-compete or a non-solicit clause in any of those documents. So like I said it could be in the employment contract itself, it could be in the employment policies of the corporation where you work and if it’s not there and if you have already quit your job or handed in your resignation they might ask you to sign a release and it’s sometimes in the release document as well where you would find the non-compete or non-solicit provision. So that’s what you should first do because a non-compete or non-solicit provision could limit how you do business on your own and you need to understand the scope of those Clauses to really assess how much you can do when you can do where you can do the business. So that would be my first advice look at these documents to see if there is a non compete, non-solicit provision.
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