Frequently Asked Questions
What is Escape the City?
Why have you started it?
Why do you think there is a need for it?
What is your mission?
Why have you called it Escape the City?
What does Escape the City stand for?
What does Escape the City not stand for?
Is it easy to Escape the City?
Doesn’t everybody need money to survive?
What is your business model?
Who is eligible to be an Escape the City member?
Do you have a membership guarantee?
What is Escape the City? Back to top
Escape the City provides exciting options for young professionals who want to do something 'different'. We are building a platform to help like-minded people find meaningful and fulfilling work outside of the corporate mainstream.
Why have you started it? Back to top
We believe that the people who are having the greatest impact in the world, making lots of positive change happen, and doing great work are the people who are passionately engaged, motivated, and inspired by their jobs.
We also believe that lots and lots of young people find themselves in jobs that don’t allow them to fulfil their potential in this way. Many of these jobs are corporate, desk-based, city jobs. This is what we were doing before we left to start Escape the City. These are the people we want to help.
We ran a survey which told us that only 30% of young professionals find their current jobs interesting, 57% are looking to move within a year, and only 10% believe that their current job is their vocation. We realised that a scary proportion of young people find their corporate jobs unfulfilling.
We think that this is a real shame given the impact they could be having, given the right opportunities. We want to solve this problem.
Why do you think there is a need for it? Back to top
The idea came from the dozens of conversations we had with our friends and colleagues while we were planning our own escapes from 'The City'. We realised that we weren’t alone in wanting to escape our jobs.
Through trying to work out what we wanted to do next we spent a lot of time researching alternative, non-mainstream career paths. There was nothing that jumped out at us as being particularly useful for people in our situation. We’re now setting out to build that something.
We also realised that lots of people (our previous selves included) don’t really know what they would rather be doing, so they continue doing what they’re currently doing, even if it makes them unhappy.
Many young people today have ambitions and aspirations that aren't catered to by traditional job descriptions (especially corporate ones).
We believe that happiness comes from acting on your values and doing work that is important to you. We also acknowledge that it’s really hard to work out what you want to do with your life.
Which is why we’ve started Escape the City – to provide tangible options, advice, and inspiration.
What is your mission? Back to top
• To help young professionals who are stagnating, bored, unfulfilled and frustrated with their jobs and their lives.
• To find and distribute concrete opportunities and provide real, practical and realistic alternative options.
• To provide them with ideas, information and inspiration to help them make the necessary moves to find the life they want
• To connect people to help them achieve great things together.
• To build a tribe (a movement) of likeminded people.
Why have you called it Escape the City? Back to top
Escape the City is a metaphor for leaving a job that you dislike and making the necessary changes to go and do something that you will like.
You don’t have to have worked in finance to qualify. Although we do know plenty of people in finance who want to escape!
And, no we’re not literally trying to encourage you to leave cities!
In our minds someone has ‘escaped the city’ if they have left a job they hate and found one they love. That’s what we want to encourage, inspire and help people to do.
Jobs in the city (banking, accounting, consulting, etc) are often challenging, interesting and rewarding. There are people out there who bounce out of bed at 6 am ready for the day ahead.
We reckon good for them. They have already found something that they love.
For the rest of us, however, the search is on.
What does Escape the City stand for? Back to top
We believe that different people are suited to different occupations.
We believe that one person’s idea of a dream job is another person’s nightmare.
• We are anti ‘people stuck in ruts’.
• We are anti ‘people doing jobs they don’t enjoy’.
• And we are anti ‘people feeling like they don’t have any options’.
That is what we care passionately about.
What does Escape the City not stand for? Back to top
We don’t stand for people just quitting their jobs and cruising off around the world.
We wouldn’t have thought many people have deep enough pockets to be able to afford that. We anticipate that most people will use Escape the City to help them make that transition from one job to another.
Although we are also building resources to help young professionals research exciting adventures and startup businesses if they are so inclined.
We are not anti-job, anti-corporate or anti-work.
We love fulfilling jobs.
We love the feeling of working hard towards a goal that you care about. We just think that everyone deserves (at least every now and then) to get that ‘yesssssssssssssssssss!’ feeling from their work.
This is the feeling that we are getting from building Esc. Take it from us. It’s awesome.
Corporate firms often contain interesting people doing really good work.
Corporate firms have the funds and the contacts and the influence to achieve great things. Check out what Innocent says about Capitalism -- it makes the world go round.
Besides, we wouldn’t be in a position to set up Esc if it hadn’t been for our management consulting training (and we certainly wouldn’t be as good as we are at PowerPoint!).
However, we have seen lots of unhappy people in corporate jobs.
These are the people we want to help.
Is it easy to Escape the City? Back to top
Absolutely not. As we've discovered ourselves, it's actually really hard.
There are lots and lots of barriers to leaving a professional corporate job. The main one is obviously money.
There are lots of other challenges too: changing your lifestyle, dealing with other peoples' expectations, understanding how your skills apply elsewhere, and having the confidence to make the change.
All these barriers contribute to the situation that we're attempting to remedy with Escape the City: specifically that there are lots of young people who, because of these challenges, feel stuck in jobs that aren't right for them.
The platform and community that we’ve built is designed to help people overcome these hurdles.
Doesn’t everybody need money to survive? Back to top
Yes of course they do. We’re extremely aware of the fact that everyone needs money to survive.
Our Esc survey has shown us that financial matters are the principal concern amongst people who want to leave their jobs. This challenge is central to Esc. We want to help people solve this problem.
Esc is based firmly in the real world. We would imagine that none of you want to be poor and all of you want to be able to afford a good standard of living in the future.
The eternal challenge, and the question that people pose to themselves on their lunch-breaks, on the tube, on Sunday night in front of Top Gear, is this:
“How do I find an occupation that makes me really happy and fulfilled, one that really interests me, and makes me enough money at the same time?”
Guess what? This is your lucky day!
Esc is committed to finding an answer to the very same question.
What is your business model? Back to top
Esc isn’t conceived of as a traditional business -- we want to build a platform to help like-minded people find occupations they can be passionate about.
Making money isn’t the over-riding objective. Building something genuinely useful is.
Of course we would love for Esc to pay for itself and in due course we will introduce revenue streams which allow the project to become self-paying and sustainable.
We would love even more for it to provide us with enough money to buy a double decker bus and drive it to China. Or for Dom to do one of the epic adventures he has in his head (be the first person to travel from London to the top of Everest under their own steam or something equally mad).
But we aren’t building Esc to make money. We want to make enough money to allow us to build Esc.
We hope that the site will always be free for our members and we will never introduce money making ideas which detract from that.
The most important thing is building something useful – making money to allow this to happen is crucial to Esc’s success – but it is not the original goal.
In due course we will introduce services whereby relevant organisations can pay to offer our members exciting opportunities. But while we’re in beta mode the site is free.
Who is eligible to be an Escape the City member? Back to top
We anticipate that the majority of the people using this site will be in similar situations to the one that we found ourselves earlier in 2009. I.e. in corporate jobs that aren’t right for them and looking to ‘escape’ to find an occupation that inspires, excites and fulfils them.
However, we aren’t limited to corporate escapees. You’re very welcome even if you’ve never been anywhere near the city.
The site provides exciting non-mainstream options for anyone who wants to ‘do something different’.
You’re just as welcome if you’re a university graduate who is researching their first move or if you’re twenty years into your career and looking to branch out.
Do you have a membership guarantee? Back to top
We completely guarantee the anonymity of our members. We’ll only send you one email a week (on a Monday) full of exciting options and inspirational stories.
We’ll never sell your email addresses to spammers. We don’t even know how to do that. And if we did know of course we wouldn’t.
We’re building this platform for our members and hope that they’ll take an active role in steering its direction and providing us with feedback to continuously improve it.