It is not all about freedom, being your “own boss”, nice home office, smiles, and happiness. It is also about fear, stress, & anxiety.
After sharing about my decision to work on my own business and the responses I got from most of you (80%+) who also would like to build their own business, I want to break down for you some reality checks of becoming and entrepreneur VS employee in 4 different areas: income, independence (being your own boss), freedom, and work-life balance .
Because none of them is either great or terrible, but both can be great or terrible depending on the perspective, lets dive in:
|
area |
Employee life |
Entrepreneur life |
|
Income |
Stable & secure. Comes every month with no doubt, and no stress. It allows you to plan your expenses and quality of life you can afford with n o “surprises” or much more stress around it. |
You have none at the beginning, so you better have saved enough to support yourself while your business is being built and grows enough to provide for you and for itself to maintain it’s growth. But most times, in long term it will be many times higher than whatever you can expect from a salary increase as an employee. |
|
Independence |
You have 1 boss, no matter what your role is (even as a CEO, you got investors) so it all depends on what kind of boss you get. If you are lucky and get an great boss, it is an awesome opportunity for you to learn how to do things right, but if you are not that lucky you will have to deal with your boss’ craziness or change job… | There are two perspectives: a) You are your own boss: so if you are kind, patient and encouraging with yourself it will be a great experience, otherwise you will suffer more with the pressure you will put on yourself . b) You have plenty of bosses (clients): some can be great, some can be terrible so you will have to learn to deal with all of them or decide not to have them as clients. |
|
Freedom** |
You have the freedom of choosing the company that better fits to your lifestyle and ambitions, but you will always have to align to each company you work at. You will have to align to their schedules, rules, vacation days and structures. So as long as long as the company’s structure is similar to yours you will be able to feel free as an employee. ** |
You have the freedom of choosing every single thing about your company. The rules, the structure, the schedules, ways of working, etc. On the other hand this freedom only exists as long as your company is producing what you need or expect from it, otherwise you will start aligning to the “common best practices” of other companies. Anyways, from my (biased) perspective, entrepreneur life is the most freedom you will get professionally. After learning from good and bad leaders and companies you get to build your own how you learned and believe is the best way according to your principles. |
|
Work life balance |
It depends 100% on the company and leadership you get. If your boss and leaders are a good example of prioritizing work-life balance, it will spread through the company, otherwise everybody follows consciously or unconsciously and you end up in an unbalanced work environment (that ends up being less productive as I mentioned in my podcast episode about “fuel” ) | This one is one of the toughest one for entrepreneurs, since you will be passionate about your idea, business or company at early stages you will invest all your time in it, you won’t notice what day of the week it is, you will work on weekends and holidays, excited but maybe also exhausted. So if you care about work-life balance for yourself or for your family you will have to define clear limits. But again it depends on YOU! |
**On Freedom:
You will only find real professional freedom (as an employee or entrepreneur) as long as you have financial freedom (read post about it).
If you are financially free, you will be able to quit a bad leader or company and choose to join a better one that aligns with your vision and freedom expectations.
So YES! You can be free as an employee as long as you are responsible and build your financial freedom!
So now, share with me all of you who are entrepreneurs or want to be, How do you feel about this? Are you more or less encouraged now? let me know!
Alex @theyogicoder
The Yogi Coder 
This is great!
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