Have you ever noticed that everywhere you look, in articles and advertisements and podcasts and news clips, entrepreneurs of any type are called courageous and daring?
Every other minute somebody is saluting entrepreneurs for their courage and vision. Give me a break! Our species didn't grow up walking into factories and office buildings every day to do our work. Just a few generations ago nearly everybody was an entrepreneur.
Our grandparents and great-grandparents didn't need a fancy French word to describe their lives. They got up in the morning to feed the chickens or load up the milk truck. They did what they had to do. Nobody called them brave and daring for doing it.
I am a wuss from way back. I don't do daring things like jumping out of airplanes or exploring underwater caves. The only roller coaster I like is Space Mountain because it's not as scary in the dark.
I don't do things that are scary, but I started working for myself anyway. How did I do it? I figured out that self-employment isn't scary, even though people will tell you it is.
Why would people tell you self-employment is scary and hard if it really isn't? That's a good question. Maybe certain people want the vast majority of working folks to keep believing that it's incredibly difficult to start a business.
That way they'll stay in the traditional-employment lane where they can be snapped up cheaply by employers who know more about monetizing their employees' talents than the employees themselves do.
People tell me "You are a big advocate for self-employment, but not everyone has skills that employers will buy on a per-drink basis." That's ridiculous. Anyone who can perform a job can work for themselves.
You can start a side business and make money alongside your full-time job or your job search. Doing so is the best way to grow new muscles!
Here are five lies about self-employment most people have heard so many times they believe them.
Self-Employment Lies
1. Only people with very specific and in-demand technical or professional skills can make a living working for themselves.
2. Consultants and other self-employed people have a tough way to go because their work is so sporadic.
3. It's safer to stick to salaried employment than to strike out on my own.
4. Self-employed people have to pay for their own health insurance (in the U.S.) and it's very expensive.
5. When you're self-employed, it's feast or famine. There's no middle ground.
Let's break these lies down and demolish them one by one.
Back when the first internet crash took place around 2001, there were still a lot of employers who were wary of hiring people who had been self-employed. Employers had a bias against self-employed people because they thought that the former consultants might bolt at any moment and go back to consulting.
Nowadays employers don't have much of a bias against formerly self-employed people, if they have any. They know that people work inside and outside the corporate or institutional setting as the situation demands.
Most of us have worked side by side with consultants while we were employees, or worked with employees when we were consultants. We can see that there is very little difference between working on a contract versus working a full-time job.
We are all entrepreneurs now, regardless of how we get paid. There used to be a wall separating traditional employment from self-employment, but that wall has broken down.
Anybody can work for themselves now! Kids in high school can do it. You have marketable skills that somebody else needs and will pay for. If you can answer the phone politely, you can do that for pay from your house. You can even set your own hours. If you can write or edit documents, ditto.
If you can create a marketing plan, do graphic design, create sales presentations, design menus, coach people, create spreadsheets or do any kind of office work, you can work for yourself.
Many people say "That's fine for office workers. Fast food restaurant workers don't have skills that translate to self-employment" but even that isn't necessarily true.
Just because you work at a fast food restaurant doesn't mean that the skills required in your fast food job are the only skills you've got! Most of us are underemployed, if we tell the truth about it.
Most of us working on a payroll have talents our jobs don't use. That's a waste -- a waste of our talents and our income potential, both!
Self-employed consultants face the same task we all do: they have to keep an income stream going. As a new consultant you'll spend a lot of time drumming up business, but that task will get easier and easier as more and more people know you and your excellent work. When you have so much work on your plate that you can't take any new clients, you'll raise your fees.
Welcome to the business world!
Self-employment has its ups and downs the same way full-time salaried employment does. Self-employment requires you to keep your eyes wide open and to know what kind of undefinedBusiness Pain you solve. Ironically, full-time salaried employment requires the same things of a person but most salaried employees go to sleep and forget that there is a world outside their cubicle walls.
Self-employment builds the very capabilities all of us need now that traditional employment is going away.
People feel that full-time jobs are safer than their own small business would be, but it's not true. Any job could disappear out from under you at any moment and leave you with no way to make your rent payment next month.
When you work for yourself, you have a lot of clients. When you work at a full-time job, you only have one client.
Obviously that single client becomes incredibly important to you. You might turn your whole life upside down trying to keep your one client happy. You may make bad decisions as you seek to hang on to the job you've got, whether it's a good job for you or not.
When you work for yourself, you can let a client go if the client is being too difficult. You can use your own voice and find your backbone when you need to. You can set boundaries in a way that many people aren't comfortable doing with their boss in a regular job.
It's true that self-employed people have to pay for their own health insurance in the U.S., but more and more full-time employees also have to do the same thing. It is very risky to take a job just for the health benefits. An employer can change their health plan at any point and pass greater and greater chunks of the premiums on to their employees while cutting benefits.
You don't expect your employer to pay your auto insurance or your homeowner's insurance. Once you take the step of finding and funding your own healthcare, you'll never worry about getting a job just for the insurance again.
It's a lie that all self-employment is a boom-or-bust proposition. Many self-employed people live a comfortable life and have much more free time and control over their schedules than full-time employees do. Who do you think fills up all the coffee shops in every town during the day? Those coffee drinkers are working and they're getting paid.
Some of them are writing code but lots of them are doing the very same things you do every day in your job. They're doing the same things you do, but they're charging more than you charge your employer because they get to set their own prices. They know their markets.
They don't deal with much in the way of office politics. They don't worry about coming back to the office five minutes late after lunch. They don't worry about their annual review or the company policy manual. Those annoying things don't apply to them.
They don't lie in bed at night and worry about whether their client likes them or not. They don't want to become dependent on one client. They bob and weave with changes in their environment and they never stop growing.
This year, take a step into self-employment by imagining the business you'll have and the clients you'll help. It could be a full-time or part-time business. You could take on one project as a place to start. You'll have fun completing your first assignment as a self-employed business owner.
Whatever sum you get paid, you'll feel differently about the money than you do about your salary. You can be proud of that money! You earned it the old-fashioned way.
The more of an entrepreneur you become, the stronger you'll be. You won't contort yourself into pretzel shapes trying to keep your boss happy.
There are a lot of bosses out there. Why should you limit yourself to working for just one of them at a time?
