I have been self-employed frequently during my professional life, meaning since college. My days of being an employee were well interspersed with periods of attempted entrepreneurialism. I do not know if being one’s own employer is in my genes or if the thought was planted due to my family’s business activities.

My father was forced into self-employment by the sweeping wave of unemployment in the 1930’s during the Great Depression. There were few jobs, unemployment ran higher than 30%, so people did what they needed to do to survive. My father ran his own business for 40 years. My mother started her own retail store at age 55 after her children became teenagers. I also had an uncle and an aunt who ran their own businesses all their adult lives.

This was the atmosphere in my life when I went off to college to become an engineer. I worked at that profession for 15 years after graduating from college, until I encountered my first layoff. This was a shock, but also an awakening that one does not have to rely upon someone else to provide you a job (with all the mind control, time clock punching and frequent idiotic supervision/management to whom you must report).

Running through my writings on this website is the thread of education, learning and accumulation of knowledge that I over-emphasize at all times. My mother set the drumbeat going in my head that education is the solution to employment and personal achievement. The pursuit and accomplishment of a good education in relevant subjects is not necessarily the road to fame and fortune, but the lack of same can be a dreadful handicap and deterrent to making money. It is not impossible for a person without money and education to make a lot of money, but the odds are against it. There is room for only so many professional athletes and rappers making record deals.

Which brings us back to the urge for self-employment.

There are positive and negative reasons for going into business for oneself. The positive ones are those that make some sense; the negative ones are those that make little sense, because the entrepreneur is in denial, is running from something he/she doesn’t like or is suffering from bad advice.

What are some of the positive reasons?

1. Working for a salary cannot make you as rich as leveraging your talent/knowledge through the efforts of others (employees), creating a business which can be sold, or creating a product/service which can be sold over and over,
2. Creating a business that gives the owner great personal satisfaction and pleasure, over and above the purely financial benefits that might ensue from a successful business,
3. Having a break-through idea or invention that calls for personal handling, as opposed to trying to sell someone else on pursuing the opportunity,
4. Realization that employment by a large, faceless corporation, in which one is a number, can lead to a dead end situation wherein the employee loses all the efforts that he/she has provided to the employer, due to company collapse, lack of loyalty by the employer to the employee, or any of a number of other pitfalls.
5. Creating a side-line, or “moonlighting”, business as a safety net to protect against failure of a person’s primary employment, or to anticipate early retirement into one’s own business.

1. Attempting to start a business because a relative or close friend broke away from their employee status to start a business that has been successful.
2. Looking for a way to exit a job because of unpleasant or difficult working conditions.
3. Starting a business in which you have absolutely no business experience or background, because someone comments that you are good at something, e.g. cooking (open a restaurant), singing (start a band), fashion (start a retail clothing store), you like to travel (start a travel agency), etc.
4. Buying a franchise because you see a lot of successful franchisees, and you know that “you are as smart as they are”.
5. You want to be the boss for a change, instead of the employee.
6. You think that once your have the business going, it will run by itself, and you can take a lot of vacations and leisure time away from the store.

Whatever reasons the reader has, self-employment should not be taken lightly or casually. It can be difficult to start, maintain and sustain a business without a lot of hard work. It takes a lot of skills that might not be obvious in advance of the undertaking, so some advance research and study is in order. Finally, interviewing successful and not-so-successful people who have taken the leap into self-employment will yield much down-to-earth insight into the reality of running your own business.