I’ve been fortunate (?!?) to have the experience of returning to the world of full-time employment having spent the past few years running my own business.
I say ‘fortunate’ because having gone both ways (employee to entrepreneur + entrepreneur to employee), I’d have to say this way round is far, far harder and it’s good to know that now, in case I ever get tempted again.
Fortunately for me, it’s only temporary and in a few months I’ll be back to running my own business and free from the shackles of the cubicle. In the meantime, I’ve learned several lessons from this experience.
Here’s what I wish I’d known (or reminded myself of) before returning to the world of employment:
- When you’ve worked for yourself even once, working for someone else is very, very hard to do
- A regular salary is not all it’s cracked up to be
- Being able to decide exactly what to do each day with your time is a massive privilege
- Keeping someone else’s clients happy is more stressful than keeping your own clients happy
- Trust your instincts about the promise versus the reality of a job
- The average office environment or cubicle is about as soul destroying as you can get and totally kills creativity and productivity
- You’re highly unlikely to ever be paid back for any unpaid overtime you do
- No matter how hard you work at your job, as soon as you walk away you’re usually left with nothing to show for it
- Office politics are not exciting – they’re stressful and distracting
- Not hating your job is not the same as enjoying it
- It’s amazing what the relative security of employment does to the productivity of employees
- Your employer’s priority is usually (but not always) their business – not you
- It is way too easy to get sucked into the comfort of a regular salary, not having to think for yourself and become distracted from your own personal goals
- If you left a job previously because you hated it, never go back to see whether you made the right decision. You did!
Jonathan Woodward Studio
Kinetiva
Location Independent
Vibrapreneur
That’s funny; I was just telling my husband that I wanted to work for someone again – that I was tired of all the stress of always being the one in charge, the one that decided every single little final decision and the one that had nightmares about the office… and then I read your post.
Maybe not so much; maybe I just need a little vacation and breathing time to remind myself of all the things you wrote above, and more.
I thought I missed having colleagues but I snapped out of it when I read your post.
Love this bit: “If you left a job previously because you hated it, never go back to see whether you made the right decision. You did!”
I’m happy to be doing my own thing and I actually look forward to waking up everyday, compared to the time I was working for a company when I was late for work often. I take comfort that I am more content now even though I probably earn less than before.
@Anne-Marie & @Yu Ming Lui – LOL!! The grass is always greener, eh?!? Seriously…I know being the boss can sometimes be just as stressful, but being an employee and not having that degree of control of what you do on a daily basis?? A living nightmare ;) I keep saying at the moment, that no amount of money offered would make me want to stay an employee – and I mean it.
Anne-Marie – yes probably time to take a holiday…or at least a few days off doing exactly as you please :)
I think the biggest disadvantage of working for someone else is not being able to say, “I did it.” When it is your business, you can feel great self-satisfaction in your successes and you can (or at least should) learn a great deal from your failures. I seldom hear employees talk about what they have learned form failure. On the other hand, I often hear successful entrepreneurs talk about how much they learned form their failures. One of the greatest feelings in business and in life in general is knowing that you were successful in running YOUR business. Just think about it, if you broken-even or made $1.00 profit in 2007, you managed your business better than the American automobile companies, almost all of the the U.S. airlines, and many of the banks and mortgage lenders – and they had a lot more resources than you did. Now that is self-satisfaction.
I agree usually Ron – altho my nightmare job right now means I’ll be able to turn round in 4.5 weeks (yes, I am counting!!) and say “look I did that ALL by myself”!!! But that’s certainly not how it’s meant to have been.
Love your point about a $1 profit being a better performance than many major companies – puts things into perspective a little!!
There is a wonderful combination of both worlds out there, folks. Academia.
Teach a little, consult a little, use your skills to find the few bright, young, aggressive minds that “get it” and help them flourish…
I urge each and every entrepreneur out there to give back to their community by teaching a class at the community college from time to time. Who knows. You might end up managing one or two of these kids later on in life!
And you have so much to offer; imagine the thirty or forty wasted years you can save a student by showing him or her the light.
Interesting suggestion – I’m all for teaching others (esp kids) about the options out there…funny though, when you mention academia and community colleges, I get images of a roomful of kids bored out of their brains wondering how this relates to the real world. No idea what curricula are like these days but if they’re more “real world” focused than when I was in education, that’s great.