Comments on: You Are Self Employed

By: SANUDIYA WILLIE

SANUDIYA WILLIE — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:57:40 +0000

SUCCESS IS NOT BY LUCKY.

Success people are not lucky, however, they have taken their time, effort, and ideas together, some of them have secrified their valuables, properties. There is a need to work hard inorder to achieve our goals, some of us we are already there, but, we don’t know it, we need to work hard and smart so that our goals will come true.

Honesty, if you want to be someone, there is a need to be faithful in all your business transactions and everything you do, for those who are not yet in business this is the time to make it. Keep on working hard and praying your dreams will come true.

With Lord everthing is possible.

SANU-EXTRA: BUILDING THE SOCIETY TOGETHER.

“It’s more than usual”

Email:sndwillie@gmail.com
Cell :0774062495

By: sanudiya willie

sanudiya willie — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 07:22:04 +0000

One need to put all efforts together in order to come up with a sound business, you need to know your strength, opportunities, threats, and weakness.

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:55:26 +0000

Obviously it is a lot harder to start a business when you need the money. I know that a lot of people do things to drop their expenses before they launch a business. My wife and I sold our house and moved into a small apartment before we started our business so our expenses dropped dramatically. On the other hand you can start a small business today with less capital than probably any time in history. You’ll have to look hard to find something that matches with your skills.

By: Edith Darling

Edith Darling — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 09:57:40 +0000

We share the same views just that i don’t fear success i actually fear the process of getting there,my problem is the income to start the business and what kind of business i can start coz i’m personally not a business oriented person but i need something to supplement my salary coz of these hard times.Any ideas?

By: johnny

johnny — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:54:37 +0000

My employer wants to terminate my employment and wants me to go self-employed and rent my own seat in a hairdressers. Where does this leave me with regard to redundancy I have been working for them for 2.6 years, the last 9mths of this have been on a part-time basis due to the down turn in business

By: Olivia

Olivia — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 03:08:21 +0000

I’m wanting to start a tutoring business, but I don’t know
where to start. I’m just wondering if it would be
worth my time and effort to start my own business. I currently work for a
school district and I am dissatisfied with the “behind the scenes”
politics that goes on… What are your thoughts???

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:30:06 +0000

There are always going to be businesses that require massive amounts of capital to start. However, creative people can find ways to start a business and bootstrap it with minimal capital. For example, if you were to start out small doing catered sandwiches for special events your cost wouldn’t be nearly so high to start off.

The town where I live has a pretty nice taco/hotdog place. They started off selling hotdogs from a cart downtown. Now they have a small building and they seem to be keeping pretty busy.

By: Christina

Christina — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 19:22:52 +0000

I’ve wanted to open a vegetarian sandwich/small scale restaurant
for quite sometime however it is very risky given the money i’d have to sink into it
Just to get started. It seems like only people who are well off or have a lot of savings can do it. A successful eatery would require a great location, custom remodeling to accomadate cooking equip, in house seating, etc. not to mention hiring help and the food supplies themselves. Seems much less daubting to punch someone elses clock :(

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:33:43 +0000

If you work for someone, but they pay your company instead of you, then they are contracting with your company–not you directly. In this US this would mean that they wouldn’t have to pay about 7% FICA tax because your company would be responsible for paying that on whatever salary you take from the company.

By: sarah

sarah — Mon, 30 May 2011 23:56:13 +0000

If you worked for someone as an employee and you had your own private company can they pay your private company or do you still need to be paid as an employee. Stating this as better tax deductions with private company

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:29:07 +0000

Thanks John. I think one of the problems people run into is when they start making money from their side job, they just expand their expenses. You want to set that money aside as funds to further the business or to pay yourself if you quit your job. If your expenses just grow along with your side job income, you’ll never get to the point where you can actually quite the job that requires you to show up everyday.

By: John

John — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 17:54:03 +0000

It’s absolutely wise to have a steady job and continue working on your own business on a side. If all your income is coming only from your new business, you might start “strangling it” by not re-investing that income back.

I have a 4-year old internet business that does well, however I still keep my steady job, as the income is not the same yet (it’s around 60% of the pay I get working for a large corporation). It may never be. However the satisfaction and flexibility is not even comparable, and when I look at work/pay ratio my own business always wins. If I couldn’t keep both jobs I would always choose my own business. When income comes to 100%, I may finally decide to quit the corporate job.

Do not get discouraged, do not get greedy (e.g. charge how much you need instead of how much is wise to keep the customer base growing), treat your customers right, and most importantly, be patient. Good luck.

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 17:33:37 +0000

I think keeping your current job is an excellent idea for now. Particularly if you have very little savings. Once you are in business for yourself, you will probably go through dry spells and you’ll need to make sure you have cash on hand in case you need it. It is a lot easier to make good business decisions when you know you have a year’s worth of living expenses in your bank account than when you are trying to figure out how you are going to pay for food tomorrow.

I would encourage you to try to to find ways to run a business that doesn’t just involve just selling your time by the hour. For example, if you are a programmer, you might want to consider creating software and selling the software itself. Lets say it takes you two months of spare time to make a simple product that you can sell for $10 and you can average 10 to 20 sales per month. If you can do this for a year and create 6 products that bring in $900 per month without require continued large investments of time, that is a significant amount of income that keeps coming in even while you work on other products or doing other work.

Another example, from my experience. I do software engineering as well and I’ve started taking on clients in a startup arrangement. Basically I’ll do software at half the normal cost for half ownership. So if someone comes to me with an idea that sounds good, I’ll write the software, but they only pay me half the invoice. The other have is the portion that I’m putting into the business. This type of approach helps give me some income now from selling my time, but ongoing income in the future as the product is sold.

The trick is to spot the opportunities that are worthwhile and where the other person has something to really offer. In particular you want to look for partners that have an established customer base to sell the new product to. I’d much rather partner with someone on a good idea who has excellent chances of marketing the product than someone with a fabulously incredible idea, but no existing customer base. And as with any partnership, you have to make sure you can trust the people you are partnering with. Get things in writing, etc.

It is much easier to quit your job when you know you have enough passive income to cover your basic expenses already.

Best of luck in your new ventures!

By: lx123

lx123 — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 05:42:01 +0000

Hi! Nice article. I started my own business around July last year, I’m already seeing some decent income. However, I’m concerned about the fact that when they offer me a job it actually pays more than what I get. Do you think it might be a wise idea to work on my business on the side? With a 9-5 job I would have around 2-3 hours per day plus the weekend, where I can at least put 12 more hours.That’s like 98 hours a month, two weeks of full time job. Basically working at half speed, I’m not sure though if this formula would actually work out. Any ideas?

My long term plan is to have my own business, but right now I’m starting to really question my decision, is it possible that it’s wise to wait? The thing is that any job as a programmer, with my experience, offers me at least 80 EUR per day after taxes. To get that working for myself I need to make at least 150 EUR daily (because I have to pay my taxes, social security, etc) And I’m not getting that, these last days I’ve lost some of my motivation because I worked really hard for the last two months, working 16 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, and I made like $1500 in the whole 2 months.

I’m thinking on maybe working on the side and get like $500-$600 extra per month, maybe a bit more… Definitely I want to have my own business, but I’m a bit tired of not being able to have savings… Can you tell me more about your personal experience? Are you enjoying now a very profitable life?

By: James McLaughlin

James McLaughlin — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:31:16 +0000

I agree with everyone about having the right state of mind. If you are just thinking about failure then it’s not for you. They don’t train car racers to look at the wall when going around turns do they?

Before you invest any capital some research on whether or not people are willing to pay for your products or services. This is as simple as asking acquaintances if they would pay for your services or products.

Anyone who wants to start their own business read Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. Stands for Entrepreneurial Myth and was introduced to me by a mentor with a successful business who said this was a fame changer for him.