Trendy words like mom boss and mompreneur have moms with more traditional jobs and stay-at- home-moms considering entrepreneurship. Becoming self-employed is often seen as one of those incredible life milestones that automatically signals some degree of success and fulfillment. Entrepreneurship also paves the way towards greater autonomy, happiness, independence and much more flexibility than one would find working a more traditional 9 to 5.
Obviously, being self-employed really can be all those things and more. When you begin working for yourself, you’re certainly adopting more all-encompassing responsibility for your professional life than you would have been embracing before, and there is plenty of potential for you to really establish yourself and achieve something great.
But just as every specific job out there has its particular requirements, skill sets, and associated culture, so too does the self-employed life require specific things, and present specific challenges.
Should you become self-employed? Here are a few questions to consider.
Are you willing to accept total responsibility?
When you are your own boss, you really have to be your own boss in all senses. Being in charge doesn’t just mean that you get to set your own hours, wear what you like, and decide how to allocate your resources. It also means that everything that can conceivably go wrong for your business is your personal responsibility, and that in every event, the buck has to stop with you.
Before becoming self-employed, ask yourself if you are willing to accept total responsibility across the board. Are you willing to put in the hours, even when you are already exhausted? Are you willing and able to hold yourself strictly accountable to your own plans and schedule?
Perhaps most importantly, are you willing to bear the brunt of any setbacks, and work to extract the lessons from your failures so that you can do better next time around?
Are you comfortable with outsourcing and learning from third parties?
Even if you are a great expert in a particular field, running your own business is likely going to require you to handle all sorts of tasks, and fill all sorts of roles that aren’t strictly related to your area of expertise.
The question, then, is do you know who to learn from, and to get advice from? And are you comfortable with the idea of delegating responsibility and outsourcing?
IT Outsourcing Services, for instance, may be vital for the overall success of your business. But in any event, you have to be humble and curious enough to not try to do everything solo, indefinitely. No business can expand and survive that way for long.
Are you in it for the long haul?
If you are interested in becoming self-employed as a “get rich quick scheme,” you’re probably starting a business under the wrong pretenses. Starting a business and seeing profit requires hard work and patience.
Making a success of your own business, and being a proper entrepreneur, always requires that you be committed to the task over the long term. You need to be in it for the long haul.
There are many brilliant entrepreneurial success stories out there, but virtually none of them sprang out of nowhere. Rather, almost every successful entrepreneur has years of hard work, experiments, and abandoned ventures under their belt.
If you’re going to become self-employed, you should do it because you are interested in the journey, and are willing to work to create something substantial, even if it takes years.
