The WAY to WOW Shows
Start a Business or Get a Job?
October 26, 2022
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[0:25] good afternoon and welcome to the way to wow people making money I'm your host Kevin bemel and we are here every Wednesday at 12 30 p.m Pacific Time 3 30 p.m eastern time and an hour in for each of the um uh um other time zones mountain and Central trying to think of a descriptive word for them and couldn't do it so uh thank you for joining me if I didn't say that before we uh once a week spent an hour talking about how we can improve our

[1:02] professional success hence the name people making money um of course money isn't the only marker of professional success but it's it's one of the biggest and I think for for most of us we have a particular monetary goal in mind with our work and and uh sometimes we have to sacrifice other things about our professional lives in order to meet that goal so that we can support ourselves our families the people uh who who on whom rely on us and um so that's what we're here to do every

[1:38] day um and uh gosh last week I don't remember what I talked about but I invite you to go to our YouTube channel the way to wow show on YouTube you can just go to youtube.com C slash the way to wow and you will be there please subscribe if you're not already a subscriber and you'll see all the previous episodes this is our third season of the show and we'll be wrapping up this season uh in December so in just a really about a couple of months season

[2:13] four will start in January and we'll continue to have these uh midweek hourly sessions both talking about information and knowledge that we need to have and talking to people who have found their way to wow professionally and and so um they can give us some thoughts about how they how they got to uh where they are today and on that note I want to mention that next week my very long time frame and Bob Sanders Dr Bob

[2:50] Sanders will be my guests on the show this is a return engagement for Bob he was on the show during season one and Bob recently got a new job he's been with NASA for the for the last uh quite a number of years now um he was in their dive program and now he has transitioned he's a flight surgeon and he is the program manager for basically the upcoming walk on the moon all right so um talk about wow that that that's

[3:26] that's definitely it now of course I I joke somewhat because wow doesn't literally mean wow in in our show's context it means um what you want right so where's my yeah here's here's my graphic right who are you way what you want wow and so that that's what we mean when we talk about the way to wow so today I I'm going to talk about the um decision we all have to make between getting a job versus starting a business so

[4:03] I think many of us have the dream of starting our own business uh and yet business formation I um I haven't checked the statistics lately so maybe things have changed in the last year or or two but um uh over the last decade or more small business formation in the United States has been getting less and less and less and I on some level I I think that's really a shame um however what how I want to conduct my

[4:38] professional career really isn't relevant to how you want to build your career so I want to take a look at the pros and cons between having a job versus having a business I'm going to attempt to do so without bias although I I gave away my bias which I think is is is valid for you to know that I mean my bias is toward um starting my own business and or starting a business being a part of a business startup doesn't necessarily require that we do it on our own and so I'm going to go through uh 10 points

[5:16] um that that I think are worth considering and here we go let's see okay and let's see if we're going to be able to um are they gonna let me put this in slideshow mode here we go Play From the Start see if this is going to work it's it's it's always uh you know all always uh there we go fantastic okay so job versus owning a business these are 10 issues uh to

[5:53] consider uh I'm gonna move the image of myself here in the front so I you know look at you as we do this so before I get into those 10 issues though I I do want to remind you or or talk about what I call the primary mindset shift do we have to make in our professional lives and that is that uh wealth or in our financial lives let me change it this is the Mind shift I think we need to make in our financial lives and that is that wealth comes from value delivered

[6:28] so the more value we can deliver to our employer or if we have a business to our customers or clients the more money we're going to make now let me quickly add that value doesn't necessarily mean something monetary for a lot of us I'll give you I'll give you an example my dentist referred me to a periodontist and I called the office earlier today to set an appointment and the um the woman who scheduled the appointment for me I

[7:04] mean she was terrific so personable so easy to deal with it was it was really a pleasure to speak with her and you know she she before the call ran off she said hey I'm looking forward to meeting you I mean what a nice thing to say right didn't take any any it really I mean I don't know if it took effort I hope it didn't take effort I hope she sincerely wanted to do that but he wanted to meet me but even if not um that's she's delivering value for that

[7:39] uh periodontist practice and so there's lots and lots of ways that we can deliver value Beyond just uh you know dollars and cents and so I invite you to think about that and I and I would I would say by the way in really almost any realm of our life when we speak about wealth so a wealth of friends uh a a a wealth of mental Wellness a wealth of physical wellness all of these things come down to this

[8:16] same equation if you will so it comes from value delivered if we want to have close friends we need to be valuable in their lives and they need to be valuable in our lives there's definitely um a a a a a a trade-off is the wrong word there's got to be a mutual benefit in in the case of friends and relationships family members if we want those relationships to to to build or become stronger if we want to be physically healthy we need to deliver

[8:52] value in this case to ourselves and I I've talked in the last weaker two maybe three weeks about the things that we need to do to be physically healthy that's the value we deliver to ourselves so for for any of the Realms in the three pillars of attainment I I guess I should go this way I'll be easier to see in any of these it really comes wealth comes meaning an abundance of comes from value delivered to others or to ourselves okay

[9:27] so I I encourage you to to consider this to candidly adopt it as your one of the key aspects of your mindset okay so let's let's proceed from there then so in in looking at the 10 issues of whether we should get a job or start a business uh you know probably uppermost in in people's minds oops there you go I clicked and and uppermost in people's minds is the idea of income potential oh and you know what I should have

[10:04] well let's I'm not sure oh you know what I just realized I didn't put that slide in so um I'll have to do it from memory um so I looked up the median income uh for uh employees versus business owners uh here in the United States and in reality there there isn't a real big difference in the median income for employees is around fifty four thousand

[10:40] dollars a year and the median income for uh business owners is a little uh just slightly under fifty one thousand dollars a year so what about an eight percent difference I guess something like that um seven eight percent difference so so not a lot now in terms of for the business owners the lower the lowest 10 percent of business owners are making about twenty seven thousand dollars a year okay that's their median the top 10 percent

[11:16] are making ninety one thousand okay so I think that's something to keep in mind um and that is that uh you know I think we have this idea that oh if I start my own business I'm gonna be rolling in money that may very well be the case uh but you know and and I'm not sneezing at ninety one thousand dollars uh but that's all that that's all it takes to get in the top ten percent that's you know compared to uh you know jobs that are out there

[11:52] um to me that that doesn't seem like a lot more than what you would make once you've been in the job market for a while so I I you know I I don't know that um on its face income potential is is a powerful determinant for us either way here's here's where I think income potential uh may be a factor and that is when you're an employee the bottom line is someone else is going to have at least some say over

[12:31] how much you make okay even if you're in a commission role where you know you produce uh let's say you're a pharmaceutical rep so pharmaceutical reps tend to get a salary plus overrides right and so the more they produce the more they make but in the final analysis they do not determine the percentage of their overrides nor do they determine their salary all by themselves it's in negotiation with the company okay whereas when you have your own business

[13:08] really the amount of income you make is up to you now that can be a good thing or a bad thing it for if you're if you're not particularly self-motivated well so then maybe starting a business isn't for you because it takes it takes uh motivation it takes hard work it takes dedication all of those uh you've got to push yourself to meet your income potential whereas when you're working for a company uh then you know what you

[13:44] need to do hopefully is reasonably well defined if you do it you get your salary and and that's kind of it and even if you're in like I said something like pharmaceutical sales where there's an override well so you know there's going to be a team there kind of pushing you I don't necessarily mean pushing you in a negative way but sort of helping you stay motivated and all of that so I I think that when you when we talk about income potential um those are the kind of things that uh we need to we need to consider okay so income potential that's number one

[14:19] number two is wealth building now when I talk about wealth building I mean exactly that building up a net worth if you will so net worth is defined as the value of your assets minus your liabilities and what you have left over is your net worth let's say maybe you own a house it's worth four hundred thousand dollars there is a two hundred and seventy five thousand dollar loan against the house so your equity in the house is a hundred and twenty five

[14:54] thousand dollars now if you don't have any other assets and you have no other liabilities that's also your personal net worth 125 000 okay now you may have a car loan you may have some some investment accounts or whatever so you know in in that case you need to add up all your assets add up all your liabilities subtract liabilities from assets that gives you your net worth I.E your wealth so when you work for a company and and I'm gonna I'm gonna put a qualifier on this and you do not have think something like

[15:31] stock options or you don't own a piece of the company you're you are strictly an employee and and shall we say the purest sense of that word so you are likely not developing any wealth now an exception to that would be if you have some kind of pension plan right and there's two kinds of pension plans generally there are what are called defined benefit pensions and there's defined contribution pensions now it used to be you know going back 50

[16:07] or more years ago if a company had a pension plan it was a defined benefit pension plan now what that means is how much you get paid once you retire is is defined so you so we when you retire from the company they'll let you know okay you're gonna get three thousand dollars a month for the rest of your life that's defined benefit plan and then the the sponsor the plan typically the company it's up to them to make sure that the money is there to pay you

[16:42] a defined contribution plan which is which is what you see today in most private sector companies okay unless unless there's a typically unless there's a a union involved so and if defined benefit pension plan the amount you invest periodically typically monthly is defined maybe it's 200 a month or 500 a month or whatever that is the benefit you get when you retire will vary depending on the performance of the the Investments you made and depending

[17:18] on how the market continues to uh you know respond to inflation or whatever else is going on as you start taking payments out of that pension so um and there are companies who have defined um uh contribution plans where they'll match all or a part of your contribution and so that's how they contribute to it to make it more attractive for their employees so you may be building some wealth there now if you work for a

[17:54] government for for a government period whether it's the federal state government municipal government well I shouldn't say Municipal governments because that probably varies I I to be honest with you unless it's a large city I can't say for sure that you're going to have a pension but if you work for the federal government state government large city like Los Angeles it's it you know where you have you're a union employee you're going to have a defined benefit pension so you are in essence Building Wealth so a friend of mine recently retired from being a professor at UCLA and one of the decisions he had to make was do I take my pension benefit

[18:31] in a lump sum or do I take it you know in monthly payments right so he had built wealth in that Pension Plan okay and he was he was he was able to do that that's on the employee side now on the own a business side okay if you build up a business not only can you have a pension plan in that business the same as you could if you were an employee of a company you don't own but the business itself has value in it and there's several ways

[19:09] that can be the case so I I believe last week or the week before I mentioned a company called Primerica so Primerica is a financial services company and one of the benefits that well and when you but when you work for Primerica you really have your own business so it's sort of a misnomer to say work for Primerica uh it's it's more like you're more like a independent contractor for Primerica uh not not more like you are an independent contractor for Primerica and and and therefore you you really are working for

[19:45] yourself so among the benefits that that you have of doing that are you build what's called residual income which means for example if you um uh build up an investment uh practice where you know people are investing money let's say in there for their yeah their 401K uh I'm sorry not their 401 case they're Iris uh through your efforts Okay so those those investment accounts will pay

[20:20] you a residual income over time so even after you retire you're going to continue to get that income stream okay so that's one way that you build wealth owning your own business is is to be in a business where there's a residual income another is in the business itself so when I joined the Navy I had my real estate company and I was able to sell that business okay and I and I collected you know the money for that so um not now let me hasta to add not every

[20:56] business ends up having a value to it okay it depends there's got to be assets of the in the business that people will pay for so in the case of a a real estate company I had a management company and that's and and because those contracts generated monthly Revenue there was a value in that in in my business that I was able to capture by selling it okay so again you know it can vary a lot now by the way you know a law practice um law law firms continue to consolidate and so you know there's value in a law

[21:31] practice uh primarily either in the reputation of the lawyers and their ability to generate business or their ability to um deal with certain types of case cases very well right so all of those things can factor in and if you have a small business like a restaurant or something like that then it may very well have a value so the value that you build in the business is creating wealth for you okay and at some point you can sell that business and realize that wealth or maybe sell a part of the business and

[22:07] and and and that will generate well for you so as as a way to generate wealth I think it's it's reasonable to say that you know a business um has a greater ability to do that okay number three schedule and time commitment so one of the pieces of information I came across when I was putting this presentation together was a graphic that showed people who own their own business a 75 percent

[22:42] of people who own their own businesses work 50 or more hours per week and it's split roughly half and half of the 75 between 50 plus hours and 60 plus hours so what that's really saying is if you want to be successful in a business you're going to be working a minimum of 50 hours a week and maybe much more than that maybe 60 plus hours a week especially in the beginning okay

[23:18] now if you have a job you may be working you know 50 hours a week in a job too you know it depends on the job right but some jobs don't require that some jobs only require you to work 40 hours a week and and as long as you work your 40 hours a week you get your you know periodic paychecks and and and and that's that's all you have to be concerned about okay so the time commitment to a business is is is I would say greater than it's than the time commitment you would typically make for as an employee

[23:55] especially as a median income uh employee now of course the higher you go up in a particular company the more time you're going to commit and and I would imagine you know most uh senior leadership in a company they're probably working the same kind of hours that you know business owners work uh of course they're hopefully getting well paid for that right so so that's there is the trade-off now the difference or the other issue is scheduling flexibility and that's what I mean by schedule and time commitment so

[24:30] when you're an employee you may not have a whole lot of flexibility to you know to deal with life in general okay whereas if you own your own business you have a lot more flexibility so if you want to go to your child's uh you know soccer game a particular afternoon um you know you don't have if you have your own business you don't have to ask whoever you report to hey uh you know can I take the afternoon off to go you know to my child's soccer game you just

[25:06] work your schedule around doing that and and that's what I found and that's what I've always found um in in having my own business and for me by the way aside from the ability to build wealth the scheduling flexibility is one of the most important parts of owning a my own business for me I like having that schedule so because I own my own business for example when when uh on the weeks my daughter is with me not only can I take her to school in the morning but I can pick her up in the afternoon I've built my schedule to be

[25:42] able to do that because I number one I think it's important for me to do that especially since she started High School this year and and you know making the adjustments so I can be there for her to you know you know say a few words to her as she heads off to school and I can be there for her when school is done to help her sort of decompress and figure out her day if she needs to to me that is the most important part of I mean it's the most important thing I do in my life period

[26:19] that that's it okay and so if I worked for someone else I wouldn't there's a good chance I wouldn't have that kind of flexibility unless I were a very you know senior person and therefore you know had that that kind of flexibility and and by the way as a senior person uh you know from a leadership standpoint I I'm not necessarily particularly comfortable with the idea that I get to have more flexibility than than the you know my team has so you know you have to set the example

[26:54] um in in you know when you have people working with you and so you know to I think it's to you know to be in that situation can can you know there can be other barriers to schedule flexibility besides just whether or not it's permitted you know by the people to whom you report okay so schedule and time commitment I think you know that's that's a balancing issue to consider here what's you know what's more important for you there okay number four security what I call one client versus multiple clients now why one versus

[27:32] multiple clients so here's the thing my my sense is that most people think having a job is more secure because the the you know kind of the perspective is if I show up do my work I get my paycheck don't have to worry okay whereas in a business and we'll talk about this more in one of the other issues you know from from month to month or year to year as the business Ebbs and

[28:09] flows and as the economy changes the how well the business is doing will may change and so there's not the same kind of stability as income I think that's how most people look at this issue I want to give you a different perspective and and again this is this is another one of my key reasons why I choose to be a business owner when I look at working as an employee my sense is that I have one client

[28:46] and that one client especially here in a state like California has the ability to essentially fire me or lay me off at will okay and so if I lose that one client my entire income is gone okay and this just happened to A A friend of mine he was he was really working in a job he really he just loved what he was doing and over the um last up until about uh roughly a

[29:23] month ago the company was saying we're doing great don't you know we're looking forward to expanding and all this stuff and everybody felt like their jobs were really secure and then about a month ago the company cut 20 of their Workforce and my friend lost his job and he lost his entire income and now he's doing something he hates just to bring in some money while he figures out what his next step is so while the way you know our income is paid is different as an employee than it is when we own a business or maybe different the reality is we've just got

[30:00] one client when we when we work for an organization whereas if we have our own business we have multiple clients so I mean I I had I had various clients when I was in business in the real estate business before that after a while dealing with them was just it was too difficult and I had the ability to fire a client without losing all of my income whereas when I when I was an employee before I started my company and I got to the point where I just could not stand

[30:35] working for the guy I was working for I only had one choice that was to fire that employer and lose all my income which which I did um and and I you know I had to struggle um and that's when I started my business I said hey never again am I putting myself in a situation where basically I have where I have one client and and I could lose all my income in one Fell Swoop by the way I think people do recognize this more these days that's why you see a lot of people with um I think they call them side hustles or you know alternative gigs or whatever

[31:12] and whether they're driving uh you know Uber or something like that and by the way I think those are great and I think it makes a lot of sense to do those things right and that's also where I I know I mentioned Primerica before but that's also where getting involved in something like Primerica on a part-time basis it gives you something to fall back on uh in case the job that in case you lose the job that you have or you just get to the point with your job well I cannot stand this got to do something else okay so uh you know security you know I think you need to I would encourage you I should say to think

[31:48] about what does security really mean to you and are you as secure as an employee um as you would be as as a business owner okay so that's number four and I just want to check timing here yep we're doing well good okay so next number five professional satisfaction so a lot of people tend to think that they'll get greater professional satisfaction starting their own business and and and they may okay but I I think too that um

[32:26] there can be a lot of professional satisfaction in being an employee I just think it depends um what you're doing how how much you like what you're doing the atmosphere the professional atmosphere in which you're working the people who you work with the person who you report to or work for all of those I think have an impact on professional satisfaction so I'll go back to this woman I spoke to this morning at the periodontist office I have a sense and and I'm I'm going to

[33:01] be curious to ask her when I when we meet you know face to face um her name is Kim obviously you know Kim how would you rate your professional satisfaction working here I BECU I'm curious to know the answer to that question because my sense is she rates it very high that's probably one of the reasons why she's so pleasant to deal with um and and you know the way she treats um patience or you know potential patients the way she does and I would extend it to say I suspect working for

[33:36] that periodontist is probably pretty Pleasant probably a pretty nice guy you know um that all goes into it so I I again I'm just speculating here um so I I I wouldn't necessarily um Accord greater professional satisfaction to having your own business this is what I will say about it if you have your own business you're you have control over your route to professional satisfaction

[34:11] okay you do have control of because it's your business now here's the thing and then this may come up a little bit later um yeah this this actually it will come up a little bit later um but these two work together when you have your own business there are inevitably you're going to have to do some things that you probably don't like to do because that's it's your business somebody's got to do it now hopefully you'll get you know your business to the point where you can hire someone to do those things that you don't like to do someone who does like to do them right

[34:46] that would be ideal but especially in the beginning okay whatever professional satisfaction you feel for having your own business is going to be at least partially offset by the reality that they're you're gonna have to be doing some things that you don't like to do because the buck is going to stop with you right the um the the famous quote by uh Harry Truman President Harry Truman so I I would again I would um uh encourage you to think about that and and whereas when you're an employee

[35:21] now by the way there may be things you have to do as an employee that you don't like to do right um however if you if you you know you might be able to work yourself to employ where you're doing what you love to do and then you have an assistant to do the other stuff or whatever so I I I you know in the end I I don't know that we can Accord a greater amount of professional satisfaction to one or the other but I think it's it's a matter of how much control do you want over your ability to attain professional satisfaction over the medium to long

[35:57] term that's really where it counts short term probably not a lot of control perhaps in either a job or owning a business oh oh that's weird I didn't click or anything it just ticks okay we were just five yeah okay uh okay so six okay personal growth potential this is and you could argue well this is part of professional growth um I I don't know that that's necessarily the same thing um here's here's what I found uh as a business owner my

[36:34] my success as a business owner I'm sorry professionals you say could be a part of professional satisfaction I I just I separate them because I think there is a difference so my success as a business owner was tied very closely to my personal growth okay and I think I've talked about this before when I first started in business I had inherited from um especially um my father a kind of uh not kind of an attitude that um most if not all wealthy people became wealthy uh through dishonest uh means

[37:12] and you know so you know I'm out there looking to attract clients real estate clients who for the most part are at least somewhat wealthy right and and the sort of underlying attitude I had um was was insulting to them not that I ever said that to them but I think people sense these things so one of the things I had to do was I had to grow personally to look beyond the the sort of cliches or beyond the stereotypes to see the individual people and what I

[37:49] found was in general wealth tended to make a person what I call even more so so if a person was a good person they were um they were kind um they cared about other people so money gave them the ability to exercise their kindness and to care more about other people and conversely for people who were selfish and who were mean wealth gave them a greater opportunity to be more selfish and and meaner right so um I I don't think wealth necessarily

[38:28] um I I don't think wealth is a controlling factor in the character of a human being I think it just tends to drive them in in whatever Direction they pretty much want to go that I and I was able to learn and grow learn that and therefore grow personally when I had my business in a way that I never did as an employee and in fact as an employee to a certain extent that that bad attitude was reinforced because it seemed like you know I I wanted more money or whatever from who I was working for and the real estate guy was working

[39:03] for I mean I would work hours and hours and tens of hours and hundreds of hours and and I got almost no compensation from him and he was he was a wealthy guy it's and and very selfish basically um and so it you know working for someone in in this case didn't afford me the opportunity for personal growth because the one person I was dependent on for my income happened to be not a good guy and it and it he reinforced The Stereotype I had so um when you have your own business

[39:38] one of the things you're going to need to do is really examine yourself periodically and see where am I holding myself back what skills don't I have what attitudes do I have that are not conducive to my success what values do I hold that maybe they're false values okay what I found um over the 20 years I had my real estate business was I became more understanding

[40:14] and more empathetic because in the crush of having to deal with people especially tenants um and and be the go between between the tenants and the owners of the buildings you know my attitude of well you know every owner all they care about is maximizing their money I realized well that's not true not every owner cares about maximizing their money A lot of the clients I had really cared about making sure they were providing a decent place to live for

[40:49] their tenants and so early on in my business I would sometimes find myself in Conflict saying well you don't need to spend this money because you know too bad for them otherwise and they'd be like well no I've got a responsibility and and so I also learned from these people and grew personally to become a I think a better person right now would I have done that working for someone else I don't know I think I I think we become who it is we're associated with and so the fact that as

[41:24] an employee we when I say associated with report too as an employee to the extent that we report to someone who's perhaps not a particularly great person I think that will overshadow other personal growth opportunities now you may have a different experience I I absolutely respect that what I will say is like with professional satisfaction having your own business gives you control over your well gives you more control over your personal growth so hopefully you're pursuing it no matter what but in any event as a business

[42:02] owner even when you have Partners you're going to have much greater control over your uh pers potential for personal growth okay all right let's go on to number seven yep we're doing good on time okay risk and stress okay now these are two of the things that you know I I would say are the worst aspects of of being a business owner so and and not that being an employee means you have no risk and no stress

[42:39] obviously you do and the higher up you go in an organization probably the more stress you have and also probably the more risk you have because the more money you make the you know the uh well uh risk risk in the sense of you know losing the um Financial uh level that you've reached Okay so um but in general as an employee um I think we look at that as being less risky

[43:15] um and and and there's probably in in this in the sense that you know since we're not um I mean unless we are um the driver of the income for the business um so then um you know as long as as long as the income is there I'm I'm good I'll have to worry about making sure the dollars are there to pay my salary though other people have that responsibility right now there's all look there's always going to be some stress but but you don't have that stress of of being The Rainmaker as it's called okay I mean

[43:50] unless you do unless you're a Rainmaker for the company okay and hopefully if you're a Rainmaker for the company you've got some equity in the company by the way so in that case you're a business owner even even if it's only a minority share okay here's the thing when you own your own business again the buck stops with you and here's the reality in the first five years eighty percent of startups fail okay now you may say oh I'm gonna I'm gonna be in the 20 that succeeds after five years

[44:25] good okay but just understand that uh the the odds are against you and so what you need to do to be in that 20 after five years is a lot of hard work a lot of growth um a lot of stress in order to potentially offset that risk okay and what's more is you've got to be able to perform at a high level despite the risk and stress

[45:02] okay which means you got to have a way to deal with it now my way to deal with it is primarily exercise that's how I deal with stress exercise okay now a lot of business owners deal with it the same way but some deal with it in very unhealthy ways drinking drugs overeating and engaging in all kinds of uh you know self-abusive behaviors right and and so they may get to the point where they now they have a successful business but their their health those physical mental mental and spiritual health is just shot

[45:37] to hell right so um is is that is that trade-off worth it I I don't know I mean some business owners I've spoken to seem to feel it is a lot of them seem to feel it is not right so again this is something I encourage you to think about um and again not that being an employee is risk-free there are certainly risks now of course the tighter the labor market the lower the risk for employees but even in a pretty tight labor market like we have right now there are layoffs happening uh companies are tightening their belts in anticipation of a

[46:12] potential recession perhaps next year so you know all of these things are real risks um having said that I do think that for most people the risk and stress of having their own business is greater than being an employee it's just how we perceive them okay so uh something to think about and uh now let's move on to number eight okay Authority responsibilities duties and tasks right so um much of what makes up what we do day

[46:49] to day whether as an employee employee or as a business owner is going to be our duties and tasks okay and um we I talked about this a little bit uh earlier in terms of professional satisfaction um as a business owner especially in the beginning you're going to have duties and tasks that you do not like to do that's that's just what it's going to be and you're gonna have to do them okay you're just gonna have to accept that now hopefully the business like I said the business will become more successful and you'll get someone else to do them um but in the short term in the near

[47:25] term you're going to be doing them because you have those responsibilities okay you can't shift them off to somebody else okay now the same may be true as an employee um having said that as you go through your job hunt hopefully you are looking for a job that aligns with the things that you like to do and are good at doing okay so whatever duties and tasks there may be associated with the job that are that you don't like are minimal okay there's probably not going to be there's probably not a

[48:01] job out there where you know you have no duties and tasks at all that you don't like but but you know you minimize them okay and especially once you get to the point where you can have uh you know an assistant or an executive assistant or whatever so then again you can lateral those off to to someone else so in in this particular issue where what I find to be the more important pairing is Authority versus responsibilities okay and this was something I learned

[48:36] very early on in my um professional life my first job out of college I worked for a lawyer um and my mother my mother got me the job she was she was his bookkeeper and he she needed some bookkeeping help and he also needed some help prepare preparing cases so he made me his law clerk okay I couldn't be a paralegal because that that means I'd been through paralegal school so I was his law clerk that's what we figured out okay so here was the thing even for my mother who had been a full-charged bookkeeper for years and

[49:13] years and years before she got that job she had enormous responsibility but almost no Authority and it made it extremely difficult for her to get her work done it was probably her biggest source of dissatisfaction in her life and I would see it on a regular basis and now you know for me a kid you know well I wasn't a kid okay a young guy just out of college early 20s the fact that I didn't have much much of any

[49:49] Authority didn't seem so strange because I was new to the to the you know to the to the Work World um I didn't know a whole lot about the law so I had to learn um and and in many cases you know the person I reported to was my mother um and and so you know um if I would say you know hey Mom you know here's what I'm working on here's what I think ought to do um a lot of times if it was within her Authority um which a lot of the work that I did did happen to be there was already oh it's okay so you know does vidanya as as

[50:25] we say she just go with it and that was fine or let me go with it um it is I think one of the biggest sources of dissatisfaction in being an employee is when there's a mismatch between Authority and responsibility because it hampers one's ability to do one's job okay and that's why I was having this conversation I believe it was last week with somebody and I was saying that my one of my core leadership principles

[51:01] is to push responsibility with commensurate authority as low down in the structure of an organization as I can so I want people to have the authority to to fulfill their responsibilities knowing they're going to make mistakes and then they'll have an opportunity to learn from those mistakes and they'll exercise their Authority more prudently going forward I think

[51:36] that makes overall for a much less stressful work environment for everybody so always in in the businesses that I've owned I've done my best to match Authority with responsibility now there are some cases where I can't where there's some sort of statutory Authority that is the licensed individual I had to retain and and that's just how it is nonetheless I I did let the people my team members know that while they may not have literally the decision-making Authority what I really wanted them to do was come up with the solutions and

[52:12] then if they you know run them by me with the idea that um you know hopefully at most I'm going to just have to tweak a couple of things because there's something that they don't know about otherwise you know they'll be good to go you know great plan roll with it right so that this and again this is one of the one another one of my key reasons why I like being a business owner is I have the ability to match Authority with responsibility now now you know if it's a startup and I'm the only one there of course I do but even as I build the

[52:49] business and bring people into it I can do that matching and I think that's very important so I uh another uh you know important issue to consider in the employee versus business owner uh decision okay strategic and operational flexibility so depending on what level of employee you are you may have little if any strategic and operational flexibility now if you're at the c-suite level presumably you're going to have um you know at least some if not quite a bit now obviously if you're the CEO of

[53:25] the organization so then in the end the Strategic and operational flexibility rests largely with you you may have to report and be responsible to a board of directors or something like that there may be people within the company that you need to consult with before making a decision or certain decisions may be made by certain committees whatever but you're going to have a lot more [Music] influence if not actual authority over the Strategic and operational uh direction of the organization okay but for the typical employee in an

[54:01] organization they're going to have little if any strategic and operational flexibility okay and and that too can I think can be a very frustrating aspect of being an employee whereas if you are a business owner this is going to be one of your primary responsibilities is to guide you your company your organization strategically and operational only okay to set that plan that then everybody else will work within okay and the way I and that's how

[54:37] I do it I set a strategic Direction I create an operational plan and then in executing that strategy I I give each person kind of their domain if you will so they have authority to match their responsibility within their operational objectives okay and and and and that I find that to be the most conducive to professional satisfaction to enhancing personal growth to profitability Etc et cetera Etc okay so um this this I think is is something that

[55:12] um a lot of employees or potential employees don't consider how important is it for me to be able to impact the direction of the company right so give that some thought as you're you know making these decisions and then finally number 10 operations versus growth so typically as an employee you're going to be on one side of this or the other unless you're at very Senior Management where you're overseeing a lot of people and in that

[55:47] case while you may you may be responsible for both you're going to have teams of people who to direct um to make these things happen it's not going to be your sole responsibility okay so most employee employees are not going to be in the Dilemma of do I focus on operations do I focus on growth as a business owner and again it's as I mentioned on some of the other issues especially in the beginning you're going to feel a constant push and pull between focusing on operations

[56:24] versus focusing on growth and what happens for a lot of small businesses is it's initially they focus on growth bringing in clients customers whatever and they and then and all of a sudden they got all these clients and customers to service and so the focus goes off growth and it goes into operations meaning taking care of the clients and customers and they they sort of get that taken care of and then all of a sudden they look they're looking down you know the timeline and they realize oh my gosh I have no new business coming in well now they got to go back and focus on growth and so then the operations slip a little bit or slips more than a little

[56:59] bit and they start losing clients and customers and it feels like it's a constant pendulum between the two and getting some kind of balance between operations versus growth is among the very biggest challenges you'll have as a business owner and it can frankly at times be pretty crazy making okay I can tell you again from personal experience this was one of the most crazy making aspects of my business until I got it big enough that I was able to hire people to handle

[57:36] operations especially day-to-day operations so I could more consistently focus on growth so by the time I sold my business I focused on uh setting the strategy creating the operational plan generating the business those were the three things that I did and a lot of the operations I had other people uh handling right getting there is is is a fantastic goal but it's probably going to take at least a few years if not longer okay so in in the decision of do I be an employee do I be a business owner again this is something I I

[58:12] encourage you to give serious consideration to because it is one of the key sources of stress in a business right and the the inability to successfully deal with this um you know this the these two uh aspects of your business are one of the key reasons why businesses don't succeed okay because one one gets short shrift at the at the expense of the other that there's got to be a balance okay and it does you no

[58:47] good to get clients in the door and then they're not taken care of properly and so they're going out the door while you're bringing new ones in you're just churning through clients not building a business okay so so again I I you know encourage you to think about that is that is that a um a challenge that you want to take on and and by the way if if on on on these 10 most likely you're going to identify at least a few that you think you're very good at and others that you're not very good at okay and so then the idea I would

[59:24] recommend is to think about okay based on the things that I'm good at well I will I really enjoy being an employee versus being a business owner because we can be good at something but still not enjoy it right so those don't necessarily coincide so so do look at those aspects out of these ten which are the ones you're good at which are the ten which which are the ones that you wouldn't you think you would enjoy doing and how do those match up especially vis-a-vis the issues of being an employee versus being

[60:01] a business owner okay oh we're coming we're coming up on time here so let's uh just real quickly if you want any help with um hashing these out feel free to um send me an email you see my email address there and um also um you know there's links um where you can post a question um on social media feel free to do that um I'll I will respond to them and always happy to take your uh you know your thoughts and and and input um and um as well if there's a

[60:38] particular topic you want you'd like me to do a a show on to expand on it happy to do that as well um so any way that I can help you further as you figure this out let me know and okay there we go here's the last slide it's got all the legal stuff on it right that I have to put um and um if you if you want a copy of these slides feel free to send me an email or a post post a comment and I'll get your uh I'll get away to to send it to you and uh there you go and I think that's the end of the presentation yeah okay and we're gonna stop share

[61:16] come on stop share there we go um okay so that that's our show for today um the the uh 10 issues to consider between being an employee versus starting your own business and uh next week as I mentioned at the start of the show my guess is going to be Dr Bob Sanders of NASA so I encourage you to join us for that um there you will be able to join us in the zoom meeting um through an Eventbrite event so if you go to my Eventbrite page for uh for for

[61:53] Kevin bemel you'll see where you can get a free ticket to join us and would love to have you do so or of course you can like you did today uh watch live on the various social media so thank you again for joining me today I hope you found this useful always looking to hear your comments um thoughts good or bad um on on how um how useful this was and how I can make it more useful for you and that just leaves me to say Marie darling my dear friend you are still my bell

[62:29] you all have a great rest of the day and a great rest of the week