Self Employed or Bust

Why Being Self Employed is Better

July 3, 2008 – 12:44 am

Ok, Dave, if you love free market economies so much and are willing to give the big wigs a free ride, why even start a blog like this? Why did you seem so emphatically against those corporate “fat cats” as you implied in your first post – Self Employed or Bust – and then turn around and defend them in – Why Free Market Economies Work?

Good questions. Because I’m not against them and I’m not defending them. I am, however, pointing out what they have over us and why. The point is that it’s ok to not like making less than them. It’s ok to wish you could profit as heavily as they do from your efforts. It’s ok to want what they have. It is not, however, ok to think that you deserve all of that simply because things feel “unfair.” If you haven’t matured enough to realize that life is not fair then you aren’t ready to succeed. Assuming you are somehow deserving of all the success others have simply because you’re a hard worker will lead you down a path of failure.

In order to become wealthy or successful, you have to learn how the system works, why it works the way it does and then decide what you can and should do to be in the same position. In other words, I want us all to be educated and reality focused. If you’re here looking for a get rich quick scheme or tips to an easy money solution, you won’t find it. If we (because we’re going on this journey together) are going to make it, it’s going to take work.

If that word, work, is enough to make you bail and look for the next get rich quick gimmick then I wish you well but I hold no faith that you’ll succeed. If you’re still reading, good. Hard work is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, hard work is to be embraced. What will set us apart from 80% of the population is that we aren’t content to let our hard work result in wealth for the guy at the top. We want to keep more of what we deserve. We want to be compensated for the sacrifice and we want to run our lives rather than having them run by somebody else.

That’s what self employment is all about. Wealth doesn’t always come. Being self employed is not necessarily a road to untold riches. But it is a viable means of ensuring equitable reward for effort applied. Allow me to elaborate.

A high-end “management” consultant earning $100,000 can bill out to clients at around $250/hour or more. Think about that. The guy who takes home $48 for every hour he works is worth 5 times that much to the company for whom he works. Now imagine the same smart guy self employed. He’s already proven his worth by providing consulting services under the sponsorship of a big company. Granted, flying solo isn’t going to land him the super-big contracts but even if he only handles smaller contracts at three quarters that rate, he’s still earning $187.00 every hour. That’s almost 4 times what he was making.

You don’t need to think much beyond that to realize that building wealth and financial security is far more likely to happen to an independent person than it is for one of thousands of corporate drones toiling away out there and that’s what Self Employed or Bust will be all about.

As with anything worth doing, though, there are risks. Why Free Market Economies Work should have made more than just the point that the hypothetical you earned more than our hypothetical Bob. It should also have served the lesson that, being the big guy comes with risks. Hard work and risk are the prices paid for high reward. We’ll cover that more in subsequent posts.

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