Four Lessons We Learned from Self Employment
By Steph
For those of you contemplating the idea of self-employment, it may be helpful to hear some of the good and bad that comes with self-employment. Here are the biggest issues our family experienced:
- Murphy’s Law is alive and well. Both my husband and I have worked in consulting (we actually met at work) so we thought we had experienced Murphy’s Law at its harshest. The notion that “if things can go wrong, they will” shifted to an entirely different level when we became parents who owned a business. If I had a hard deadline to meet and limited hours to complete the work, everyone in our family would become violently ill with the flu. If I had an important meeting at a client’s office, our babysitter would cancel at the last minute. It was stunning to watch this law come into play again and again. Know that it will. Which brings me to my second point….
- Flexibility is crucial. Murphy’s Law ran rampant when I limited my options. When I leveraged the flexibility I had instead, the impact of Murphy’s Law was limited. If my daughter took an extra long nap, I would use that time to catch up on paperwork. After rescheduling several meetings and taking my baby to others after sitters canceled, I changed my childcare strategy and split the week between two sitters. That way even if one sitter had an emergency, I would (most likely) still get a couple of days to work. I also built much more time into my internal estimates for projects. I was accustomed to working at a sprint so estimated my project timelines from that viewpoint. Now I build in time for my children to be feverish and for me then contract their illnesses once the kids are feeling better – real life estimates, in other words. By assuming things will go wrong, their impact is lessened if they do.
- Boundaries aren’t just for kids. With my office now in my home, the separation between work life and home life was initially, and for several years, very blurred. If I couldn’t sleep, I would drift into my office to “finish up a few things” and end up staying awake for hours. If the phone rang during dinner, I would “take a quick call” and end up motioning for my family to go ahead without me while a client started point number five on her thirteen point agenda. It took me a while to realize I needed boundaries for myself, not just for my kids. Now I have a designated work space and set hours when clients can reach me. When I shut down my computer, work time is done and family time begins.
- Flowing cash makes for happy families. The first time that paying bills was problematic because a client hadn’t paid me on time was an eye opener. Cash flow can make or break a business! I had read that many times but living it was something else. Don’t paint yourself into a corner – establish an emergency fund or structure your business so cash flow issues don’t clog your financial life.
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Being an employee or self-employed has its advantages and disadvantages. We cannot have the best of both world. The ability to manage our time well (Time Management) and not let time managed us is utmost important.
Charmaine, I completely agree with your comment about the importance of time management.