Financial freedom
is the aspiration of most people across the world. However, there are individuals who earn high salaries in their employment but they do not have the time or the freedom to enjoy the money they wake up every day to make. Being a highly paid employee is great thing, but if the employment denies you the freedom to have time with your family and to do other things that matter to you most, then you need to restructure your lifestyle. The restructuring comes in the form of being your own boss and having the freedom to determine what gets into your calendar and when it gets there.
This aspirational status can however not be achieved when still working as an employee in another person?s business; you will need to jump into entrepreneurship in order to start having the flexibility that you want in life. Starting your own business can be an exciting adventure if you have a good background in the line of business you choose to venture into. You can choose to go into consulting or offering a service that you are familiar with. On the other hand, you can choose to start a business that deals with tangible products such as selling food, clothing or even electronics.
Choosing a Business
Your choice of business will be determined by among other factors your familiarity with the market dynamics of your chosen product as a well as your available capital. Market familiarity is not a big challenge though; since you can always conduct research using online sources and through physical interactions with players in your chosen market segment, in order to gather relevant market insights. Funding happens to be the most difficult challenge to overcome for new beginners who want to be their own bosses by venturing into entrepreneurship.
The primary source of funding is always your personal savings and borrowings from family and friends. However, as your business starts to grow, you will get to a point whereby you will need external capital injection from sources such as equity investors or from a business loan. Equity investors share in your profits and losses; but for a business loan you repay the creditors their interest and part of the principle amount on a regular basis as agreed in the loan contract. You will therefore need to ensure that the rate of interest on your borrowed funds is lower than the rate of return you expect from your business before you go for the business loan option.
Building Your Business
Having made a choice as to which business you want to get into and the market you want to serve, the next step in your journey to being your own boss is to develop a business plan for your new venture. Writing a business plan is very important since it acts as your guide when you start your operations. By outlining what your product is, your target customers, marketing channels, your organizational structure and your business growth plans; you will have a drawn a road map that will guide you each day you are running your business. The business plan will also help you to put business systems in place in order to ensure that you run your daily operations in a structured manner that is organized and most efficient.
Beyond the business planning phase, you will get into the implementation phase whereby you will need to start acquiring the resources needed to start running your business operations. Once the resources are in place including the employee; you can then open your business doors and start welcoming your customers. Having gone through the whole process of creating a business from scratch and reached the point of opening your business to your customers; you will have then realized that being your own boss comes with a lot more responsibilities and it is not as easy as it is made to appear.
Running the day to day operations in your new venture can be tiresome and very draining. Working long hours is common and you will need to start learning how to deal with your employees and responding to all sorts of customers in a polite manner in order to maintain your business reputation. The aspired freedom in being an entrepreneur might appear to be a mirage at some point; and you might feel discourage by the toughness of the journey of being your own boss.
However, the end always justifies the means. With entrepreneurship, you will be literally writing your own pay check every month depending on the goals you set for yourself and how much effort you put towards achieving them. Ultimately, the reward of being your own boss comes in the form of exponential growth in your well-structured business; that is now able to attract top talent to run it over the years, as you the founder take a back seat in the boardroom for strategic decision making.
Have you ever wanted to be your own boss? How can you get there?
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Wise Dollar
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Entrepreneurship is the #1 way that the worlds billionaires attained their money (https://maximizeyourmoney.com/financial-fitness/how-billionaires-got-their-money/).
It is definitely something that everyone should at least consider.
Having started my own business, grown it for 18 years, then selling it – I can also attest to the power of building something on your own instead of working to make money for someone else.