I’ll be honest here – a chat with a past client the other day inspired the writing of this post.
While I feel people are starting to be more open and honest about how tough it can be to run a business, I still think there is a lot of mis-information about, plenty of people putting a brave face on, and hiding some of the ugly truths about being in business for yourself.
Don’t get me wrong here – I love working for myself. I’ve run businesses of one sort or another for over 10 years now, and have been completely self employed for almost 6 years. I’m not sure I could go back to having a “proper job”. I’m far too used to being in control of my own time table, my own workload… and I’m really good at procrastinating and watching far too much netflix during the day.
Anyway, back to the whole point of this post. While I love working for myself, I still think there are plenty of misconceptions floating around.
So here are 3 things people don’t tell you about running your own business.
1. While you might love what you do, there will be plenty of bits you don’t like
My great friend Jaz Higgins of Art By Jaz loves to paint and create, and is self employed as an artist (she even had a gorgeous little gallery). She once said to me “I spend about 20% of my time painting… the rest is all the other stuff. Packing, posting, updating the website, social media.”
Jaz loves to paint, but the truth is, that even as an artist, she doesn’t get to spend a huge amount of her time doing the art bit of her business, as everything else still needs to be done too.
2. You can pay someone else to do those things, but…
Outsourcing is great a idea in theory.
Don’t want to pack and post your own products? Hire someone to do it for you.
Don’t want to track your finances? Hire a bookkeeper and accountant
Don’t want to do your social media? Outsource it to a VA or a marketing team
But, this doesn’t take into account two things.
Firstly, you have to have the funds to outsource. Until that point, you just have to suck it up and do it yourself.
Secondly, it might take you a while to find the right team.
Just like hiring staff, hiring the right service providers can be more difficult than it seems.
You might have an issue with the quality of work they produce, have a clash of personalities, or simply just have more issues giving up control than you thought you would. After all, this is your business and you like things to be done a certain way.
While most “6 figure coaches” will tell you to do the bits you love and outsource the rest, they often gloss over the fact that building a great team takes time, and you may have to “fire” plenty of service providers along the way.
3. Income is great but profit is better
I see lots of people online sharing how many sales they made, how great their year was, or how quickly they reached 6 or 7 figures…
But I don’t see a lot of people talking about their profit margin.
Income is all well and good, but if you have huge expenses to generate that income, then it doesn’t leave you with a lot of money for you at the end of the day.
While I track my income, I also track my expenses, and keep an eye on my profit margin. My current profit margin is about 83%.
That means for every $100 sale that I make, about $17 goes to cover expenses such as software, hosting etc, and $83 comes to me.
Next time you see someone claiming they had a 6 figure you, or a 10k month… or whatever the next income fad is, see if they are willing to share their profit margin… I have a feeling most won’t be.
What do you think people don’t tell you?
I think people are definitely sharing more about the highs and lows of business than they used to… but there are still plenty of bits we don’t talk about very often… or that we gloss over the top of.
Got something to add? Let us know in the comments below