Employee or entrepreneur. We tell you the advantages and disadvantages to help you make a decision on the right path for you.
One of the most important decisions everyone must make is about their professional development. Do you want to be working for someone else for the rest of your life? Or are you ready to take a chance and try to build something on your own?
While entrepreneurship may sound like the immediate and tempting career choice, it is not for everyone. You may not be ready to make all the necessary sacrifices in the future.
On the other hand, if you just stay at your current job and never try something different, you might end up regretting it a decade from now when it will be too late.
So, to help you make a decision about which path is right for you, we're sharing an in-depth breakdown of the pros and cons of being an entrepreneur and an employee.
Being an employee might not be so bad after all. However, at the same time, it may be a mistake to accept this as your destiny and take or keep a job. Let's see why.
One of the good things about a regular job is that you will receive your money every month. That means you can keep doing what you do and not worry about a business project not working out or a client not paying. That level of insecurity remains for businessmen.
The benefits of being an employee include paid vacation and sick days, health and life insurance, a retirement plan, Social Security, workers' compensation, and more. That makes life much easier for the employee.
Imagine having to deal with all this and pay out of pocket. Because that is the life of an entrepreneur.
Not everyone wants to be the busy owner who leaves a family event to handle a crisis at work or the entrepreneur and parent who is always on the phone or answering emails and traveling all the time to meet with clients.
Furthermore, the lack of fixed work hours can drive some people crazy, ruin their sleep, and eventually affect their mental and physical health.
However, employees know precisely when and for how long they should be at work, after which they can leave and forget about everything that happened there. That means they can push themselves and generally achieve a work-life balance. These are not connected in any way, which is comforting for people who don't want unnecessary stress in their life.
If you stay at your job forever, you will never grow and see what you are capable of. Because that takes courage, you must enter a new field, make connections, risk a lot, make sacrifices, and fail a few times before you succeed. These are some of the main reasons why people never start their own business.
You may avoid that thought for a while, but eventually it hits you: there you are working the same way you did five years ago and not having done anything new with your life. You realize that you are investing the best and most energetic years of your life in something you don't enjoy.
It's not just average workers who are unhappy. It's proven that a job makes people miserable over time.
There is not much that can motivate employees, since no amount of additional work will make them richer. In fact, it will only help your bosses. If you are looking to change your financial situation and want to be more independent, being an employee is not the right path.
Work monotony will come to you eventually. Most people hate waking up in the morning, the commute, the office and atmosphere, the tedious projects. If you dedicate your entire life to it, you could end up depressed and lose the desire to achieve more or make a change.
Now, let's see what's on the other side. You may admire entrepreneurs who are transforming the business world or small business owners who seem to be living the ideal lifestyle. However, it is not always easy. In fact, they admit it's the hardest thing they've ever done. However, they still love every part of it. Let's see if you can enjoy that trip too.
Forming a company involves paperwork, assuming responsibilities, doing research, handling finances and legal matters. Plus, that's something that will make most people quite stressed. However, if you get through it, it will be fine.
The sad thing about entrepreneurship is that you have to make a lot of mistakes before you get it right. Your first business or business idea is unlikely to be successful, so don't expect money to come in the first month or even a year after starting your own company.
However, even some of the biggest names in business did not succeed from scratch. Elon Musk, for example, received a lot of bad feedback with the first version of PayPal, and his first three rocket launches were failures (costing him hundreds of millions of dollars). However, he did not give up. In fact, he says: “If things don't fail, you're not innovating enough.” Today, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is changing the world in ways other people couldn't even imagine. If he decides to be an entrepreneur, you will have to accept the fact that failure is a big part of the journey.
As an employee, you just wait for the work day to end so you can relax at home and not even think about anything work-related. Then you wait for the weekend so you can do something fun.
However, entrepreneurs do it differently. When they are building a business, they work all the time. Your mind is always trying to solve problems, think of ways to find new clients or generate new business ideas. They must also be available to others 24/7.
There is no one else to blame if something goes wrong. Therefore, the entrepreneur may wake up in the night to solve a payment problem or dedicate his entire vacation to an exotic destination to building a sales funnel for a new product.
Entrepreneurship involves risk, uncertainty, stress and failure. However, at the end of the day, no one else is telling you what to do. You can take a day off whenever you want or structure your work around the other things you need to do. It just means you'll catch up later or do a little more work up front. That means you have all the flexibility in the world, which equals freedom.
So, you are the owner of your time. That is our most precious possession, and employees do not have it under their control. However, as an entrepreneur, you do it.
If you dedicate your career to being an entrepreneur, you will also learn. You will seek personal and spiritual growth with mentors, books, networking events, online courses, life lessons, experiences, etc. You will become the best possible version of yourself, and that will positively affect your business as well.
Then comes business growth. The more effort you put into your project, the more opportunities will present themselves to you. You never know when something you write will go viral online, when you'll receive a great offer in your email after someone finds out about your work, or when you find your next partner.
Last but not least, you will have the opportunity to achieve all your financial goals, no matter how big they are. You can't become a millionaire by working for someone else. However, you can do it by creating the next best product, creating a brand that gets a lot of attention, becoming an expert in your field, and charging a lot per hour for your time.
The best thing is that there are no limitations here. You are creative, productive and determined, ready to work as hard as it takes to make your dreams come true. Being an entrepreneur means that you can enter more than one market, have different products and services, serve different types of audiences and thus diversify your income. This will bring you financial stability. Therefore, even if an income stream is affected by external factors (such as the economy, a change in people's desires, a new competitor or another), it will affect your monthly income a little.
So what will it be for you? Now that you know the good and bad aspects of both career paths, you can make a plan, define your priorities and passions in life, discover what you really want, and then take steps in the right direction.
