If You'd Stayed Employed, You'd Be Retired by Now

Transcript

Today we’re going to be talking about when entrepreneurship really beats employment. G’day. My name is Mike. Welcome to Lone Wolf Unleashed.

Over the Christmas break, I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of new people. So we had some friends and they invited a whole bunch of people out throughout the whole day. You could sort of come and go as you pleased. And I arrived there with my wife and we met this couple who was older.

In fact, he had been retired since a couple of years ago. And I asked him what he had done as a career and things, and he said that he was a dental technician.

We exchanged what our careers were and all those sorts of things. Anyway, he got telling me about another guy that he used to work with who started a business.

And it’s such a familiar story where this friend of his went, I am good at what I do and I don’t need to be employed stuff. My boss. I’m going to go and start a business doing dental technician work. And he went and did that, which was great.

And he’s been doing it for a while. And it came time where these guys caught up again. And this gentleman who I was talking to said, oh, I’m retiring next week. I’m done.

I’ve hit my number. I’m finished work. I don’t need to work anymore. And his friend was livid. He said, how could you do that? I’ve got three years left.

He came to the realization of, wow, if I just stayed at my job, I’d be retiring now. And it’s not that he didn’t have clients. It’s not that he wasn’t earning fairly decent money.

It’s just that the comparison between what he had as an income at his employment was different to that and more than what he had as a business owner. And this is a very familiar story because I hear a lot about this.

And yes, there are other perks to owning a business. You know, you might have extra flexibility or you might have xyz, you might get more time off throughout the year, things like that. You might. A lot of people don’t.

And hearing about how this guy was running his business and he was, you know, he was in the same building as his customers, but that’s all he had as a customer base. They’re all the customers that he was serving.

And it kind of made me sad to hear about it because he never hired anyone. He was just always just doing the work, doing the books, talking to the clients, making sure they’re happy, those sorts of things. And is that really what you want your business to be like.

It was very interesting conversation because it validated what I want to help people with.

There are people out there who run businesses like this that, you know, and they leave employers for that reason that need help building up systems and they need to be in a position to trust other people to do the work because when they don’t work, the business stops. And for you, that might be one of your strategies and that’s fine.

But for people who start a business for freedom and flexibility, it’s not. The only way is to stay by yourself. So it’s very interesting seeing how these things come together.

These customers of this guy have this guy right where they want him and there’s extra value in having him there in the building. Chances are it raises prices, no problem. And that would still come to him with the work.

Because the cost of going elsewhere, you know, shipping or extra time with delivery or pickup or whatever it means, would mean that, you know, they spend more time and more money doing those things when they could just go downstairs to this guy.

Is mistrust of people who could do the work for him. And this gentleman who I was talking to did end up going to work for this guy one day a week because, you know, he’s retired, he’s got the time.

It’s nice to have some face to face time with someone, that sort of stuff. But the trust was already built there and he was sort of relying on him being there that one day a week.

And if he wanted to go play golf, then he’d just say, look, I’m not going to come in today because I don’t need to, or hey, in a month’s time I’m going away for six weeks because I can, I’m retired. This arrangement is not formal employment. You know, it’s not a long term thing.

It’s just, I’m helping you out, I’m happy to be here just to help out, but it’s not there.

So I think it’s just those types of attitudes, you know, when you go to leave your company that you’re working for as an employee, what do you need to do to make that a better deal going out on your own than if you were to stay in employment.

There was an old, and I think they still do it today on TV, there’s an old superannuation ad out there where they have the two people stand side by side and you know, this person is with an industry super fund and this one’s with another one and they sort of do those big numbers over time to see what the difference is.

It’s the same when you’re looking to start a business. Is this going to pay off? Is the risk that I’m taking worth the reward that I’m going to get at the end? And you, as a business owner, you’re the one putting your life on the line. You are the one who’s taking the risk.

This is why business owners, shareholders get better returns than employees, is because employees aren’t the ones that putting up the capital, putting up the risk. Right? They’re not the ones who are dealing with risk.

This is something I’ve often had to talk about with my employee friends, is, Mike, your rates are so high. How do you justify doing it? It’s because I take the risk. I’m not billing that many hours a week. I take the risk.

I have to make sure that I’m covered off. I have to make sure that my pricing is good enough. Because if I charge just what I charge as an employee, my gross rate, then I might as well just go back to having a job and maybe able to deliver that amount of value in a shorter period of time allows me to charge more.

So if I’m taking the risk in that I have to find clients, what if I go a period of time without work? All those sorts of things is built into the price. That’s something that a lot of business owners don’t really think about when they go out on their own, is what those numbers need to be.

You know, this is a relatively short one today because I had this conversation, I was inspired to do a podcast episode about it because it’s a real story. You know, it’s something that there are people out there who are like this everyday.

People, people you pass on the street, people you pass and meet as you go about your day or your week. There are people, there are real people out there experiencing this thing.

And what I don’t want you to be like is I don’t want you to be like the second gentleman who decided to start a business and then didn’t hit his number in time. You know, he got really disappointed when his employed friends were retiring before him. You know, I don’t want you to be like that.

I want you to be able to build up the systems and have a good sense about what your prices and things are supposed to be and how your business works and how your business serves your life.

Get a really good sense of what goes into all those things so that you can go about having a successful journey as a business owner. That’s what I want for you.

That’s going to do it for today, guys. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a great week. You could have been doing so much with your time, and I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. And I’ll see you next week.