To Thine Own Self: Self-Employment Challenges

It is an incredibly fulfilling moment in your life when you begin on the road to your own career and your own business. I’m sure you have dreamt about starting your own company or figuring out your own ways to improve your career.  There are many different challenges that you will have to face during your time in setting up a business but what are the sacrifices you have to make as a self-employed person and what do you need to do in order to keep yourself afloat, not just in terms of your business, but also personally. Here are some things to think about.

Getting Motivated
In some respects, this is probably the biggest challenge you will face. Starting your own company
or going into business for yourself means that you have to keep yourself motivated at all costs. There are some tasks that don’t require you to force yourself to work, such as when you work for a client and the task is incredibly enjoyable, but there are tasks that you will have absolutely zero motivation to get started on, like if you were working on crunching the numbers for the next financial year, or completing your tax return. You may not have a clue about where to start, and many small companies view the task as one of the most stressful. If you have the finances it would make more sense to hire one of the business accounting companies available to work on your return, or to give you some advice on how to be more efficient with your number crunching. The dream about running your own company is about doing everything you want, on your own terms. However, there are small concessions you have to make, and it is all about taking the rough with the smooth, and doing things that you may not want to do on occasion.

Learning All the Tricks of the Trade
This is a must if you are working for yourself, by yourself. Going headlong into running a company, even the small ones, has many different strands. From hiring staff to cooking the books and even the menial tasks right down to the cleaning of the toilet! When you start out you may need to put on many different hats to make the operation work successfully. As you start to get a handle on how you can operate with the most success, and the business is starting to bring in some more money, you can start to outsource other workers. It will be an essential process at some point because you will not be able to keep all of your plates spinning by yourself. The tasks that come with being self-employed can fill a tax return booklet, and we all have struggles or things that don’t come naturally to us. This is a part of the journey! The thing you need to remember is, although working hours may increase, and your earnings may plateau at points, this is all for the best possible outcome, and it is the best thing for you.  

Photo by Kinga | Shutterstock