We start this off with I started a small business since I'm injured from a workplace accident and now not getting paid because Washington State decided to deny my claim for a traumatic brain injury.
The Epiphany that I have had is I've not left the rat race. A human never really leaves the rat race even if they become unemployed or self-employed. You're just running on a different wheel, and I say that as if you're employed with a corporation you and hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of rats are running on the same wheel and that wheel barely benefits you. Yes you get paid whatever wage they decide to trickle down to you but you're running for the good of something else not yourself.
If you're unemployed you're on another big wheel with a bunch of other people doing what you can to keep that wheel running because the bearings of never been greased, there's a tensioner pushed on it to keep you from going full speed, and it's angled to try to throw you off.
If you're self-employed you're running on your own small wheel trying not to get run over by all the other bigger wheels around you and just trying to get noticed. Your wheel is the hardest of all because it's smaller, there are no bearings and you're just running metal to metal, and it has a severe angle to it to try to throw you off into one of the bigger wheels again.
So I guess in the end it's all the same, but you have to recognize the person that's trying to do it for themselves and maybe dragging a few people along with them are really the ones trying to do something better. Now don't get me wrong some of them fall into a middle management concept because that's all they've ever known so the only thing we can do is to try to correct them when they fall to that path. Your employees are your lifeblood because we didn't go into business to burn ourselves down doing 80 to 100 hour weeks trying to make this all work we got into it I hope to bring others up and if you can't pay them for really what they're doing for you what have you accomplished?
And that's just my ramblings and thoughts. My small pressure washing business is not taking off like I want it to, I want to be able to hire people and pay them an excellent wage to get jobs done and leave some for me even though I'm going to do the back end work which arguably is a pain in the ass, but they're getting the work done and the face of the company. They deserve the lion share of what we do. My biggest problem is to grow takes money and people to see you. You're fighting against huge corporations like Google and Facebook to try to get out in front of people and make your name known. As much as they say that they're for the small businessman they aren't, they're out for their own pocketbooks. So just remember the next time you're scrolling and you see an ad for a small business double look at what they're doing and can they help you at all? You may be the difference between feeding their kids and them, or them going hungry or worse.
The government had always likes to tout that small business is the lifeblood of America but yet they give all the breaks and the piles of cash to large corporations not to little guys trying to make a living and a life.