Be Your Own Boss

It’s a good idea to start thinking of ways to expand your regular cash-flow, especially if you desire to increase your quality of life. We are blessed to be living in a country that allows individuals with no particular expertise, training or royal bloodline to innovate and create something from scratch, intent to either develop an income stream alternative to working a job or even to become vastly successful.

be your own boss fire your boss start your own business

Fire Your Boss

How many times have you considered telling your boss to take this job and shove it,” walk out and prove that you could show him (or her) how to run a real business and be your own boss?

Basically, there are two ways to go about starting a venture to create independent cash-flow. Reduced to their simplest form, the first (and most thought of when considering a business start-up) is the highly financed operation.

The highly financed business requires a lot of cash up-front to keep the money machine operating. Using this method, it is hopeful that if the business can stay in operation for a period of time (generally three years) it will begin to create a cash-flow that exceeds the expenses and can even begin to repay the initial debt, or investment outlay to start the operation.

The other way to begin an independent venture is referred to as a bootstrap start-up.

In a bootstrap business, the owner or founder self-finances the startup with little or no cash. The operation continues to grow based on its own merit and revenues are reinvested to grow the operation. In this scenario the business owner often sacrifices all in hopes to create an income stream equivalent to having a decent paying job without having to work for someone else, essentially “being your own boss.”

Occasionally, the creative, forward-thinking business orchestrator (entrepreneur) will out of sheer determination and hard work, risk all in an attempt to push beyond the barriers of other businesspeople to create a successful venture leading to true financial independence. This is to say his or her venture is so successful that it operates without his or her attention and pays them handsomely for their efforts in launching the business.

They no longer enjoy a self-signed paycheck, now they enjoy regular passive income from work they completed previously as their self-sufficient venture continues to perpetuate with little or no effort from the original founder.

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I grew up around start-up stories of loggers and fishermen with a dream building wildly successful canneries and lumber mills that started with chopping firewood or a fishing pole and building their enterprises from scratch.

More recent stories include those who have started service-related or Internet-based businesses with little or no start up overhead or investment. Low overhead is a key component in a bootstrap startup. You may be able to self-finance the opening of your operation and the hanging of your shingle (business signage) with the ability to pay the rent for the space to conduct your business, the utilities and a pittance for advertising… but for how long? Three months? A year? Three years?

That’s the beauty of being able to turn to the Internet as a place to create, build and expand upon your venture idea, because the cost of starting up a virtual (Internet-based) operation and a brick-and-mortar retail location are separated by ongoing maintenance costs. The monthly cost of operations is far less for the Internet-based operation and is much easier to manage on a shoe-string budget.

While my clients are evenly divided between Internet-based and physical locations, the Internet-based operations that are successful tend to have the ability to create a positive cash-flow in less time than the brick and mortars.

What are your chances of creating a successful business? Chances are you will fail.

That’s just the truth of the matter, we all know the statistics. No matter what type of business you set out to create, the likelihood that you will fail is prevalent.

Interestingly, as I work with individuals in all phases of their business, whether you succeed or fail in business does not depend as much on the business as you might think.

It has to do solely with the individual at the wheel running the business. It appears they have the Midas touch, everything they touch turns to gold. Truth be told, indeed, they have what it takes, but what it takes may not be what you think it is.

What do you think makes some businesspeople succeed while others seem to be unable to survive?