Don't Start a Company to Be Your Own Boss

The word boss has a pretty specific connotation and your clients and customers aren't that. Yes, if you work for yourself you're responsible for delivering work to your customers and they have some control over you due to that but it's incredibly different from the relationship between a salaried employee and his singular supervisor.

There is actually a lot to be had to start your own compnay and not to have a silly boss. I have and am doing exactly this for several years now.<p>Being your own boss means: I get credit when credit is due. I get to choose my customers. I get to choose people I work with. I get to influence the product in any way that makes sense. I work with tools and in places that work best for me.<p>And so much more.<p>I think its all word play and its hard to ha e debate with what&#x27;s been said in the post. I agree with post but disagree with ttiitle and conclusion

What people don&#x27;t always remember is that having a single boss means having a single person in charge of your fate.<p>Having 10,000 bosses&#x2F;direct customers dilutes that power greatly. Individually, none of them have any power over you. Only as a unified movement can they amass the power of that single boss.<p>There is every type of boss out there in world and I don&#x27;t mean to say they are all to be feared, hated. But the power dynamic mentioned above IS there, and your boss knows it.

I&#x27;m considering stopping my day job to work as a contractor. My goal isn&#x27;t to avoid stupid grunt work--I just hope that being entirely responsible for my upkeep and well-being will make the stupid grunt work seem more urgent and important. When I see posts like this (especially when, as in this case, the author claims to like his situation), something about them seems a bit condescending. It sounds like he&#x27;s saying that if you don&#x27;t like having a boss you&#x27;re not cut out for running a business. When I look at successful small business people, though, they all seem like the ones who don&#x27;t like being bossed around. They work crazy hard for their clients, yes, they make big sacrifices, yes, but they&#x27;re not motivated by the kind of petty dread that the pointy-haired boss types engender.

I get what the OP is getting at, but I still think being able to be your own boss is a good reason to start a company. The investor&#x2F;founder relationship isn&#x27;t the same as a boss&#x2F;employee relationship. You get to choose how you interact with an investor ahead of time. For instance, you should have already thought through and set up the conditions under which you can get fired so that the investor has to live with those rules. When you have a boss, you&#x27;re interacting with them on their terms.

I don&#x27;t have investors, and I don&#x27;t have employees, so I don&#x27;t know about that. But I have clients, and they&#x27;re not my boss, or my bosses, at all.<p>They ask for stuff, they wait for me to tell them what&#x27;s possible and when it can be delivered, they&#x27;re interested&#x2F;engaged in the process, and they&#x27;re happy to get the product in the end; they say thank you; they pay the bills I send them.<p>They don&#x27;t tell me to sit here or there and do this or that.

I had a franchise that I got in 1990. I remember when I called a mentor&#x2F;friend in the business the first time that I got the flu. I asked him &quot;How do I or who do I call in sick to?&quot; . My mentor&#x27;s response was - &quot;just contact everyone you were going to do business with today&quot;, which was about 60 people. An impossible task. I went to work sick.<p>Not the best job situation, but the reality if you are a sole operator.

Being your own boss is great...<p>...if YOU are good at being a boss!<p>If you allow your employees (ie YOU) to slack, then that&#x27;s not being a good boss.

I love having bosses. They deal with customers, go to meetings, handle negotiations, make sure deals get done and basically do everything else needed to leave me free to solve problems and hack. Why would I want to give all that up?

He makes some excellent points—that self-employed or start-up CEOs do have many stakeholders.<p>That said, the second sentence in this statement is false:<p>&quot;First, if you have investors, you are working for them. They are providing the capital for your business and you have a fiduciary responsibility to return their investment with profit.&quot;<p>Yes, you have a responsibility to investors to do everything reasonable to give them a return on investment, but the type of investment may or may not create a fiduciary relationship. And it&#x27;s important not to be glib about what fiduciary duties actually are and when they arise.

There is only one legitimate reason to start a <i>company</i>: you have identified a business opportunity that you believe is worth pursuing.<p>If your primary interest is control (over your schedule, your work environment, the type of work you take on, etc.), consider freelancing.

&gt;Second, you have your employees. They may technically work for you, but let’s be honest, you work for them.<p>If that happens to you, I&#x27;d highly recommend reading &quot;Work the System&quot; and &quot;Emyth Revisted.&quot; Yes, it&#x27;s self-help porn but it works.

The key difference is choice. If any of the things the author mentioned control me, it&#x27;s because I allow them to. Whereas it might even be partly accurate to say that the definition of having a boss is that don&#x27;t have that choice.

I don&#x27;t want to go too recursive, but have you ever worked for a boss who became one because he&#x2F;she did not want to have one?<p>Remarkable features I found were: Trouble delegating work (it&#x27;s out of their hands), don&#x27;t want to be hampered by decisions made in the group, resorting to &quot;because I don&#x27;t want it&quot; where factual arguments are asked for.<p>For your energy, attitude and stamina it seems better anyway to have a positive drive (&quot;I do because I want...&quot;) and not being steered by avoidance.

I think the article has a point and yet misses the point. If you start a company and don&#x27;t have investors that can fire you, it is true you still don&#x27;t work for yourself but for your clients, employees, etc.<p>Nonetheless there is a huge difference in that the ability to terminate a relationship with a boss is possible from either side, without you losing your position in your company. It&#x27;s wonderful being able to tell a client that if they are going to micromanage you, they can take a hike.

You should read The Emyth, he talks about this very issue, and how you can still pull it off.

I found the order of the bosses in the post to be interesting: Investors -&gt; Employees -&gt; Customers.<p>Not sure if that was on purpose, but I would have put it in the opposite order if the subtext of the article was how to successfully be your own boss...

In general this is terrifyingly true, although this depends largely upon which business you&#x27;re in. A market trader doesn&#x27;t feel this in the same way that the boss of a graphic design studio might.

I agree with the overall premise of the blog.<p>But for many, I believe &quot;being your own boss&quot; is just another way to say you want more control of your destiny and want to capture more up side of your hard work.

Start a strtup in case you want to make business, to have fun. Investors are not your bosses. Their goal is the same: make your company perform better. Don&#x27;t be afraid of them :)