The desire to follow your passion and do what you love often leads many professionals to branching off and becoming entrepreneurs at some point in their career. While being self-employed is the ultimate goal for many professionals, there are lots of pros and cons that come along with the risk of building your own brand and below are some of the changes, both good and bad, that you should expect to occur.
Ability to do what you love full time: The main reason a lot of professionals leave their traditional, supervised job to work for themselves is because they want to devote more time to doing what they love. One major benefit of being an entrepreneur is the flexibility to set your own schedule and devote however much time you feel is needed to accomplishing your goals and focusing on bring your dreams to fruition.
Greater responsibility and oversight: As an entrepreneur you have the ability to oversee all final decisions and thus you will be held accountable for any mistakes that may occur. Knowing that all decisions, both good and bad, are a reflection of you will require you to have lots of self-discipline and it will test your ability to discern what a bad business deal looks like and what a good business deal looks like.
Fruition of your own brand: When working for someone else you’re helping them to build their brand and vision, so it’s only right that your personal brand and vision is the first thing you think about when stepping out on your own. Being self-employed allows you to have 100% creative control over every detail of your brand, from how you want your company to look to what message it should send and who you want your audience to be.
Sole responsibility for benefits: When stepping into the lane of entrepreneurship you must consider the fact that your health benefits, retirement plan and sick leave days are no longer covered by someone else. There is no one there to give you vacation days, to compensate you if an injury occurs or if a family emergency were to happen, so be sure that both your health and finances are in good standing before taking the big leap.
No fall-back: One of the biggest risks that comes along with being an entrepreneur is the uncertainty of when your next paycheck will come. Unlike working for someone else where you usually have a set payday schedule, being self-employed puts all of the financial pressures on you as you are 100% responsible for how much money your company makes.