
Don't Start a Company to Be Your Own Boss - derstang
http://blog.matthewgoldman.com/post/64805179325/dont-start-a-company-to-be-your-own-boss
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princess3000
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.

~~~
corobo
You can fire a customer, you can't fire your boss

~~~
namenotrequired
You can disappoint a customer, but you can't afford to disappoint all of them.
You can disappoint your boss but you can't disappoint him or her all the time.

A single customer isn't necessarily equivalent to your boss in a job, but
together they are.

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general_failure
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.

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.

And so much more.

I think its all word play and its hard to ha e debate with what's been said in
the post. I agree with post but disagree with ttiitle and conclusion

~~~
WalterBright
I do run my own company, unfortunately, my boss is still pretty silly.

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jayfuerstenberg
What people don't always remember is that having a single boss means having a
single person in charge of your fate.

Having 10,000 bosses/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.

There is every type of boss out there in world and I don't mean to say they
are all to be feared, hated. But the power dynamic mentioned above IS there,
and your boss knows it.

~~~
xenonite
If you and your boss respect each other well, everything can be great. Then,
one does not need to distribute the power to people you know to a much lesser
degree.

~~~
jayfuerstenberg
Absolutely. I've had a few of these bosses myself.

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zipfle
I'm considering stopping my day job to work as a contractor. My goal isn'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's saying that if you don't like having a boss
you'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't like being
bossed around. They work crazy hard for their clients, yes, they make big
sacrifices, yes, but they're not motivated by the kind of petty dread that the
pointy-haired boss types engender.

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j_baker
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/founder relationship
isn't the same as a boss/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're
interacting with them on their terms.

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bambax
I don't have investors, and I don't have employees, so I don't know about
that. But I have clients, and they're not my boss, or my bosses, at all.

They ask for stuff, they wait for me to tell them what's possible and when it
can be delivered, they're interested/engaged in the process, and they're happy
to get the product in the end; they say thank you; they pay the bills I send
them.

They don't tell me to sit here or there and do this or that.

~~~
qwerta
+1, I would add that bosses I had before I went on my own, were actually very
nice.

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gregpilling
I had a franchise that I got in 1990. I remember when I called a mentor/friend
in the business the first time that I got the flu. I asked him "How do I or
who do I call in sick to?" . My mentor's response was - "just contact everyone
you were going to do business with today", which was about 60 people. An
impossible task. I went to work sick.

Not the best job situation, but the reality if you are a sole operator.

~~~
einhverfr
It is a good opportunity to write a simple scheduling app to automate such a
task if you need it.

~~~
roel_v
I don't think you understood the _real_ message of the advice...

~~~
einhverfr
The point is that people who are established likely can hire someone to make
those calls. There is no reason you can't automate it. The new people who are
getting established end up usually finding it is not worth it.

My father is a physician in private practice. He rarely takes time off for
being sick but it is possible to do either in an emergency or just being very
sick. His front desk people could cancel his appointments.

This is not cost free, and it is a lot harder than just calling in sick. After
all if you have fixed expenses, such as salaried employees, they collect their
money whether or not you work.

So it is very different. Automating some of the processes can cut down on the
expenses but it is still a major thing and not really comparable.

~~~
roel_v
Again, your response shows you missed the message.

The lesson wasn't about this particular set of circumstances. Of course it
would be trivial to automate this specific use case. The point is that as a
business owner, as the person onto who everything comes down in the end, you
sometimes just have to suck it up and do what no salaried person would do. The
lesson was: as an employee you can just call somebody and make your sickness
their problem (I'm not suggesting that people with cancer can make that
somebody else's problem, please no autistic readings of an abstract point). As
the boss, the final person responsible, you have nobody to offload things like
this to. You just have to find a solution and often that solution is in
muscling through the obstacle.

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jpwagner
Being your own boss is great...

...if YOU are good at being a boss!

If you allow your employees (ie YOU) to slack, then that's not being a good
boss.

~~~
WalterBright
I've had my boss sacked many times, but the replacement boss turns out to be
exactly the same.

~~~
xenonite
maybe it wasn't the boss, but the team forcing every boss into a similar
pattern.

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dagw
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?

~~~
arctangent
You might want to give all that up if (a) you disagree with how they deal with
customers, or (b) you think they negotiate badly, or (c) or you think they
don't make the right deals, or (d) give you the wrong problems to solve, or
(e) anything else along these lines.

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cryptoglyph
He makes some excellent points—that self-employed or start-up CEOs do have
many stakeholders.

That said, the second sentence in this statement is false:

"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."

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's important not to be glib about what
fiduciary duties actually are and when they arise.

~~~
_delirium
There seems to be a persistent myth that for-profit businesses are legally
required to maximize profit, which is really not the case. It's perfectly
possible for a company to have non-profit-maximizing strategies, especially in
the short term. The founder might have some personal ethics regarding how a
business ought to be run, or they might want to project a certain brand image,
or they might be interested in maintaining a positive/motivating work
environment even if doing so costs some clients or requires paying employees
above-market, etc. As you note, fiduciary duties are much more specific. For
example, screwing over minority shareholders in certain ways would be a breach
of fiduciary duty; accepting investment under false pretenses may be as well.
Simply running a company in a suboptimally profitable way, because it's how
you prefer to run the company, is not. There are other mechanisms in place for
handling disagreements over those kinds of things, such as investors demanding
seats on the board in return for their investment, in which case they could
vote to overrule your decisions (or replace you entirely, given enough seats).

To take a high-profile example, Chik-fil-A chooses not to open any of its
stores on Sundays, because the owner believes the Sabbath should be a day off
work. This may or may not maximize profits, but it's not an illegal choice
even if it doesn't.

~~~
cryptoglyph
All great points. Directors have a very wide range of discretion, even now
including absolution under many articles of incorporation for pursuit of
corporate opportunities that may create a conflict of interest (as well as the
long standing waiver by the corporation of the duty of care so often included
in Delaware articles).

Short of a grossly malfeasant breach of loyalty or bad faith—or declaring
dividends when the corporation meets the legal definition of insolvency—there
usually aren't many claims for shareholders to bring.

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7Figures2Commas
There is only one legitimate reason to start a _company_ : you have identified
a business opportunity that you believe is worth pursuing.

If your primary interest is control (over your schedule, your work
environment, the type of work you take on, etc.), consider freelancing.

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steveplace
>Second, you have your employees. They may technically work for you, but let’s
be honest, you work for them.

If that happens to you, I'd highly recommend reading "Work the System" and
"Emyth Revisted." Yes, it's self-help porn but it works.

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brandonhsiao
The key difference is choice. If any of the things the author mentioned
control me, it'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't have that
choice.

~~~
dworin
You always have a choice; it's the same choice you have with investors and
clients, the option to stop (either by quitting or getting fired). Mentally,
you might not see a job that way, but it's the same basic choice. If you have
a single investor, or a single client, it's the same as a boss. Running the
company might let you diversify towards multiple clients or multiple
investors, but then you've just traded one boss with a lot of influence for
many bosses with proportionally less influence. The choice, with each one, is
the same.

~~~
brandonhsiao
Having one boss with a lot of influence versus many with proportionally less
influence is the point. When you have many bosses, you can choose between
them. When you have one boss, you can't. That's the choice that matters.

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route66
I don't want to go too recursive, but have you ever worked for a boss who
became one because he/she did not want to have one?

Remarkable features I found were: Trouble delegating work (it's out of their
hands), don't want to be hampered by decisions made in the group, resorting to
"because I don't want it" where factual arguments are asked for.

For your energy, attitude and stamina it seems better anyway to have a
positive drive ("I do because I want...") and not being steered by avoidance.

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einhverfr
I think the article has a point and yet misses the point. If you start a
company and don't have investors that can fire you, it is true you still don't
work for yourself but for your clients, employees, etc.

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's wonderful being able to tell a client that if
they are going to micromanage you, they can take a hike.

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davemel37
You should read The Emyth, he talks about this very issue, and how you can
still pull it off.

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tchock23
I found the order of the bosses in the post to be interesting: Investors ->
Employees -> Customers.

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...

~~~
saraid216
The ordering doesn't actually matter. Failing one of them is failing all of
them.

~~~
derstang
Yes. Order does not imply anything here.

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bencollier49
In general this is terrifyingly true, although this depends largely upon which
business you're in. A market trader doesn't feel this in the same way that the
boss of a graphic design studio might.

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theprodigy
I agree with the overall premise of the blog.

But for many, I believe "being your own boss" is just another way to say you
want more control of your destiny and want to capture more up side of your
hard work.

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vargalas
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't be afraid of them :)

~~~
derstang
Bosses aren't someone to fear. I think investors are overseers of my
performance and people to whom I am accountable, therefor, my bosses. I'm not
afraid of them. Never work for people you are afraid of.

