The grass isn’t always greener
When you’re stuck in the 9-5 grind of a day job, particularly one where your time is charged by the hour, it can seem very appealing to jack it in and become self-employed. That feeling that you could be working for yourself is alluring – you could charge less, and still be better off.
I wonder how many people in this situation have read The eMyth Revisited by Michael E Gerber? If they have, they might be more cautious about taking the plunge to self-employment or a freelance lifestyle.
Michael Gerber outlines that when you run your own business, you have to do three roles.
The technician – the role of doing whatever it is you do. If you are an accountant – providing accounting advice if you are a software developer – writing code if you are an HR professional – providing HR advice or working on documents.
The manager – this is the role of making sure the business operates. Things like raising invoices, ordering stationery, completing your VAT return and doing your bookkeeping
The entrepreneur – the salesperson, the ideas person, the business development and creativity role
So if you have all three roles to do, and he recommends you split your time evenly across all three, it stands to reason you won’t be able to bill 37.5 hours a week as a technician. This is what clients will be buying and will value, so the rest of the time has no value – and yet it needs to be done.
From a productivity point of view, we are only productive when we are generating an output that has value to somebody else. So, the challenge from an economic point of view, when moving out of employment and setting out on your own, is how to be as productive, if not more productive than you were as an employee.
This is one of the perils I’ve found in running a freelance business over more than a decade. Whilst I probably do spend time in each, it has often been 100% in one role for a period of time and then 100% in another for a period of time. Which has caused rather a roller-coaster journey at times. This is one reason why I’ve decided to change the business model entirely.
Without the manager, you’ll be doing the work and not getting paid for it, or incurring fines from HMRC. Without the entrepreneur, you will get distracted by doing the work and forget to go out and find new clients, new projects and new sources of income.
Whilst I’m not sure I agree that time needs to be spent equally on all three roles, there is no doubt in my mind that all three roles are important and need to be done. The challenge is how to balance them without eroding productive time to a point of failure. It’s like the way the sea wears away the coastline, gradually eroding the land until it is no longer sustainable and collapses into the sea.
